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Earnings Call: Q2 2018

Jul 12, 2018

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Welcome to Nordic Semiconductor second quarter 2018 numbers presentation. Today, I will do a quick business update. Pål Elstad, as usual, will do the financials, then I will go back and do an outlook for our business for the rest of the year. This was a record quarter when it comes to revenue. We had a total revenue of $71.2 million. This is new all-time high. It is a 21.3% growth year-on-year. We grew 45.2% year-on-year in Bluetooth. Strong growth in Bluetooth, and obviously, Bluetooth is what is bringing Nordic forward currently. We see a strong revenue from both consumer and non-consumer. We have been predominantly, if you look back a couple of years, consumer-oriented. Now we see that the non-consumer business is picking up. When it comes to profitability, we are now seeing that we are on track to meet the improved profitability target that we had for 2018.

We had $10 million EBITDA. Good. It is 25% up from last year, we compare quarter-to-quarter. Our gross margin, we are at 49%. It is a bit higher than maybe some of our analysts expected, but we had a good mix of favorable products and customers last quarter. The important thing is that we still keep a strong cost discipline, and at the same time, we are building up our organization to become even stronger. It has been a good quarter through all parameters, we believe. Revenue, $71.2 million. Bluetooth revenue, $52.3 million. Solid number. Proprietary. It basically are very seasonal and based on a couple of customers, so it varies quarter-to-quarter. We do not have a broad customer base that is contributing to volume in Proprietary. Gross margin at 49% is 2.3 percentage points up from last year the same quarter, and still up from the previous quarter.

As I said, a very strong EBITDA of 25.2% growth quarter-on-quarter. If you add up what the first half did for Nordic, we ended at $131.3 million. It is in the high end of our guidance range. Bluetooth, we said 40%-50%, we ended at 50.2% growth for the first half. Gross margin, we are also up in the higher end of what we did forecast. Obviously, Bluetooth drives the growth. Looking at this foil here, you will see that it constitutes 73% of our revenue is now originating from Bluetooth. We have also been working on diversifying our revenue to spread over more customers. If you look to the same quarter last year, we have been going from 40% on top 10 to 31% top 10. I think this picture will change a bit going forward, and we can discuss the reasoning a little bit later.

Customer base, we had a 25% increase in customers year-on-year. 25% growth in customers. Here you see how it is split between consumer and non-consumer revenue. We are, as you see here, above 43% revenue from non-consumer. This is completely different from if you look two years, three years back. We give a lot of appraisal to non-consumer customers because it is a more stable customer base and more predictable customer base. Thirdly, but not the least significant, it is also a longer lifetime usually on products for non-consumers. If you split it, our revenue then into the market, consumer electronics, $28.2 million, is up 19% year-on-year, and it is also up 19.6% quarter-on-quarter. These are correct numbers. It just happened to be equal. Wearables, $11.9 million, up 36.6% year-on-year, 16.3% quarter-on-quarter.

Retail and building is down 17.8% year-over-year, it's up 12.6% quarter-over-quarter. We had a large customer that sort of is missing, compared to last year. It's a product that was seasonal. We see that despite that it was lower year-over-year, we had a strong growth quarter-over-quarter, which is important for us. Healthcare looks strong when you look year-over-year, 115% up. Quarter-over-quarter, 14%. That's again a sector or a market which we're going to see getting larger as we are progressing quarter-over-quarter. We have a big lump of others, which grew very strong. You see the diversification of our business is strong. I usually show some products. Here you see some new Nordic Power products that we have announced this quarter. This is only press release product.

We have some other ones in there, which unfortunately we can't show you. Dexatek is a router for smart home. Shenzhen DO Wearables you saw. Wearables is growing. We get new customers in wearables. A smart thermostat for smart home. I think that's a segment you're going to see Nordic getting stronger in. Smart home is using different protocols. Nordic can support any protocol. This is a Bluetooth, by the way. Swiss Connect, they're making a smartwatch platform. If anyone here want to build a smartwatch, you can basically buy the concept from Swiss Connect and put your own branding, your own plastic, whatever you want to do and have your own watch. On the first design that we have showed publicly here is with Samsung, a smart door lock. Anyone here heard about the IoT lab we have in the U.S.?

