GSI - Q3 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to GSI Technology's Q3 fiscal 2024 financial results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. At that time, we will provide instructions for those interested in entering the queue for the Q&A. Before we begin today's call, the company has requested that I read the following safe harbor statement. The matters discussed in this conference call may include forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future performance of GSI Technology that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risks and uncertainties are described in the company's Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Additionally, I've been asked to advise you that this conference call is being recorded today, January 25, 2024, at the request of GSI Technology. Hosting the call today is Lee-Lean Shu, the company's Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer. With him are Douglas Schirle, Chief Financial Officer, and Didier Lasserre, Vice President of Sales. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Shu. Please go ahead, sir.

Lee-Lean Shu (Chairman, President and CEO)

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us. I am pleased to share several key updates from an eventful Q3. Starting with the product development, we achieved two major milestones that will keep us on track to advance the Gemini APU family. First, in November, we successfully completed radiation-hardened testing on the Gemini-I APU for compute in space applications. The test results confirmed that Gemini-I has met the characteristics to be a radiation-tolerant processor. We are actively engaged with several satellite companies that need radiation-tolerant APUs, and we are encouraged by their strong interest. Moving to our next generation APU, we completed the tape-out of Gemini-II in the Q3. In late February, we will evaluate the initial spins and expect to begin sampling Gemini-II chip in the second half of calendar 2024.

Gemini-II has 8 times of internal memory and 10 times better performance than Gemini-I, at notably lower cost. This dramatically improves cost performance, allow us to target a much broader range of applications. The 96 megabyte of internal memory in Gemini-II can fit many AI models entirely on the chip, enabling in-place data processing without accessing external memory or external devices. This should give Gemini-II tremendous advantage on compact edge applications like drone and ADAS. We anticipate starting initial alpha deployments with select customers in the second half of calendar 2024. Lastly, in the Q3, we shipped radiation-hardened SRAMs to two customers for two new programs, and we received a second SBIR direct to Phase II contract in the amount of $1.1 million.

Looking ahead, we are in the early stage of developing the architecture for our next generation, Gemini-III chip. We had a discussion with several hyperscalers about APU design options to best address their emerging markets need in the data center. In addition to helping hyperscalers lower data center power consumption, the APU can also provide significant benefit to Gen AI end users by reducing inference costs. We initiated preliminary discussions with two major hyperscalers who have expressed interest in our technology and continue to work with internal teams on various early-stage concepts. Turning to our financial performance, the Q3 revenue of $5.3 million met our guidance with a gross margin of 56%, was at the midpoint of our guidance. The sequential improvement in gross margin reflects product mix this quarter.

Our operating expenses, which increased both year-over-year and sequentially, included a one-time expense of $2.4 million for a pre-production mask for Gemini-II. We view this as an investment in future growth, as Gemini-II will greatly expand APU market reach. In parallel, we continue discussions with potential strategic partners to support Gemini-II launch and assist with Gemini-III development. As our most ambitious, ambitious chip to date, we anticipate Gemini-III will require significant capital investment and partnership to help mitigate our funding, funding needs. We remain focused on prudent financial management to fuel our product roadmap and expansion into new markets. Recently, Cornell University published a research paper spotlighting the unique efficiency of our Gemini-I APU to accelerate location filtering in DNA mapping.

Didier will discuss the detail of the paper and its implication for GSI in his comments. In closing, it was an eventful Q3 with tremendous progress on our Gemini roadmap, prudent expense management, and action to increase our financial flexibility to support our growth. We remain laser-focused on bringing our innovative APUs to market and driving long-term value creation. Now I will hand the call over to Didier, who will discuss our business performance further. Please go ahead, Didier.

Didier Lasserre (VP of Sales)

Thank you, Lee-Lean. I want to provide some additional context on why we are so confident in the market potential for our APU architecture, especially for inference workloads. First, the unmatched flexibility of our variable bit processing is key. With 2 million undefined bit processors that can be toggled from one bit to 2 million bits, cycle by cycle, our APU can adapt to real time, I'm sorry, in real time to maximize efficiency. This dynamic bit-wise configurability can process long strips one bit at a time, and is ideal for inference, since research shows that different bit precisions are more efficient for different models. Second, our APU architecture breaks the von Neumann model by removing the data fetch function. This innovative design delivers higher performance with lower power consumption.

