Nordic Semiconductor ASA (NOD) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to our presentation for Q2 2022. My name is Svenn-Tore Larsen. And as always, I have my CFO, Pål Elstad, with me. In these turbulent times, despite all the challenges we had with wafer supply for Bluetooth and also the filter challenge we have for cellular IoT, I'm glad to report that revenues in the quarter were record. We passed $200 million in the quarter for the first time. And this, if you look back, this is what we have in annual revenue back in 2016. Overall, we delivered 36% revenue growth in the quarter. The frustrating thing is that it could have been significantly higher if our capacity had been not impacted by wafer supply. We had severe impact of wafer supply this quarter also. Gross margin remains a solid 55.4%. Pål will go back to you with that. This generated a 48% increase in gross profit up to USD 111 million. EBITDA increased by 78% to USD 52 million, with an EBITDA margin of 26% for the quarter. We see a stable outlook for Q3, and we will remain having supply challenges. And the revenue guidance would be $190 million to $210 million. And we also expect that our gross margin will stay above 54%. And I want to reassure that our long-term outlook stands firm. Given the persisting supply chain constraints, we continue to work with our end customers and distributors to adjust order volumes to better match the actual delivery capacity we have. Our order backlog was taken down 9% in the first quarter, and we did an additional 9% also here in the second quarter. But the fact is that our order backlog remains at a significant higher volume than our supply capabilities. And until the wafer supply situation is resolved, you should therefore expect that we will continue to trim our backlog and adjust going forward. We also see that inventory remains low throughout the value chain, and we see no signs of inventory buildup. Our inventories stand at just about 30% of our quarter revenue, which is extremely low in a historic context. And most of the inventory is works in progress. We see on the design win that our position in the broad market remains strong. And of a share of Bluetooth designs, certification is still around 40%. If you look at the numbers, you will see that most of the quarter has been the same around 100 designs, but in the meantime, the value of Bluetooth market has increased significantly. That really shows that the value per design has increased. We also see that trend very easily in the Nordic numbers. If you look, we see that our higher featured parts with higher ASP and higher volumes, which leads to $200 million this quarter. We continue to see a steady stream of new products being launched with Nordic inside, both in Bluetooth and cellular IoT. Worth noting this time around is the world's first cellular IoT watch, powered by 9160. If you recall, BLE started actually with a lot of sports watches. Now we see our first cellular application in a watch. Other noteworthy news this quarter includes our launch of the 5340, the audio development kit. In the last quarter, we highlighted some of our customers, especially Sennheiser has chosen Nordic for a new audio product. We now see that our first LE audio customers are entering into volume production. Bluetooth SIG calls LE Audio the future of wireless sound, and we are in a position to accelerate the development of next-generation wireless audio projects. This new kit also used the most advanced SoC we have, taking advantage of the Bluetooth SIG, a new standard called Auracast, is a standard to broadcasting of sound to multiple devices. This will open new applications for many new users. Another important event was the launch of Thingy:53. It's a prototyping platform. The customer can basically plug it into a PC and have an IoT application. This is a platform with multiple sensor and multiple connectivity standards, which also include machine learning capabilities for IoT edge processing. As we earlier have said, we want to take a larger share of our customers' PCB, and this platform combines actually 3 different Nordic products. It's powered by our most advanced dual-core system, the nRF5340. We also have the extended range, the 21540. And we also have put on the nPM1100, which is PMIC. So basically, here, we have an application with 3 Nordic chips. Our cellular IoT, we warned about slow revenue in Q2 because we had this filter that was sort of not up to the spec. We sorted out that filter. And from end of June, we basically have a full production line up running. And this means that the growth trajectory that stopped second quarter will be back on the second half of this year. So we expect a significant growth in second half. And we are currently working with hundreds of different cellular IoT products, and we see some of them have started to show some commercial traction. Creating next-generation of IoT innovators. That's always been Nordic's mission, and we are backing initiatives that support cellular IoT innovation like Tributech's smart IoT product challenge, which was this spring. As always, our technologies are versatile and go into different end user market application, and this competition that ran this spring was won by a health care product tracker and a secure storage box. But it just seems that we contribute to these initiatives, and we see the signs coming out regularly. Picking up on our work to secure our customers' access to sell our IP. You might remember from Q1 that we joined forces with Nokia to secure access to the standard essential patents on device level. This quarter, we have signed a highly innovative agreement with Huawei on the component level. Huawei licensed the right directly to Nordic with implications that all Nordic's 9160 customers are covered regardless of end product type. I think this is important step forward, adding transparency and predictability early in the process for our customers. And I think we are jumping an obstacle to widespread adoption of cellular IoT by having these licenses in place. Finally, before handing over to Pål to do the financials, I would like to mention a small but very exciting technology acquisition. We have reached an agreement to acquire Mobile Semiconductor, a small team in Seattle, which we know very well from past. We're using the ultra-low power memory technology in existing parts. And they also are engaged with us now for 3, 4 years with the next generation of Nordic products. We know that ultra-low power operation is an absolute critical requirement. And when the opportunity arose to get these guys, we were really happy to bring this technology in-house. With this, I'll leave it to Pål. Thank you.