Now we launched a product, nRF Connect for Cloud. Basically, we host the cloud service at Amazon, and we make our own gateways both for iOS and Android. Currently, it support all our Bluetooth business, all our Bluetooth parts, and will very soon support all our LTE products. This is the early adopter of new technology, and we are proud to announce that we do have something that works straight out of the box. If you guys want one, go to the website and test it. It's good. We had a private placement some weeks back. We are not lazy, we sit now and putting this private placement to work. We expand our test facilities in Norway and Finland. We do characterization and product test development. Why do we do this? That's the most important thing. We will shorten time to high volume.

We will shorten time to high yield. By implementing these facilities, we achieve so. We're doing a FA lab. Why do we do this? We have new tier 1 customers that have even higher expectation from the vendors. We fulfill those expectations. This will also help us shorten time to volume production. On the right-hand side here, we have a cellular test lab. Important thing is to accelerate compliance and certification approvals. Basically, now we can do that in our own lab. Since we have this equipment in, it makes time to market faster, and it's easier for different regional rollouts because we already done the test. Obviously, it also ensure us a reliable and a robust cellular connectivity. This is the first installment of this placement. Now I hand over to Pål, which go through the financials.

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

Thank you. Thank you, Svenn-Tore. I will now go through the financials for the quarter. As normal, I will start with the operating model performance. As you all know, we are continuing to invest in the company to secure growth in the future and to capture the growth opportunities we have today. As you see on the bottom, we do see some leverage coming in due to higher revenue in the quarter. These numbers are not adjusted for capitalization, so they're not the cash costs. I'll come back to them later. As Svenn-Tore mentioned, we had a good 21% growth in revenue over the quarter. Compared to the same period last year, it's a 10 percentage points increase. A gross margin of 49%, which is on the higher end of our guidance. We saw a bottom around this time last year with 46.7%.

The 2.3 percentage points increase comes as yield improvements, mainly on the nRF52. Back in 2017, we had very good demand for the nRF52. However, the yield was not been running, so we served our customers. Today the yield is more on track. We have also depleted all the old wafers we had on this product. We will see improvements there. Total OpEx for the period is 35% of revenue, which is a slight increase from previous periods as we are continuing to invest. The underlying number this quarter is $24.9 million, up from $19.4 last year. You will here see that there is a shift between costs per revenue in short range versus the cellular IoT. This relates more to how we capitalize the internally developed R&D on our projects. Previously, it was mainly the nRF52 high-end products that were in the commercialization phase.

These products are up and running in mass production, so we've stopped capitalizing on them. However, on the cellular IoT, our nRF91, we are now in the end of the commercialization phase, so we've increased capitalization there. On the nRF91, we've capitalized $3.4 million this year, versus very little a year ago. That's why you see the shift in the R&D. However, if I look at the underlying spending for the cellular IoT, it was $6.8 million compared to just over $6 million last month. We haven't added much people there, so the increase is mainly related to more costs related to tape outs, adding silicon from the foundries. Finally, on SG&A, we are growing our organization to scale and manage the future growth of the company. This quarter, we've spent 14.9% of revenue versus 13.1% last year.

In pure numbers, we went from $7.7 million to $10.6 million. As I mentioned, we have a small operational leverage, so our EBITDA margin is now 14% versus 13.6% a year ago. We do have seasonal variations on both revenue but also on cost, we also like to show the trailing 12-month spending. In total, this year, we've spent 37.7% out of revenue on OpEx, just a slight increase from the previous periods. Both R&D and SG&A are more in level with historical periods. Of course, R&D, as I said, is impacted by no revenue on the cellular IoT. You will see the R&D number going down when we get revenue from cellular. Gross margins at 49%, which is on the upper end of our guidance.

