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

[Operator Instructions]

[Audio Gap] Will be an executive summary, which I will cover. Lottie will go over the financial results. I want to give some pretty key market and business updates for our audience and some takeaways. And I'll look to answer Q&A as they come in. So let's get into the executive summary. So for the fourth quarter, we had record revenues at SEK 76.7 million, and we also delivered strong adjusted EBITDA of plus SEK 15.5 million. We showed sequential growth of 31% in our revenues, and both the Photonics business and Wireless business had healthy sequential growth during this time frame. The SEK 76.7 million is a record revenue for the company in the history of Sivers. And so is the full year revenue at SEK 243.7 million. Product revenues came in at 32% of the total, and that's an increase of 12.5 points year-on-year and once again shows our commitment to drive product sales higher and higher as our years and quarters go by. Let me cover some highlights. As I already mentioned, this is the highest recorded revenue quarter for the company, and it also sets the new baseline for taking into 2025 onwards. So if you remember last time, we talked about digesting a fantastic growth year in 2023 solidly in 2024 and forming a basis for future growth. And that's exactly what we have delivered in Q4. We also have good backlog and healthy order intake for growth in 2025, which is also essential to carry through momentum into the new fiscal year 2025. We've made sizable progress again on the road to profitability. We improved adjusted EBITDA for the full year by 21%, and that's a mission that continues to stay strong going into 2025 as well. We conducted a successful directed raise of SEK 108 million, which we closed in January 2025. And our focus was to bring in fundamental long-term shareholders that see the potential for Sivers, not just in the near term, but also for the long term. And this is epitomized by Boardman Bay coming in as our first U.S. investor. Boardman Bay is very, very well known, and they follow both the secular trends that we are focused on, and they're extremely impressed with what they see ahead for us. And so that was a really, really important thing for us to have Boardman Bay come on board as our first U.S. investor during this directed race. The photonics industry is now driving towards commercialization of the copper to optical interconnect transformation. And we announced a $4.3 million MOU with a strategic photonics customer, and that's all around qualifying our products and getting ready for high-volume production 2027 onwards. So this is a very critical MOU, and it also shows gathering momentum around the deployment of new architectures which use Sivers technology for deployment into the marketplace. Alex McCann, who comes with 30-plus years of semiconductor industry experience and has been part of extremely successful companies like Dialog Semiconductor, Linear Technologies and Analog Devices has joined us to specifically focus on this commercialization process for our Photonics business and making sure that we are ready on time to enable our customers to be successful in their AI data center deployments. So this is extremely exciting and a very critical addition to our team. We also announced a $5.4 million contract with a leading telecom infrastructure vendor. And this now allows us to engage with this customer for multiple generations of products in the coming years for specific use cases in the cellular infrastructure space. And this is extremely exciting as well as we see promising use cases coming out of the cellular infrastructure market segment as well. We talked about SATCOM being one of our focus markets, and we have lead customers who are already working with us on their deployments, but we have also now added on a blue-chip customer, a global leader, Intelsat, have signed the development contract with them to develop products for mass production in 2026. We already talked about our 2 U.S. CHIPS Act contracts that have been awarded to us last quarter. And now those contracts are signed and funding inflows have also commenced. So a tremendous amount of highlights through the quarter and coming into 2025 with very significant momentum. that's extremely, extremely exciting for Sivers. With that, I want to hand this over to Lottie to cover more financial specifics, and then I'll come back with the markets and business and customer update.

