Applied Optoelectronics - Q4 2022

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon. I will be your conference operator. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to Applied Optoelectronics fourth quarter and full year 2022 earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press Star then one on your touchtone phone. To withdraw from the question queue, please press Star then two. Please note that this call is being recorded. I will now turn the call over to Lindsay Savarese, investor relations for AOI. Ms. Savarese, you may begin.

Lindsay Savarese (Director of Investor Relations)

Thank you. I'm Lindsay Savarese, investor relations for Applied Optoelectronics, and I'm pleased to welcome you to AOI fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results conference call. After the market closed today, AOI issued a press release announcing its fourth quarter and full year 2022 financial results and provided its outlook for the first quarter of 2023. The release is also available on the company's website at ao-inc.com. This call is being recorded and webcast live. A link to the recording can be found on the investor relations section of the AOI website and will be archived for one year. Joining us on today's call is Dr. Thompson Lin, AOI founder, chairman, and CEO, and Dr. Stefan Murry, AOI's chief financial officer and chief strategy officer.

Thompson will give an overview of AOI's Q4 results, Stefan will provide financial details and the outlook for the first quarter of 2023. A question-and-answer session will follow our prepared remarks. Before we begin, I would like to remind you to review AOI safe harbor statement. On today's call, management will make forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties as well as assumptions and current expectations, which could cause the company's actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements of the company or its industry to differ materially from those expressed or implied in such forward-looking statements. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terminology such as believe, forecast, anticipate, estimate, intend, predict, expect, plan, may, should, could, would, will, potential or think, or by the negative of those terms or other similar expressions that convey uncertainty of future events or outcomes.

The company has based these forward-looking statements on its current expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections. While the company believes these expectations, assumptions, estimates and projections are reasonable, such forward-looking statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's control, including important factors such as risks related to the company's ability to complete the transaction described on this call on the proposed term and schedule or at all. The risk that certain closing conditions may not be timely satisfied or waived. The failure or delay to receive the required regulatory or other government approvals relating to the transaction, and the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to the termination of the transaction.

Forward-looking statements also include statements regarding management's beliefs and expectations related to the expansion of the reach of our products into new markets and customer responses to our innovation, as well as statements regarding the company's outlook for the first quarter of 2023. Except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this earnings call to conform these statements to actual results or to changes in the company's expectations. More information about other risks that may impact the company's business are set forth in the Risk Factors section of the company's reports on file with the SEC, including the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31st, 2022. Also, all financial results and other financial measures discussed today are on a non-GAAP basis unless specifically noted otherwise.

Non-GAAP financial measures are not intended to be considered in isolation or as a substitute for results prepared in accordance with GAAP. A reconciliation between our GAAP and non-GAAP measures, as well as a discussion of why we present non-GAAP financial measures, are included in our earnings press release that is available on our website. I'd like to note the date of our first quarter earnings call is currently scheduled for May 4, 2023. Now I would like to turn the call over to Dr. Thompson Lin, Applied Optoelectronics founder, chairman, and CEO. Thompson?

Thompson Lin (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Thank you, Lindsay. Thank you for joining our call today. We are pleased to report fourth quarter result was revenue in line with our expectations, gross margin above our expectations, and a non-GAAP loss per share better than our expectations. We continue to see strong demand in the CATV market and generated the highest quarterly CATV revenue in the company's history in Q4. During the fourth quarter, we delivered revenue of $61.6 million, in line with our guidance range of $58 million-$64 million. We delivered non-GAAP gross margin of 21.4%, above our guided range of 17.5%-19.5%, driven by our target cost reductions and favorable product mix. Our non-GAAP loss per share was $0.19, above our guidance range of a loss of $0.28-$0.34.

Total revenue in our CATV segment was a company record of $38.2 million, up 53% year-over-year and 22% sequentially off a strong Q3 as we continue to see robust demand in the CATV market. Total revenue for our data center products of $16.5 million decreased 35% year-over-year and 7% sequentially as customer continues to manage inventory level of older products during the transition to 400G. This was partially offset by increase in 400G revenue, which more than doubled sequentially. In Q4, we signed an agreement with a major hyperscale data center operator for development program to make next-generation lasers for their data center, both for 400G and beyond.

While the development of this new product will take several quarters to be complete, we view this contract award as validation of the value of our core laser fabrication ability. I'll turn the call over to Stefan to review the details of our Q4 performance and outlook for Q1. Stefan?