Thank you, Svenn-Tore. I'll now go through the Q2 financials. Nordic, as you mentioned, Svenn-Tore, continues the strong reported revenue growth as we've achieved in the previous quarter. Revenue came in at the middle of the USD 190 million to USD 210 million guidance range. So we ended at $200 million. As we already mentioned, revenues increased by 36% despite the wafer supply constraints and the lacking components in cellular IoT. The growth from last year is a mix of volume and price. The mix from last quarter is an effect of higher volumes as the price increase was fully absorbed in Q1. Looking at the different technologies. The year-on-year growth was actually strongest in the proprietary segment with 45% growth. Proprietary revenue has generally been very strong since the start of COVID-19, with high demand for PC accessories and other home office equipment as well as gaming, virtual reality, fitness equipment, et cetera. However, revenue has particularly been high in the past couple of quarters and given that more people are expected to return to work and consumer sentiment has weakened, we're prepared for lower demand in this segment going forward. It's important to remember that back before COVID, we expected a gradual decline in proprietary revenue, where its revenue over the 12 past months is 60% higher than in 2019 and only 10% of the total revenue. Actually, back in 2019, we estimated a 10% decline annually as a lot of the proprietary customers will shift to Bluetooth. Increase in Bluetooth revenue over the past year reflects both price increase and a more favorable product and customer mix and slowly increasing wafer allocations. However, demand is still significantly higher than supply, and wafer shortages will continue to cap revenue in the near term. As Svenn-Tore already mentioned, demand for cellular IoT is increasing. However, delivery capacity has, as has been mentioned before, been held back by component shortages in the first half year. As mentioned -- as presented last quarter, we -- effective Q1 2022, the change in how we report in different markets. We have done this change in order to better align the numbers to how we manage sales but also how -- who is the end customer. So we differentiate between consumer and business-to-business customers. Cellular IoT is mixed into these different markets. When you look at the various markets, it's important to emphasize that growth patterns reflect product allocations more than underlying demand. Several of our large customers and prioritized customers are, for example, in the consumer market. So we do allocate more to the consumer, although demand, in some cases, is large also in health care and industrial. Just as for overall revenue, individual markets show a strong growth compared to last year and relatively flat compared to last quarter. So I'm not going to go into detail, but for example, Consumer had a 35% growth versus last year. And Healthcare had a really strong 74% growth compared to last year. And a lot of the same products that we've been discussing in previous quarterly reports, especially related to drug delivery systems. Others is a large part, the module customers Nordic has. Gross profit increased by 48% to $111 million in Q2, up from $75 million a year ago. So the gross margin was 55.3% compared to 50.9% in the same quarter last year. You see a downturn compared to the last 2 quarters. However, as I mentioned in the Q1 presentation in both Q4 and Q1, we had a positive effect of the price increase and the delay in depletion of the inventory -- inventories. Adjusted for these inventory effects in Q4 and Q1, we guided that for an ongoing gross margin of 54%. We're slightly higher than that, mainly driven by a favorable product and customer mix. I'll now turn to the operating model. For this quarter, the numbers on this slide reflects reported numbers. First of all, the strong reported revenue in the quarter has resulted in improved KPIs, although the underlying absolute spending has increased as we grow the business. Although volume growth currently is being capped, we have seen significant margin expansions as a result of stronger gross margins. So total reported R&D