Thank you, Vickram. A strong sequential revenue growth of 31% in Q4 versus Q3 took us to a record sales in Q4 amounting to SEK 76.7 million. And by this, we established a new baseline for our quarterly revenue. Sivers continues to drive overall agenda of capital-efficient profitable growth. And underlying profitability in the fourth quarter was SEK 15.5 million, and adjusted EBITDA was positive for the second half of 2024. Although higher revenue levels support higher profitability, sales mix is an important factor in determining profitability level, not only the mix between product sales and NRE projects, but also the mix of projects within the NRE product portfolio. In Q4, we had a favorable sales mix. Sivers adjusted EBITDA level is not a straight line. We have said this before, but it's worth reiterating that in the stage Sivers is in, we will continue to see fluctuations in profitability between individual quarters. And it's important to keep focus on the overall trend and progress made. Record sales in Q4 as well as full year 2024, which amounted to SEK 243.7 million. And again, continued sequential improvement in adjusted EBITDA with a positive Q4 and second half of 2024. Full year adjusted EBITDA improved 21% to minus SEK 15.6 million from minus SEK 19.8 million prior year. And Sivers is on a promising path to sustainable profitability. And in addition to drive growth, we're committed to continue to focus on operational efficiency. And as Vickram mentioned, during the quarter, we strengthened our financing through an equity raise of SEK 108 million in gross proceeds and improved commercial discipline, which will support our continued successful growth. We have a good starting backlog and healthy order intake of SEK 234 million during the past few months, supporting growth in 2025 and beyond. Siver's strategy is to become a product company. In Q4, we noted the highest level of product sales to date, amounting to SEK 25 million. This corresponds to a growth of 93%, largely stemming from the wireless business. Product sales for full year 2024 amounted to SEK 79 million, which was an increase of SEK 32 million or 68% compared to prior year. An increase in product sales is demonstrating a focused shift towards a product-driven revenue model. As presented, we continue to drive transformation to product business, which is demonstrated in that product sales in absolute value increased during the year as well as in the fact that share of sales grew to 32% from 20% prior year. Sales distribution between our 2 business units remain in line with prior year. We continue to have a balanced distribution geographically, where we see North America growing to 40% from 32% prior year. Partly this is driven by the increased activity in the awarded contracts on the U.S. SHIP Act. While remaining strong in Europe, growing business and presence in North America is an important part of our strategy. And by that, I hand over back to Vickram.

Thanks, Lottie. So we want to talk about our markets and customers, and I want to give the audience a little more color. If you remember, the rallying cry for Cirrus now is we have the technologies that we believe are critical enablers of a greener data economy, both on our photonics and wireless side. Last time, I raised awareness to 2 long-term secular trends, namely AI acceleration and millimeter wave adoption and 2 momentum markets, which is AI data centers for our Photonics business and satellite communications for our wireless business. And I also indicated that we are probing and finding the correct engagements in cellular infrastructure and aerospace and defense as well. And our value proposition is consistent. We deliver energy-efficient laser arrays and RF beamformer solutions. So I explained what I meant by momentum markets last time, which is there are tailwinds that continue to drive these markets towards successful deployment trends, which then enables Sivers to also benefit from that marketplace. So let's talk about what's the momentum in the 2 markets and the aerospace and the fixed wireless access cellular infrastructure market as well. So let's click into the next slide and talk a little bit more about the 2 trends. So the first one I mentioned last time, and I continue to mention is AI acceleration. If you look at the recent earnings transcripts, hyperscalers who ultimately drive the deployment of data center infrastructure, are increasing Capex investments by an enormous amount in 2025 compared to already very high levels in 2024. It's a 45% increase projected across the top 4 mega hyperscalers, whether it's Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, they're all having tremendous plans to drive more Capex for data center infrastructure and specifically focused on AI data center use cases, okay? This is super crucial because this drives market momentum towards more efficient architectures, which again is a tremendous tailwind for Sivers. In February, we also saw Europe announce a EUR 200 billion invest AI initiative to catch up on AI innovation. And this is something that I want to dwell on for a minute just so that we all understand what's happening here. Clearly, as I mentioned last time, the biggest activity, the biggest budget dollars for AI acceleration and AI data center infrastructure is happening in the U.S. In Europe, there has been less of a sense of urgency in the past to start playing materially in this space. It's even reflected in investor sentiment around AI data centers. But this is a reality. This is going to happen, and it's a decision that Europe has to take if they want to be a big part of this or watch this go by. So to me, this is a tremendous announcement from Europe about a very sizable spend to go in and make sure that European companies, European infrastructure is also a big part of this future with AI acceleration. We have heard news from DeepSeek regarding very efficient ways of driving inference in AI data center approaches. However, as we look at it, our feeling, and this is something that we have also checked with the market is that companies like DeepSeek will enable more segments for AI applications so that AI applications are not only reserved for the ultra-premium segments. So this is actually welcome news for a company like Sivers because as