Sivers Semiconductors AB (publ) (SIVE) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good morning, and welcome to this first quarter webinar for 2020 with Sivers IMA Holding. My name is Anders Storm, and I'm here to take you through our quarterly report and some other things as well. So we dive in directly into the numbers. The quarter compared to last year was flat, basically. And I would say that is a very strong -- to do that in the current situation when we see many, many companies struggling and in the worst business areas, losing 98% of their revenue. So we're very happy that we are in a business where we still can provide them, and we are working full speed ahead with everything. If we look at the EBITDA, it was minus SEK 5 million compared to last year. But at the same time, we have had some changes in R&D capitalization, which means that we are actually capitalizing less now and putting on the balance because of we're working more and more with customer projects. And also, we have less focusing grant funding now as well, which is a strategic decision in some way that only do grant funding if it sort of fits our core business and not just do grants for grants' sake. So moving ahead to next one, looking at the segments. If you look at the overall segments for January, March, we can see that wireless was actually down 26% compared to last year and Photonics up 12%. However, it's important to understand that Q1 last year and it should say 2020, was SEK 3.6 million of the revenue was from end-of-life product, the VCOs that we couldn't deliver in Q4 the year before. So the actual growth within the 5G business was 31%. So it's interesting to note. If you look at the markets, similar market split, 62% in North America, Europe, 28%. Asia had gone up a bit from 8% last quarter to 10% now. If we look at the quarter in general, it's been a very busy quarter. We had 4 new design wins very early in the quarter. I'm not going to go into that. We also announced the contract with Cambium Networks, very happy to also be able to tell the name to the market. This is a very interesting customer for us. And also, of course, releasing a state-of-the-art beamformer with Ampleon, which we have been working on now for this Tier 1 customer and that's very important for the company in general. And also, seeing the test results from that one being really state-of-the-art, beating the competition. And then we also had a share issue just before, actually, the corona crisis, and we got SEK 54 million, and we'll tell you more about that. And also, Photonics have started working more and more with different partnerships and working with the Belgian research company, imec, on silicon photonics, which is an important part of our overall strategy around that. If we look at the design wins, we've had, sort of on that note, a 20% conversion rate over 11 months. And design wins in several new areas, for example, point-to-point, steerable point links and enterprise businesses. And also selling even more evaluation kits during the quarter in -- we think it was 5 new ones that could potentially move into business and 6 ones to different universities. And we keep on selling quite good in Q2 now after different webinars and so forth. So it is still building up on the evaluation kits, which is very important for the next step in our phase to do -- get design wins. If we look at the design wins, we are on 16 design wins as of Q1 this year. And still, there are -- most of the design wins is in the telecom and datacom space. We have 2 different design wins also in high-speed tractor train and in several other medical and defense and so forth as well. And it's an even split, maybe a bit overweight for the 60 gigahertz unlicensed 5G bands. And what is the driver for the interest in point-to-point links now? Looking at the data from Ericsson a couple of years ago, they actually reported that the need for backhaul in 2025 would be something like 300 megabits for 20% of the sites. Now we're seeing already in 2022, the need for 200 to 2 gigabits in many sites, which is, of course, quite important. And to be using millimeter wave and unlicensed 5G or 5G there is very, very interesting. So 5G overall is the driver for the backhaul, which would use microwave and millimeter wave as well. Cambium, to go in a bit about that, that's a long-term contract. We're working on the -- with them on the current chipsets that they would be launching during the end of the year. But we are also working already on the next-generation chipsets, and they have -- gave input to the designs and so forth, and it's already written into the contract how that's going to be handled. So that's a very important customer. They're headquartered out of Chicago. They have R&D centers in the U.S. and the U.K. and India. They had a turnover of about SEK 3 billion in 2019. This is for licensed 5G. And they are using our RFIC, the TRX BF02, and it's for both base stations and CPs. And we are counting on commercial deployments in the end of the year. We did a