As Lee-Lean mentioned, these capabilities directly address the critical needs of data centers and emerging applications by lowering data center power consumption and reducing inference costs for Gen AI end users. Importantly, I want to emphasize that our APU represents true in-memory, true compute-in-memory architecture. Unlike competing chips that claim compute-in-memory, they are actually near memory compute, and our APU has logic physically integrated in the memory. This fundamental difference in architecture will ultimately enable our APU to achieve the transformative speed and efficiency gains we anticipate as we scale. Our true compute-in-memory architecture give us a sustained competitive advantage. To accelerate ecosystem development, we are focusing on getting APU in the hands of key partners in the military, hyperscalers, and academia. Their real-world deployment and libraries will showcase the benefits, expand use cases, and support our go-to-market capabilities.

One example of this strategy is helping us promote and monetize Gemini-I, is a recently published research paper from Cornell University. We are pleased to announce that the Cornell paper demonstrates our APU One... I'm sorry, our Gemini-I APU's unique performance benefits for genomic applications. Leveraging the APU's massively parallel in-memory architecture, Cornell researchers showed up to six times faster DNA sequencing filtering compared to a 16-core CPU. This showcases our technology's advantage for data-intensive workloads requiring rapid, low-precision comparisons. The study also reveals strong potential to accelerate other applications with similar data matching needs, including medical data analysis, search, security, and more. With simple scaling, our APU can be packed into cost-effective, high-density servers to multiply this performance for real-world deployments that can lower power budgets for hyperscalers compared to GPU solutions.

These results enforce, I'm sorry, reinforce our significant market opportunities across sectors that rely on efficiently finding patterns and similarities within massive datasets. We remain focused on delivering the game-changing in-memory compute performance to customers across multiple industries. As Lee-Lean mentioned, we anticipate receiving first silicon devices of Gemini-II in February. After initial evaluation and debugging, we will target a second spin this summer and initiate benchmarking shortly after. Our $2.3 million in SBIR funding will support this development. As a reminder, this includes our recently announced second SBIR Phase II $1.1 million contract to create specialized algorithms for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. The target applications include in-craft applications such as search and rescue, object detection, moving target indication, change detection, and SSIM in GPS-absent situations.

GSI will also develop algorithms using data from the U.S. Space Force to showcase the performance benefits of its compute-in-memory APU Two integrated circuit. In summary, the versatility of architecture, hands-on customer engagements, and ecosystem partnerships gives us, gives us confidence in our market opportunity. We have a robust product roadmap to deliver continuous innovations that we believe will capitalize APU adoption across multiple industries in the coming years. Let me switch now to customer and, and product breakdown for the Q3. In the Q3 of fiscal 2024, sales to Nokia were $807,000, or 15.2% of net revenues, compared to $1.3 million, or 20% of net revenues in the same period a year ago, and $1.2 million, or 20.3% of revenues in the prior quarter.

Military defense sales were 28.2% of Q3 shipments, compared to 26.2% of shipments in the comparable period a year ago, and 34.8% of shipments in the prior quarter. SigmaQuad sales were 46.9% of Q3 shipments, compared to 45.2% in the Q3 of fiscal 2023 and 55.8% in the prior quarter. On one last note, on product sales in the Q3, we shipped over $600,000 of a prototype radiation-hardened SRAM to two different customers. These will be deployed in two separate satellite programs. I'd like to hand the call over to Doug. Doug, go ahead, please.

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

Thank you, Didier. We reported net loss of $6.6 million, or $0.26 per diluted share on net revenues of $5.3 million for the Q3 of fiscal 2024, compared to net losses of $4.8 million or $0.20 per diluted share on net revenues of $6.4 million for the Q3 of fiscal 2023 and a net loss of $4.1 million, or $0.16 per diluted share on net revenues of $5.7 million in the Q2 of fiscal 2024. Gross margin was 55.9%, compared to 57.5% in the prior period and 54.7% in the preceding Q2. The changes in gross margin were primarily due to changes in product mix and volume sold in the three periods.