there are more and more AI applications across multiple segments that will also deploy architectures in a broader fashion, and they will all need to rely also on optical interconnects, which is where our photonics lasers technologies come in. As evidenced by the recent MOU signing we have had, this is also prevalent now in the entire ecosystem for AI acceleration that optical interconnect-based infrastructure vendors are pushed heavily now by the hyperscalers to get production ready by end of 2026 for AI data centers. This continues to correlate well with the input I gave during my last call that we are looking at this type of a ramp in the photonics side of our business from '27 onwards. What is also becoming very evident in the ecosystem is larger laser array sizes and higher output power levels from these lasers allow for higher efficiency architectures for the photonics vendors and therefore, for the hyperscalers also. And that's exactly where Siver's value proposition comes in. We continue to lead the way in our technology development and solution availability for larger laser arrays and higher power levels. So there is more and more interest coming from the ecosystem for the types of solutions we deliver because it allows our customers and their customers to have more energy-efficient AI data centers. And if you remember, these data centers will consume a lot of power. So anything you can do to improve the energy efficiencies is super critical. So again, if you look at AI acceleration as a secular trend, there is tremendous momentum in the AI data center market, which is what we would like to see, and that's the evidence you're seeing in the marketplace as well. Let's now switch to the second secular trend, millimeter wave adoption. I'll first talk about the SATCOM market. And here, the market momentum and the silvers pipeline momentum grows. If you remember, we participate both on the terminal side as well as the space satellite side. And on the terminal side, our focus at this moment is on defense terminals and commercial and enterprise terminals. So let's look at what's driving market momentum in this space. So satellite services, which used to be a lot of video on-demand are firmly moving from video-on-demand use cases to ubiquitous broadband. reach for everybody anywhere on the planet. So that means larger and larger quantities of data transmission, which is a good thing for Sivers wireless technology. Cellular networks are increasingly seeing satellite broadband as an effective partner for coverage. So there's also this linkage between the cellular technologies and the satellite technologies to come in and solve this ubiquitous broadband challenge that the world faces. And so these edge networks are becoming very important and not completely uncorrelated. The U.S. defense spend continues to stay strong on modernization of space infrastructure, and they want to move faster. In the past, defense systems, defense companies have moved slower in these deployments, but they also see the urgency to modernize space fast then they see all the commercial engagements and action happening in SATCOM. And the defense companies and the government have made it public knowledge that they want to leverage commercial deployments as well for hybrid support for defense and commercial dual-use satellites and terminals. So this, again, is an interpretation that there is momentum building in the speed of deployments, which is again a big positive for Sivers. From a technology side, multi-band, multi-orbit, so not just LEO, but LEO, middle earth and GEO satellites, taking advantage of all the satellites in the sky, operating on multiple bands and providing make before break support, which basically means multiple beams for communication. These are all becoming essential features in new product requests from the customers and the ecosystem. And again, going back to Sivers strength, we have multi-band capability. We are already targeting multi-orbit and our beamforming technology has tremendous advantages with make before break. So once again, from a technology differentiation and solution availability, we are in the right place at the right time. Let's now talk about the Sivers pipeline momentum. One of our key strategic customers is already written into the program of record for multiple generations of defense terminal products with the U.S. Army and Navy. And they are relying on Sivers beamformer technology to enable multi-beam make-before break architectures. This is very, very exciting and super promising for Sivers pipeline momentum. Strong field trials with our strategic customer with the U.S. defense now has the defense agencies wanting to accelerate their first-generation product deployment as well. So once again, when they see that the technology is working well in the field and they actually want to put product out earlier than original plans, that, again, is a tremendous positive momentum builder for Sivers as a whole. And as I mentioned earlier, but I want to reiterate, we had lead adopters that are very innovative, younger companies. But now this technology is starting to get noticed beyond, and we are moving beyond lead adopters with the Intelsat announcement. And Intelsat being a global leader is very interested in putting our technology into both defense terminals and commercial and enterprise terminal technology. And we're not stopping just with Intelsat. More and more RFIs and RFQs are coming in as the interest expands for our RF beamformer technology. So the takeaway here is there's once again very good market momentum building in SATCOM for our millimeter wave technology. And at the same time, we are seeing good pipeline momentum with more and more customers coming in asking for our technology to put into their products. Moving forward, if you look at millimeter wave adoption, there are a couple of other markets that I've told you are pretty interesting. And we are expanding our engagements in a careful way in these other interesting markets. If you look at telecom infrastructure, the focus is on last mile coverage and repeater use cases. That's where we are seeing strength and traction. And as I mentioned before, the sustained engagement with the leading telecom infrastructure vendor is now targeting multiple product