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

Thank you, Thompson. As Thompson mentioned, we are pleased to report our fourth quarter results with revenue in line with our expectations, gross margin above our expectations, and a non-GAAP loss per share better than our expectations. We continued to see strong demand in the CATV market and generated the highest quarterly CATV revenue in the company's history in Q4. Before turning to the quarter, I wanted to provide an update on the transaction that we announced last September that we have entered into an agreement with Wuhan Optoelectronic Technology for the sale of our manufacturing facilities located in the People's Republic of China and certain assets related to our transceiver business and multi-channel optical sub-assembly products for the data center, telecom, and FTTH markets for a purchase price of $150 million.

As a reminder, we continue to anticipate that the transaction will be completed in 2023 and is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals, including CFIUS and ODI. We continue to advance work on these required regulatory approvals. As part of this process, Wuhan has disclosed additional details regarding their financials, including new details regarding the composition of their ownership group. Based on this new information, we continue to be optimistic that regulatory approval of this transaction, both in the U.S. and China, is achievable. Turning to the quarter, our total revenue for the fourth quarter increased 13% year-over-year to $61.6 million, which was in line with our guidance range of $58 million-$64 million. As Thompson noted earlier, we made progress on our strategy to focus our efforts on our higher margin laser business during Q4.

We are pleased to announce that during the fourth quarter, we signed an agreement with a major hyperscale data center operator for a development program to make next-generation lasers for their data center, both for 400G and beyond. This customer has agreed to provide approximately $4 million in R&D funding for the first phase of this project, with the first $3 million paid in Q4. Currently, this is reflected on our balance sheet as deferred revenue. We expect to recognize this revenue throughout the next several quarters as we progress through the development program. We believe that the significant financial investment made by this customer provides further validation of our strategy of focusing on our core high-margin laser business, even as we advance with our plans to divest the data center optical transceiver business to Wuhan, as discussed above.

Turning back to the quarter, we secured 2 design wins, both of which were in our CATV business. For the full year, we secured 12 new design wins compared to 20 design wins in 2021. During the fourth quarter, 62% of our revenue was from our CATV products, 27% was from our data center products, with the remaining 11% from FTTH, telecom, and other. In our CATV product segment, the overall demand environment remains robust as MSOs, particularly in North America, continue purchasing additional networking products in order to upgrade their networks. CATV revenue in the fourth quarter was a company record of $38.2 million, which was up 53% year-over-year and 22% sequentially.

Looking ahead, as a reminder, our CATV results are typically negatively impacted in Q1 by the loss of production days that occurs during the Lunar New Year holiday in China, where most of our CATV products are produced. We continue to have good visibility throughout the first half of the year and are carefully monitoring MSO plans to move to DOCSIS 4.0 networks, perhaps as early as later this year. Broadly speaking, we're encouraged by some of the commentary that we have heard regarding the DOCSIS 4.0 transition as it relates to long-term continued investment in network upgrades.

As you may have seen in December, Charter announced plans to spend approximately $5.5 billion over the next several years on network upgrades. We believe much of the spending will be on outside plant equipment such as nodes and amplifiers, which are the products that have been driving AOI's CATV business growth over the last several years. Announcements like that from Charter bolster our belief that the network upgrades that have begun will continue for the next several years, which we believe will continue to drive our CATV business. Our Q4 data center revenue came in at $16.5 million, down 35% year-over-year and 7% sequentially as customers continued to manage inventory levels of older products during the transition to 400G. This was partially offset by an increase in 400G revenue, which more than doubled sequentially.

In the fourth quarter, 71% of our data center revenue was from our 100G products, 11% was from our 40G transceiver products, and 8% was from our 200G and 400G transceiver products. Turning to our telecom segment. Revenue from our telecom products of $6.4 million was up 94% year-over-year and down 7% sequentially. Looking ahead, we currently expect telecom revenue in Q1 to be slightly down due to the Lunar New Year, and then expect to see slow improvement in this segment as deployments of 5G products continue. For the fourth quarter, our top 10 customers represented 90% of revenue, up from 88.4% in Q4 last year. We have two greater than 10% customers, one in the CATV market and one in the data center market.

These customers contributed 58% and 16% of total revenue, respectively. For the full year, we had 2 10% or greater customers, one in the CATV market and one in the data center market. These customers contributed 47% and 18% of total revenue, respectively. In Q4, we generated non-GAAP gross margin of 21.4%, which was above our guidance range of 17.5%-19.5%, and was up from 18% in Q3 of 2022, and up from 17.6% in Q4 of 2021. The increase in gross margin was driven mainly by our favorable product mix and our cost reduction efforts. We continue to be very focused on improving our bottom line. We believe the key to this is improving our gross margin performance.