spending at just below 19% -- 20%, sorry. So this is the first time we are under 20%, down from 21.3% last year. So this quarter, we capitalized $1.8 million down from $2.4 million a year ago. Capitalization is now mainly related to the WiFi products, as we've communicated earlier, will come into the market very soon. Going forward, capitalization will probably more shift to the Bluetooth products as we are, as you know, soon introducing new BLE products in the market. In absolute numbers, R&D investments increased from $31 million last year to close to $40 million this year. It's more or less stable in all the different business lines. During 2021, due to COVID-19 knockdown, we experienced very low SG&A expenses. However, we do see activity picking up, especially travels and marketing, which was, of course, very low. So absolute numbers have increased from $14.5 million a year ago to $19 million this year. Overall, EBITDA of close to $52 million or 25.9%, a slight decrease from $54.7 million over 29% last quarter. But of course, that was positively impacted by the decreasing of the inventories I just mentioned. Short-range EBITDA margin, very strong and is consistently well above 30%. Just briefly on the total cash operating expenses, which amounted to $58 million in Q2 when adding back capitalized development expenses and equity-based compensation. This compares to $47 million a year ago, representing an increase of 23%. If you just look at salary level, salary cost of $37 million, which is up 12% from last year's $33 million. So a 12% increase. We've increased employees by 20%, now to just above 1,300 employees. The reason that the cost increase is less than the actual number of employees is that during Q2, we've had a very favorable effect on foreign currency as the NOK has significantly been weakened compared to the U.S. dollars. This actually gives us a $2 million to $3 million positive effect on the costs. So adjusted for this, the salary increase would have been more or less 18% or closer to the number of added people. Other cash operating expenses were $21 million in Q2 compared to $14 million a year ago. I just mentioned the travel and marketing expenses, but also we've had very high tape-out activities in Q2. So we are hiring top talent over the last 5 years, adjusted for 1 small acquisition of the Imagination team. We have doubled the organization organically. This has been possible in even more scarce talent pool. We've done this by increased management focus on hiring talent. We've revised the reward strategy. We are increasing our employee branding activities, and we are working much more closely with partners. So we are really investing in the future of our workforce. Actually, this year, we have 117 active students in Norway, Finland and Sweden, U.K. and Poland, working over the summer months. CapEx in Q2 was $4 million, down from $10 million a year ago but more or less the same level as we've had the last quarters. When we look back a year ago, we did a very high investment to beef up the capacity on testers so that when we get wafers in, we can quickly turn them to finished goods. Going forward, investment levels will really be to maintain this capacity. So this quarter, we were at 2%. For the full year, we expect around 3% in CapEx intensity. Finally, on cash flow. We continue the positive cash generating effect we've had in the previous quarters. During Q2, we added $60 million to our cash balance, which ended at $320 million. This was really driven by a strong operating cash flow of $30 million, which came as a result of $50 million EBITDA, only partly offset by increased working capital. We do see an increase in net working capital of $25 million this quarter, mainly driven by higher accounts receivables. Back a year ago, net working capital was below 20%. We have communicated that in a more normalized situation, net working capital will increase. Also in the quarter, we have increased our RCF revolving credit facility from the original $65 million to now $150 million. We've also made it sustainability-linked so that our sustainability KPIs are now linked to our RCF. Svenn-Tore, I'll hand over to you to go through the outlook for Q3.