Total operating expenses in the Q3 of fiscal 2024 were $9.7 million, compared to $8.5 million in the Q3 of fiscal 2023, and $7.2 million in the prior quarter. Research and development expenses were $7 million, compared to $5.5 million in the prior year period and $4.7 million in the prior quarter. Selling, general and administrative expenses were $2.7 million in the quarter ended December 31, 2023, compared to $3 million in the prior quarter and $2.5 million in the previous quarter. Q3 fiscal 2024 operating loss was $6.7 million, compared to $4.8 million in the prior year period, and an operating loss of $4.1 million in the prior quarter.

Q3 fiscal 2024 net loss included net interest and other income of $155,000 and a tax provision of $71,000, compared to net interest and other income of $61,000 and a tax provision of $84,000 for the same period a year ago. In the preceding Q2, net loss included net interest and other income of $71,000 and a tax provision of $33,000. Total Q3 pre-tax stock-based compensation expense was $649,000, compared to $655,000 in the comparable quarter a year ago, and $676,000 in the prior quarter.

On December 31, 2023, we had $21.6 million in cash and cash equivalents, compared to $30.6 million in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments at March 31, 2023. Working capital was $23.1 million as of December 31, 2023, versus $34.7 million at March 31, 2023. With no debt, stockholders' equity as of December 31 was $39.6 million, compared to $51.4 million as of the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023. For the Q4 of fiscal 2024, we anticipate net revenues in a range of $4.8-$5.4 million, with gross margin of approximately 55%-57%. Operator, at this point, we'd like to open the call to Q&A.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. We will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star key. One moment, please, while we pull for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Brett Reiss with Janney Montgomery Scott. Please proceed with your question.

Brett Reiss (VP)

Hi, gentlemen. You can talk to me like I'm six years old. Could you just explain what, what is in an infrequent $2.4 million charge for a pre-production mask? Yeah, I'm not an engineer. Just if you can give me, you know, some more clarity on that.

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

Yeah. So, every time we have a product, we have to have a mask set prepared to run in the fab to manufacture the wafers. Now, typically, when we incur charges for mask set for production product, we will capitalize that into prepaids and amortize it over a 12-month period. However, the one exception to that is when we have a mask set prepared on a new process technology that we've never run before, we'll charge that expense to R&D expense. So in this quarter, well, last quarter, we taped out Gemini 2 on a process technology we've never used. It's a 16-nanometer process at TSMC. Now, since we've never used that process before, we charged that $2.4 million to R&D expense.

Brett Reiss (VP)

All right, so this is one shot. It's not gonna be recurring?

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

No, no, no. It will recur in the future when we have another product that tapes out on a process technology that we've never used before... So it's infrequent.

Brett Reiss (VP)

Okay.

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

It doesn't happen every year. It's at most every two or three years.

Brett Reiss (VP)

Okay. Okay. You know, the cash, which was my margin of safety in my investment here, you know, keeps dwindling down. You know, I'm a little concerned about that. You know, some of these initiatives with bringing in other joint venture partners, what's the timetable on that, and how long do we have, you know, you know, before we burn through the remaining cash?

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

Well, you know, we're currently looking at various opportunities, and Didier mentioned talking to hyperscalers and others, you know, to come out with our next product, that's gonna require significant investment. So we're looking for partners or other sources of funding. In addition to that, we have a building that that's we own, that that's worth quite a bit of money, and we'll be looking into potentially selling that building in the near future.

Brett Reiss (VP)

Right. What is the building appraised at? And, you know, in a base case scenario, what do you think you could sell it for?

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

We think we could probably get somewhere in the range of $10-$13 million.

Brett Reiss (VP)

Right.

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

And there's-

Brett Reiss (VP)

Right

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

... no debt tied to that. It's fully paid for.

Brett Reiss (VP)

Right. Right. Could you just give me a, you know, broad outlines of what the structure of a joint venture partners, capital, investment in, GSIT would take? You know, would they pay an upfront milestone payment, you know, with other payments to follow? Would it be an equity investment? What do you think the structure of that would look like?