generations, which again is a huge positive and also tells us that this customer is working on a long-term plan and not just a spot product, which is something that we need as we continue to migrate to a product-rich business model for Sivers. Additionally, we are also targeting first deployments of 5G repeater technology in Asia with another infrastructure vendor starting 2026 onwards. So again, we are being selective, but expanding engagements on the telecom infrastructure side. If you then look on the defense side, the primary areas where Sivers technology becomes very important is electronic warfare, communications and radar. And the key thing that's happening in the defense industry, especially in aerospace, is multi-mission assets. And what do I mean by that? The same asset is having a mission that's on transmitting something, having a mission that's on receiving something, might have a mission that is sensing something or jamming something, right? So these are all what we call multi-mission protocols. And so the defense use cases are now prioritizing multi-mission assets, which need full duplex sensing and communication systems. Once again, Sivers has excellent IP and technology that can make this happen, and that's where the engagements are strengthening. One other thing that's happening in defense, which is also in our favor is there's a lot of focus now on lightweight, energy-efficient solutions for attributable resources as it is called in defense, such as drones, et cetera. And so with products such as drones, we have higher and higher volumes, but they still require high levels of performance at low -- small form factors and low weight. And once again, our energy-efficient compact RF beamformers are very, very relevant for this area also. The U.S. CHIPS Act project, as I've mentioned before in our press releases, is a very strong basis for developing partnership with the world's leading defense companies. We're talking about BAE systems. We're talking about Rapion, et cetera. And this is going to be very useful because these companies are working with us to commercialize technology and take it into the market with products. So if you now look across the AI acceleration secular trend and the millimeter wave adoption, one key point that I want to make is, in addition to the RF technologies we have in the Sivers wireless business, our antenna arrays are also generating a lot of interest in this market in the defense market. And what we are doing consciously now is in both these secular trends and the markets that we are servicing, we are very careful in picking up projects which are not just engineering development projects. We are working very closely with our customers to identify those projects that have the best chances of making it into product shipments at the end of the development agreements. So that's where we are putting a lot of discipline and focus so that the work we do in developing these products has a long-lived benefit with repeat sales of products and higher volume sales in the coming years. I mentioned this last time, but I want to keep this front and center. The Sivers opportunity for any investor looking at Sivers is long-term shareholder value creation. We continue to stay focused on our 2 secular trends and 2 momentum markets, along with a couple of auxiliary markets, which are showing promise. We have a sizable serviceable market. And our value proposition is sticking very well with our use cases and our pipeline is growing and has good momentum. Our ambition remains as before, and this could be a very sizable business in about 4 years. And if you look at market valuation based on comparable multiples, this is a very attractive thesis for investors who understand that these are long-term secular trends. They take time to develop, but they leverage tremendous momentum in these markets. So we're looking for sustainable shareholder value creation for the long term, and that's the type of investment we are looking for from the marketplace. I want to leave this thought as well on this slide, which is Sivers is a very unique investment opportunity in Europe to participate in 2 of the hottest global secular trends in the industry where much of the activity is taking place in the U.S., right? So it's a very unique opportunity in Europe. Not many companies that can service 2 of the hottest global secular trends in an innovative fashion with technologies that deliver the promise. So what are the key takeaways from the commentary you have seen? Let me leave you with a few key points. Number one, strong Q4 financials, highest revenue quarter, good, adjusted EBITDA results, and this forms a new baseline for growth in 2025 and beyond. A very healthy backlog and order intake for growth in 2025. We are not taking our eyes off the ball on driving profitability in the company and that continues to remain a very critical mission objective. We completed our directed raise in January '25. We brought on board Boardman Bay, and we look to bring on more fundamental long-term investors into the company that are looking for long-term sustained success. The market momentum continues. Our opportunity pipeline is expanding. We are winning more designs in our focus areas. These are all extremely compelling data points at this time, and we'll continue to make progress in these areas. And I want to reiterate, if you look at 2024, now that we have digested a very strong 2023 and formed a new basis of or a platform for growth for the future, we will see layering in of growth from wireless and photonics in the coming years. Our SATCOM product deployments from the back half of '25 going into '26, that will provide the first wave. And then as I mentioned before, AI product deployment is more second half of 2026 going into 2027, and this is further confirmed by the entire ecosystem pushing for manufacturing readiness by the end of 2026. So overall, it's an extremely compelling thesis for investing in Sivers. Our future is extremely bright, and we continue to execute with discipline and focus and making sure we are leveraging market momentum in our chosen focus areas and continue to ride these 2 very critical secular trends for the future. Thank you. And we have some time for question and answers, and I will see what might be coming up.