Thank you, Pål. We expect a stable Q3 due to severe supply challenges. And I think that this forecast is only based on wafer allocations as we see it by end of Q2, and we expect that wafer can or will be higher in fourth quarter. Gross margin, we guide for the same range as we delivered now or a bit below, at least above 54%. We are doing whatever we can to expand our capacity, both long term and short term. And we are planning for multi-sourcing of wafers and other components to be in place as soon as possible. As I went through on our last presentation, we are developing new technology platforms across our short-range, mid-range and long-range technology. And we will be deploying leading processes. This is technologies that are optimized for IoT. This means both expanded capacity and disruptive performance offering for the features really required for the future IoT applications. The first short-range product could start ramping towards the end of next year and will be a key enabler for our growth beyond 2023. And remember here, we have come to $200 a quarter based on Bluetooth and a small contribution from cellular IoT. Going forward, we will have WiFi in the portfolio, and we have all the other adjust -- adjacent component like PMIC. So we are very excited about the future, and we're going to see that strong pickup in '23, where we get these new technology platforms out there in the market. Our outlook stands firm. We are on track for our USD 1 billion next year. And we aim to more than double revenue between '23 and '26. With that, I thank you for listening in to us and open for questions. Pål, can you join me? Do you see any questions on the web.

Yes. It's Stale. Let's start with the first question about revenue. This comes from Adam at Bank of America. How should we think about the sustainability of pricing and product/mix benefits into 2023?

I think the pricing in the market is very much determined by the fabs and the wafer suppliers. And what we see is that there is a lot of speculation about increased pricing from fabs in '23. And obviously, overpricing will reflect the cost of the products. So I expect it, unfortunately, to be increased in '23 on pricing.

Thank you. Then we have a question from Henriette Trondsen, Arctic. Can you quantify the segment split for the Q3 guidance, what you are expecting for growth in BLE, proprietary and cellular and also the statement of significantly higher revenue in cellular?

We are guiding on the statements during the presentation, and we are not guiding on each segment. And obviously, we will not be able to also quantify cellular yet. We need to see how much we are going to be able to produce. But we are getting a significant higher throughput through our fabs in Q3 than we did in Q2, and the demand is there.

Thank you. Then we have a question from DNB, Bjørnsen. You say that the Q4 wafer allocation will allow you to generate revenues for the full year 2022, keeping you on track for more than $1 billion in 2023. Do you think it's fair to assume growth is likely to be higher in 2022 than in 2023? Or should we expect there will be a unique situation in which increased wafer allocation in 2023 means growth will accelerate that?

I hear the question, but that's a philosophic question. I think it's very much dependent on the rest of the market. And we believe that as soon as there is any softening at -- over competing applications, Nordic will get more wafers. And we see that the new customer base we've been generating over the last years are undersupplied today and they are screaming for parts every day. So if they get more availability for Nordic, the growth could be different than how it looks today. Today, we are calculating based on existing capacity support plan from vendors. We really hope it's going to change.

Thank you. We go over to demand, Adam Angelov from Bank of America. We frequently hear news about weak PC demand, but you still see high demand for PC accessories for home offices and gaming. How do you explain the disconnect?

I think we are seeing some softening in pockets of the markets, and we just need to rely on the forecast from our customers. And when we are doing this presentation, we reflect what we see in our forecast, but obviously, we're following very close the market. But remember that the PC market is a -- is not a significant part of our business. So I mean the Bluetooth business is the significant part of our business. And there, we see extreme demand.

Thank you. Then we have a question from Rob Sanders, Deutsche Bank. Which consumer categories have started to weaken? If you achieve $1 billion in '23, what growth do you expect for consumer overall in '23?

As you see on our design win charts, we are getting more and more industrial applications. We also are getting more cellular IoT application, will contribute. So in the consumer side, we still get new -- relatively new Tier 1 customers with new products in the market, with significant higher volume on the end product than the ones we -- the customers we used to have. So a combination of nonconsumer with weakening of existing consumer doesn't drag the growth down.