Didier Lasserre (VP of Sales)

It could be either of those. What I mean is, when Lee-Lean was talking about a partner for funding the next program, that's specifically for Gemini-III. Gemini-II was fully funded internally. But for Gemini-III, we are looking for a partner for that, you know, most likely a customer funding partner. But aside from that, that would be more of an NRE type of funding, so there would be milestones associated with that. But aside from that, we are also open to equity investments in the company as well.

Brett Reiss (VP)

Okay, I'll drop back in queue. Thanks for taking my questions.

Douglas Schirle (CFO)

Thank you.

Didier Lasserre (VP of Sales)

Thanks, Brett.

Operator (participant)

As a reminder, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one. Our next question is from Jeff Bernstein with Silverberg Bernstein Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Jeffrey Bernstein (Founder and Principal)

Yeah. Hi, good afternoon. So, just a question on the-- and congratulations on placing those rad hard SRAM parts for evaluation. If you were to win those programs, about how much revenue and over what time period might you be able to gain from those two satellite programs?

Didier Lasserre (VP of Sales)

Sure. So, one of the programs was—and again, this is just a prototype quantity for demonstration purposes. One of them was just over 500,000, and the other one was about 150,000, and it totaled 41 parts that we shipped. So you can, you know, do quick calculation what the ASPs are on those. And so those are just the again, prototype quantities. So obviously, you can multiply by something. We don't have the quantities yet. These are programs that they're looking to launch within the next year, and so it'd be some time second half of 2025, at the soonest, before they release production.

But certainly, it would be north, you know, if the prototype is $500,000, you can imagine what a production might be.

Jeffrey Bernstein (Founder and Principal)

So these would be like GEO satellites. So these aren't satellite networks. These are gonna be individual, larger satellites.

Didier Lasserre (VP of Sales)

So, these ones are x. One is GEO, one is actually LEO.

Jeffrey Bernstein (Founder and Principal)

Okay. And will you get an automatic with these evaluation parts, are you gonna get a ride into space on one of these and actually get, you know, sort of provenance from that, or are we still looking to get that somewhere else?

Didier Lasserre (VP of Sales)

Yeah, no. So certainly we have, as we've spoken in the past, we have other prototype devices we've shipped out already in the last couple of years, and so it's- it could be any of the programs we've said in the past or these two. One of these looks like is fairly accelerated in their timetable. So there's a chance one of the ones we just shipped this last quarter could get up fairly quickly.

Jeffrey Bernstein (Founder and Principal)

Okay. And then, just on Nokia, lowest revenue from them in, in, forever. You know, what's the story on, on Nokia and the outlook for that, that router that you sell into?

Didier Lasserre (VP of Sales)

So the their contract manufacturers, because, you know, we send these parts to two separate contract manufacturers, and they were both had a little bit of inventory, so they were burning through some inventory. As far as the we get, I think we've talked in the past, a 12-month rolling forecast from Nokia, and those still are coming in around the run rate we've been seeing for the last couple of quarters. So just a little bit north of what we did this past quarter, you know, somewhere in the $1-$1.1 million kind of range a quarter.

Jeffrey Bernstein (Founder and Principal)

Okay. At Needham, I think you also mentioned, in addition to looking for a partner, potentially a financial partner, potentially a development partner, possibly a hybrid of both of those, for Gemini-III. I think you also mentioned something about potentially licensing IP. It sounds like for what would probably be an edge kind of case for semiconductor IP, for doing in-process, in-memory processing. Can you just talk about that? Would that be sort of an upfront license and then royalty stream, or just give some color around that?

Lee-Lean Shu (Chairman, President and CEO)

Yeah, the IP, well, we are more focused on the Gemini-III, so it could be IP or it could be the product development for the customer. So, basically, I think we have, as we mentioned in the conference call, I mean, we make pretty good progress over the quarter. So yeah, so it's still, we're still working on it.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the call back to Lee-Lean Shu for any closing comments.

Lee-Lean Shu (Chairman, President and CEO)

Thank you all for joining us. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report our Q4 and the full year fiscal 2024 results.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.