There's a question on how our pipeline engagement is on the Photonics side. And we continue to work very well with both our customers. I can't disclose details on with whom the MOUs signed, et cetera. But on both fronts, our activity levels continue to increase. There's a question on other 5G projects. It's important to note that, and I mentioned this last time, we are being extremely careful and selective when it comes to engaging on the 5G infrastructure side. Pipeline has multiple opportunities. And as I've told you, we are already working on a couple of them, as I mentioned on this webinar. We'll be very careful and selective when we engage with more. But when the time comes and we are engaging, we'll make sure that, that news is brought out to the investor community. There's a question on LiDAR for autonomous cars, et cetera. As you've seen, LiDAR is a technology that has taken time in automotive. There's a lot of shipments on the radar side. And the LiDAR use cases are still fermenting, if you would kind of put it that way. So again, at this time, our focus is on the 2 critical markets where we have tremendous secular trend momentum going on. We continue to watch these other markets. And when they start showing signals that there is strength developing, we'll look to engage. But at this point, as I said, our main focus is on our 2 critical market segments, and we are keeping outposts and engaging selectively in a couple of other markets. There are several questions on, again, other markets of interest that Sivers might have talked about in the past. And again, I think I was talking about this in my Q3 webinar as well. As a smaller company that is trying to grow consistently for the future, we have to focus in the areas with the most momentum. If we put our efforts into too many market segments, then we are not going to be able to make material or meaningful progress in the years ahead. So we have chosen a couple of the critical markets very carefully, and that's where a bulk of our energy is going. And in the other markets, if we see signals that momentum is picking up and our technologies are relevant and sufficiently differentiated, then we will seek to engage and put in the level of investment that we would need. At this time, the company needs focus, and that's what I've shown everybody on the call where our focus areas are. There's a question on the CHIPS Act projects. So these are lab-to-fab projects, which means the aim is over the period of the contracts, 2 to 3 years. The idea is to develop product concepts that are relevant for these customers like Raytheon and BAE and others to put out into the marketplace. So these projects are being executed with specific milestones, and there is more and more input that then shapes what these specifications need to be that come in from these defense primes, okay? We can't go into the details of what exactly these specifications are, but be assured that there are firm schedules behind these projects. There are firm deliverables and the specifications are being shaped by big commercial defense primes who want to see products in the market. The MOU is monies that come into Sivers so that we can execute on our plans towards getting our products ready by end of 2026. I think I mentioned this before there's one more question, and then I think we have to wrap up. The Photonics ecosystem is wanting people to be production ready by end of 2026 because they expect deployments in 2027. And that then will form the basis for production orders that will have to be then placed for that deployment in 2027. I cannot indicate exactly which month, which quarter, et cetera, but the entire ecosystem is indicating that 2027 is the year for volume deployment. We are working on a Capital Markets Day in 2025. The date is not yet firmly set, but we are working on it being in March. And when the details are out, we will share it with the investment community and the broader marketplace. I believe we have come to the end of our webinar. So again, thanks for participating, and I hope this was useful information. Once again, I want to leave you with, it's been a tremendous Q4 and an extremely solid 2024 with very good momentum we take into 2025, not just on the opportunity pipeline in the markets, but also establishing a new revenue baseline for us from our Q4 performance and positioning us for growth in 2025 with our backlog and our order intake. So thanks, everybody.