Thank you. And I think we have a question here from Christoffer, DNB. It's similar, but I think you should take it. Consumer revenues was flattish in Q2 compared to Q1. And the CFO commented Consumer is assumed to be weaker going forward. So you basically expect Healthcare and Industrial to make up for weakening Consumer in Q3 and Q4. How confident are you in this?

I think I said weaker in general. Svenn-Tore already mentioned we see pockets of weakness in overall. We have, as Svenn-Tore mentioned, also large customers in -- also in the Consumer that we have been prioritizing over the last few quarters, and revenue will still come from these areas. But correct, Industrial and Healthcare will be strong going forward.

And then we have a -- thank you. Then we have a follow-up on Bjørnsen here. It seems you are assuming a shift to more Healthcare and Industrial revenue in Q4 as you allocate more to these customers. Should we expect to have a positive or negative effect on gross margin relative to Q2 and Q3?

We have guided the margin to be above 54%. So that means that this shouldn't have much effect. If it should have an effect, it could be more on the positive side than down.

Thank you. Lodgaard from ABG. How do you see demand develop within Industrial and Healthcare? It's the same.

I can answer. Very strong.

Very strong. Thank you. Supply capacity. A question from Rob Sanders, Deutsche Bank. You mentioned GlobalFoundries and SilTerra as new foundry being qualified in your credit present. What is the timing of volume ramp up?

'23 -- in '23.

So you had a slide on that, that the first products will be out there next year.

Thank you. Henriette Trondsen, Arctic. There has been articles on requirements for prepayments for future deliveries of wafer or that TSMC will have additional price increase. Can you comment on this? And there's 2 questions.

It is from the TSMC, Svenn-Tore. And we've also read about that there's price increasing coming up and there is a general inflation in the market. So we just have to take that into account when it actually happens. In relation to the other question, we've said that we are working on both short-term, midterm and long-term arrangements with all our vendors and to expand our sourcing options but don't want to go into details about technologies or financing at this point.

Thank you. We have another question from Henriette, Arctic Securities. There has been indications from some companies, in particular, within the automotive space of improved wafer allocations. Can you also comment on this in relation to your target bond issue, which we understand was partly to secure component to meet the demand?

It was basically 2 questions in 1. Let me take the first because you answered the second part of the question already. But we see also the same articles that there is ease up in automotive. We can read it weekly, but we don't see that reflected in the support plan from our vendors. So we have to relate all our guiding on what's the support plan at the moment when we do the presentation. And there's been no change to our capacity support plan as of end of Q2.

Thank you. Then we have a question from [indiscernible] from Danske Bank. How do you assess the news of new potential lockdown in China due to BA5? That's the new virus.

We haven't had the time to consider that, but we saw when there have been lockdowns in China, it has not affected us very much. Pål?

Our customers have been relatively agile and able to maneuver around the COVID situation.

Then we have a question from Rob -- from Johannes Ries. Why you seem -- why you see the -- why do you not see the already high wafer supply in Q3 given the weakness in consumer areas like mobile PC?

The thing is that wafers are not only wafers. It's different nodes, and some nodes are more constrained than others. For Bluetooth, we are running a node that is very, very constrained. For PC peripherals, we're running another node. And you're right, there is not as constrained on the 0.18 node as we call it, as on the 55 nano node, which we use for both BLE and over cellular IoT products.

And the 55 is in deep competition with automotive, right? And you commented that automotive is weakening, but that's nothing we've seen in our capacity plans for now.

Thank you. We have a question from DNB, Christoffer, regarding demand. I totally buy into your story that demand is ahead of supply, and that supply is the main issue. However, the market is seemingly not buying this as it thinks you are blind to what is going on in the world. Just to be clear, you have some orders being canceled, right, just not nearly enough to align demand with supply capacity?

I have to just think 2 seconds. I mean the important thing is that if you look back and look at design win registration in the last years, it's been hundreds of design wins, which are getting into production. So our situation is that we have so many designs that we are undersupplying at the moment. So we are in a situation that if some pockets ease up, it's advantage for us to support a broader customer base. And you can see that very well, Pål, on our inventory, which basically now are record low, and it's mainly wafers in works. We would have loved to see more supply. And if [ we come a shop ] of supply to Nordic, we have plenty of customers to distribute the wafers.