In addition to our ongoing cost reduction efforts, during the quarter, we exited several low-profit legacy products. Additionally, we have shifted R&D resources away from some low-margin projects to focus our resources on areas where we can maximize margin. Recently, we have also had some success in executing price increases with some customers, which will help to relieve some of the margin pressure we've been experiencing. Together, we expect these efforts to cumulatively improve our gross margin and bottom line performance over the next several quarters, and our management team and operating teams are all focused intensely on this improvement. Total non-GAAP operating expenses in the fourth quarter were $21 million or 34.2% of revenue, which compared to $16.9 million or 31% of revenue in Q4 of the prior year. R&D expenses increased 7% year-over-year to $8.9 million.

As we noted in our last earnings call, our non-GAAP operating expenses in Q4 included approximately $3 million or $0.11 per share of additional employee bonus accrual related to the China divestiture. These payments were authorized by the board in order to retain key employees who are critical to the success of the divestiture. These additional bonus payments are not expected to occur in 2023. Looking forward, we continue to expect non-GAAP operating expenses will moderate this year to between $19 million and $20 million per quarter. Non-GAAP operating loss in the fourth quarter was $7.9 million compared to an operating loss of $7.3 million in Q4 of the prior year.

GAAP net loss for Q4 was $20.3 million or a loss of $0.71 per basic share, compared with the GAAP net loss of $14.5 million or a loss of $0.54 per basic share in Q4 of 2021. On a non-GAAP basis, net loss for Q4 was $5.4 million or a loss of $0.19 per basic share, which was better than our guidance range of a loss of $8.1 million-$9.8 million, or a loss per share in the range of $0.28-$0.34 per basic share, and compares to a net loss of $5.5 million or a loss of $0.20 per basic share in Q4 of the prior year.

The basic shares outstanding used for computing the net loss in Q4 were 28.5 million. Turning now to the balance sheet. We ended the fourth quarter with $35.6 million in total cash equivalents, short-term investments, and restricted cash. This compares with $34.6 million at the end of the third quarter. We ended the quarter with total debt, excluding convertible debt, of $69.4 million, up from $65.1 million last quarter. As of December 31, we had $79.9 million in inventory, compared to $94.3 million at the end of Q3. Inventory decreased primarily due to utilization of inventory for customer orders, along with the impact of exchange rates on our foreign inventory.

We made a total of $0.8 million in capital investments in the fourth quarter, bringing our total CapEx for the year to $3.4 million, which is down from $11.6 million in 2021, reflecting lower capital needs as most of the equipment necessary to produce our current generation products was purchased last year. Moving now to our Q1 outlook. We expect Q1 revenue to be between $52 million and $55 million, and non-GAAP gross margin to be in the range of 23%-24%.

Non-GAAP net loss is expected to be in the range of $4.4 million-$5.3 million, and non-GAAP loss per basic share between $0.15 and $0.19, using a weighted average basic share count of approximately 28.9 million shares. With that, I will turn it back over to the operator for the Q&A session. Operator?

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your touchtone phone. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we'll pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Our first question comes from Simon Leopold from Raymond James. Please go ahead.

Simon Leopold (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Thanks for taking the question. I appreciate the seasonal factors in terms of the Chinese New Year effect on the March quarter. I guess what I'm struggling with is how to really think about maybe the normalized run rate, given that you didn't provide a full year forecast. Can you give us some color or quantification about how you're thinking about the full year, particularly for the cable unit?

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

As we noted in our prepared remarks, you know, we did, we had an all-time record in terms of cable TV production in Q4. I think part of that is probably some orders that were pulled into Q4 from Q1 just because they knew, you know, that there would be an impact from Lunar New Year and wanted to make sure that they had adequate inventory on hand. That number is probably a little bit high for an average run rate, but it's certainly, you know, what we were able to produce in Q4.

Consistent with demand, you know, I'd say we probably come in at a number that's, you know, slightly less than that perhaps, but not, you know, not too far off after we finish off, you know, after we get out of the Lunar New Year period. That being said, I mean, you know, we're actually monitoring pretty carefully the activity around DOCSIS 4.0, or at least specifically, you know, the MSO plans to move to upgraded networks. It's something that we've spent a lot of time developing products for and, you know, we're excited about that transition.

We're waiting to see whether that occurs, you know, later this year or early into next year and how that'll, you know, impact volumes both on the current generation of 1.2 GHz products and the next generation 1.8 GHz products.

Simon Leopold (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Just to make sure I understand what you're alluding to there is if we were to make the assumption that DOCSIS 4.0 spending were to ramp in 2024, the activity in 2023 seems like maybe preparation for that, and therefore, 2024 should give you further growth if we think that's when DOCSIS 4.0 ramps. Is that the right interpretation?

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

Yeah, I think that's, I think that's an accurate description of it. The DOCSIS 4.0 components, in addition to being, you know, just kind of more complicated in their own right because of the greater frequency response associated with DOCSIS 4.0, the products also, especially the amplifier products, contain a great deal of intelligence in the products, which is something new that hasn't really been incorporated into those products. The bottom line is that the cost and price of those products is higher than the DOCSIS, the current generation DOCSIS 3.1 products. You know, that alone, you know, independent of volume plans by the MSOs, just the cost increase alone would certainly tend to drive, you know, higher revenue numbers.