direct share issue. That was approximately 4.5% of the total outstanding shares. Subscription price was SEK 9, and the discount was only 3%. It was heavily oversubscribed, which was -- we're very happy to have all of these funds that are willing to support the company. So we had Alfred Berg, AMF, Swedbank and so forth in the direct share issue, which was very important to get done also before the current situation with the COVID-19. Also, we launched the chip together with Ampleon, has had a very good numbers from the testing. We can see that we actually are able to send the same amount of power, output power with 1/3 of the AC power. So that is very important, of course, for the future in reducing power and higher power efficiency and so forth for all 5G networks and also for the environment to be able to provide really low power-efficient solutions. We are now out selling this. There's been a big interest. We are counting on delivering first prototypes to customers during this quarter and next quarter. And we are in many discussions with customers right now around this. If we look at the Belgian company, imec. The collaboration is around an integrated C-band product, which is really high frequencies, [ 150, 30 ] to [ 50, 60 ] nanometers. It's based on indium phosphide, and it's sort of a DFB laser that is then phased on to the silicon photonics platform. This is work that's been ongoing. We anticipate prototyping services that imec can provide with these lasers in early 2021. If we look at the overall market in general as well to compare a bit, and we can see that in the ecosystem, in general, the overall market has, in some places been affected. Like analog devices, they lost almost 15% of their revenue in Q1, while Broadcom, NXP and Infineon is more in line with our numbers. And we can also see that the system vendors, which is -- are these companies' customers like Ericsson, they lost minus 2% in revenue. So the overall market is not too affected, and we are following this market in general in that sense. Also looking at the operators, which are the customers to Ericsson and the others, they are also in the span from minus 4% to plus 7% in revenue year-on-year over Q1. So all the market is faring quite well in this situation. And we are seeing, of course, effect, but at the same time, a very positive feeling on what's going on. And even Q2 is moving very well in the right direction for us. If we look at the NASDAQ preparations, we are still doing the same thing as I reported the last quarter. We've done all of the IFRS stuff. Of course, we are working on the Code of Conduct. We have increased the different committees in the Board and so forth. We are having the AGM today, adding a Board member as a proposal as well. And of course, it's up to NASDAQ to do it. But there is, of course, an effect on the speed and when it's the right time to move lists now when the COVID-19 is in there. So we will, of course, review this and come back as well with more information later on. But we are still working almost full speed ahead on all the different things that we need to do to be able to get there. And you might have seen our annual report. It is now getting more and more in line with being listed on the main list as well, of course, with IFRS number. If we look at the significant events after Q1, we had second U.S. Fortune 100 customer. This is outrageously fun to be able to add these customers on to our customer base, and the Photonics team are doing a tremendous job here. And it's in early phase, but still SEK 7.5 million for work that we're doing for them for different lasers, and that is specifically in the sensing business. We're going to deliver this work during 2020 here, and it's still in the prototype phase. And of course, these are very long processes before it gets into the type of consumer electronic things that they might be used for. And if we look at the overall sensor market now, I mean, we have 2 different companies now working within this market, Fortune 100 customers. And there are different type of sensors that CST can provide. We have not been able to share yet which kind of sensor it is, but there is some of these sensors that we're working on. And this is, of course, extremely interesting markets. The sensor market, in general, is going to explode in the future, and it's using sensors in many, many different places, in cars, on your personal devices, for environmental, for facial recognition, for headsets, augmented reality. So this is actually a very interesting market, and it is very much driven by the silicon photonics, which is key here. And the work we are doing with all of these companies are connected to that as well. Thank you, everybody, for attending the meeting today. Tonight, we have the AGM. I've also recorded a CEO message that will be put up on the web today summing up 2019 for the AGM, so everybody can see that online. And since it will be sort of a restricted AGM due to CV 19, it's easier to do that. Thank you very much for that, and have a great day.