Thank you. Then we go over to backlog from UBS. What is the level of backlog you would feel comfortable about to accept all incoming orders again?

2 quarters. That's a normal backlog we used to have if everything is normal in supply chain. So that means $400 million then if we see from Q2 numbers.

Then Henriette Trondsen from Arctic. What is the lead time for the backlog? How much of the backlog is within the next 12 months?

I would say I haven't analyzed lately, but 90%?

Difficult to say.

We don't accept orders. We are trying not to accept orders outside the 52-week window, and we have been adjusting order backlog also to reflect that.

Yes. Thank you. Then we have Petter Kongslie, Sparebank 1. Can you give any comments on new demand in the backlog -- on net new demand in backlog?

No. As we say, the lead time is still much longer than our forecast there. So it's difficult to give that.

But we can give -- I can give an example of products that we are undershipping. For example, labels -- [ bulk ] labels that we are shipping to customers, less than 50% of the need is new verticals with significant volume, which we are not able to fulfill.

And in the China wearable markets, which used to be very strong, I know that, that entire market is going down today, but we are not shipping it. So the potential is still to ship even if the market is down. We still have customers there demanding products.

Thank you. Petter Kongslie has one more question. What do you mean about demand is larger than supply? Is that related to demand that already is in the backlog, [ means ] current wafer supply or that the delta new order intake exceeds supply?

That's something you could read from the numbers. Obviously, we are pushing out more than 170 million units from Q2 into Q3 and on forward. And we are not, as we said, pushing for orders to sort of increase the backlog when we don't get increased supply.

Thank you. We have a question from [indiscernible], Danske Bank. How much do you expect to adjust your backlog for Q3 and fiscal year '22?

It very much depends on if capacity support plan increases, maybe we don't need to push too much. It's all dependent on supply.

Thank you. DNB is coming up with one question here. But you have seen some cancellations? Have you seen any cancellations?

Yes. We have seen some in AI, VR. That's one of that one when I called pockets of weakness, but very little cancellations.

And Johannes Ries is asking, where do you see higher growth, large customer or in the long tail?

For definitely large customers, new projects at existing customers with higher volume and higher complexity than previously.

But I think it's also important to us now that we've had a strategy over the last years to not only prioritize large customers but also to entertain the long-tail customers. So if there are some exciting long-tail projects, that is a great opportunity to start to support it.

If it becomes a weakness. That's really the thing. I mean if we see the softness picking up, we can start supporting the long tail much better than we've done up till now during this supply chain-constrained situation.

Then we have some questions regarding PMIC. Adam from Bank of America. When should we start to see PMIC revenue reported separately and become a material revenue stream?

We start seeing revenue on PMICs today. It was included in Others. And when it's meaningful revenue, we will break it out as an own segment.

So the reason PMIC has been slow is that the available capacity we have allocated to the PMICs we produce for the cellular model, which was the first version we made. As of now, we've had very limited capacity on wafers for PMICs.

Thank you. And then we have a follow-up from Johannes Ries. How important was the PMIC products in Q2 -- importance of this category in your backlog?

As Pål just explained, the PMIC is utilizing the same node, and it's actually the same PMIC that goes into our own cellular IoT module. So as is a very constrained node, we are using PMICs from that node to build our cellar IoT products.

You have 2 more questions. It's on supply capacity, Rob Sanders. You mentioned GlobalFoundries and SilTerra as new foundries being qualified in your credit presentation. What is the timing of volume ramp up?

End of '23.

Henriette Trondsen, Arctic Securities. There has been articles on requirements for prepayments for future deliveries of wafers. I think we have answered that question before.

Yes. We answered that question. Yes.

So I think with that, we conclude. Thank you for all questions. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

And have a great summer.

Thank you. Bye-bye.