Simon Leopold (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Can you give us the names of the customers that were over 10%, the cable TV vertical and the data center vertical?

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

Sure. ATX Networks and Microsoft.

Simon Leopold (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Great. Thanks. I'll yield the floor. Thank you.

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

Thanks. Thanks, Simon.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Tim Savageaux from Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Tim Savageaux (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Hi. Good afternoon, and congrats on the results, especially on the gross margin side. I guess I'll start there. I think your, you know, drivers for Q4 are pretty straightforward in talking about mix. I guess that's more cable and less datacom. My first question though was on the Q1 gross margin guide, which is higher still despite this seasonal pullback in revenue. I wonder if you could. I don't know if that's some of that NRE funding coming in, or if you can talk about what the drivers might be there?

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

I mean, there's not much of the NRE funding in Q1 actually in terms of the forecast. I mentioned in our prepared remarks that we've actually been successful in pushing through some price increases, which is, you know, rather unusual for our industry. So we'll start to see the impact of some of those price increases during the quarter. Then, you know, the continued, you know, cost reduction efforts.

I've mentioned this, you know, pretty consistently over the last, I don't know, 3 or 4 quarters that because of the nature of the cost reduction and specifically when you're talking about, you know, product redesigns or substituting components that maybe have lower costs, that takes some time to play out because you have inventory that you have to, you know, older inventory at a higher cost that you have to use up before the new inventory at a lower cost comes in. Those cost improvements don't happen, you know, all at once. They tend to happen over a period of a couple quarters. There'll be some additional impact from those cost reductions in Q1 as well.

Tim Savageaux (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. You know, it sounds like if you're in a situation where revenue, you know, comes back, you know, post your seasonal quarter, it doesn't seem like there's a lot of one-time stuff in that Q1 gross margin guide. Seems like you could possibly build on that with higher volumes.

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

I think that's right. I mean, we've certainly been, you know, talking about returning to certainly, you know, upper 20s, mid- to upper 20% range gross margins, and, you know, I think we can definitely see, especially over the last couple quarters, we can certainly see a pathway to that later this year.

Thompson Lin (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Tim, this is Thompson. I certainly believe our Q4 CEO gross margin should be 30%+. Next year with 34.0, I think the unit price should be much higher. You know, it's a very new product, and I think the AOI has we believe we have very strong advantage in technology and performance, and the cost might be better. The next year cost might be even better. That's all we see right now, and we see very strong demand from the key customers.

Tim Savageaux (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. I want to kind of follow. That was my next question, actually, is we seem to be talking about cable TV infrastructure demand in two different ways, which is, you know, one, your current demand profile, which seems, you know, pretty strong and you know, maybe some of that got pulled into Q4. You know, you grew 25% or so in cable TV in calendar 2022, and obviously much faster than that in Q4. You know, does that represent a normalized growth rate? Is that something, can you maintain double digits there regardless of the timing of 4.0?

It sounds like what you were trying to say is to the extent we see, you know, when some of this 4.0 activity start to really happen in the second half of 2023 versus 2024, that could be a swing factor for your cable TV growth. I'm just trying to set a baseline for, you know, how you see the current demand picture and what might be incremental to that.

Stefan Murry (CFO and Chief Strategy Officer)

Yeah. At the moment, I mean, we're sort of capacity limited in terms of production. Until we get a more clear line of sight on exactly how fast the adoption of 4.0 is gonna go, I'm not anticipating that we're gonna add a lot of production capacity for the 4.0 products. You know, for the next several quarters, I would say we're likely to be, you know, capacity constrained. Now, I mentioned earlier that Q4 was, you know, a little bit higher than I think we would do on an average basis. I mean, we sort of, as I said, the customer tried to, you know, pulled in some revenue, and we did some things to try to ship out, you know, as much product as we could.

I wouldn't necessarily predict that number exactly in Q4 as a 4 quarter run rate. You know, going back a quarter or so probably is a reasonable estimate of what we would be able to do, you know, quarter on quarter this year, absent any, you know, change in the demand picture due to 4.0.

Tim Savageaux (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Great. Thanks very much.

Operator (participant)

There are no more questions in the queue. This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Dr. Thompson Lin for any closing remarks.

Thompson Lin (Founder, Chairman and CEO)

Thank you for joining us today. As always, we want to extend a thank you to all investors, customers and employees for your continued support. We look forward to seeing many of you at OFC and updating you on our next earnings call.

Operator (participant)

Conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.