As I said before, during Q2, we did see a continued expansion in the gross margins from the bottom we had a year ago. Yield is now very close to our targets, and wafer costing is coming down. We commented in Q1 that during Q1, we had very favorable customer and product mix, and that we would see some variations on that in Q2. We haven't really seen that, so we have the same favorable mix. This will fluctuate from quarter to quarter. We are at the top end of our long-term short-range products guiding on gross margin, which is between 48%-50%. We do see good cost improvements, so during the next two quarters, we still expect to see 50% margin within a quarter. I'll now turn to the cash OpEx.

Cash OpEx is adjusted for the capitalization we do, which was at $3.6 million this quarter. OpEx increased by 34.5% year-over-year. This is partly driven by more employees. Last year, we had 564 employees. This year, we ended the quarter at 629 employees. Of course, that's an increase of 12%. The reason there's a big difference between the underlying and the reported is, of course, that we have a negative effect on FX compared to last year, and also it's the mix of employees we get in this year versus last year. You also see that other OpEx has increased from $6.7 million to $9.5 million. This relates a lot to the tape outs of the silicon I mentioned before on R&D spending. Compared to last quarter, we do see that even if we're growing the company, we are managing our costs closely.

OpEx is more or less at the same level as last quarter. We've increased people. We also have a positive effect of salaries during the summer period. Finally, I'm going to go through cash flow. We have definitely strengthened our financial position during the quarter with the capital raise we did on the 25th of April at 50 NOK. I've split the presentation in two. This is first showing the effects of the business, and then the rest is the financing effects. In total, we had a negative cash flow of $4.1 million during the quarter. Normally, you do see a negative cash flow in the second quarter due to the buildup of revenue in the two mid-months of the year.

Underlying the net working capital is more or less at the same level as it was previous month, which is good, which when we would've expected a small increase. Compared to a year ago, net working capital in percent of revenue was 35%. We've managed to get it down from 35%-26%. This is mainly due to a very tight follow-up and diligent follow-up of our customer base in Asia. We've been able to keep our accounts receivable balances down even though we're growing the company a lot. We did a capital increase in April with net proceeds of NOK 790 million , close to $99 million. We did a repayment of debt of $20 million during the quarter, so we end the quarter at $107 million.

This $107 million, Svenn-Tore Larsen mentioned the basis for. Then we will also discuss more on the working capital buildup and Tier 1 engagement requirements with this money. The cash is kept in US dollars, mainly in order to reduce the currency exposure on this company, as we do mainly have our business in US dollars. Okay. Svenn-Tore Larsen, I'll hand over to you.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Thank you. Let's look forward. We start with the guidance straight away. We expect revenue to come in around $150 million-$160 million for the second half of this year. If we meet the midpoint, it means a growth about 20%, 21% to be correct for the whole year. We expect Bluetooth still to be the driver for 2018. We have looked at the growth rates and 30%-40% we are pretty proud to present. We've seen some other analysts out there predicting higher. We don't get that to match, but I think we take market share when we go 30%-40% growth. Gross margins, as Pål Elstad said, we expect to be in the upper range of the 48%-50%. Obviously we should hit the 50% target during one of the two remaining quarters. Backlog, solid backlog, NOK 80.1.

22.7% growth year-on-year is basically on par with quarter-on-quarter. It's a healthy distribution over Q3 and Q4. It's a good product mix and customer mix we see in the current backlog. We are going to maintain or capture more market share in Bluetooth. That's our goal. We're going to show you a slide later on that say this is actually happening. We see strong growth from the nRF52840. For those of you that don't know the nRF52840, this is the high-end product from Nordic. It's the one that support multiple protocols. We are going to see contribution from Thread protocol design wins in second half. We are still going to see consumer and non-consumer markets grow.

It's not that one is taking over for the other, but we see that the need for more advanced Bluetooth chips in industrial is higher than we see in consumer. It really proves the task we set out for some years back when we said we are not going to be in the ultra-low-cost segment of Bluetooth Smart. We're going to be up in the right corner where we bring value. Most customers need these features that we have implemented in the nRF52840 if they're going to do anything smart, for example, in smart home and other application segments. I have to give strong recognition to the guys internally that push this product so hard. Every half year we show our kit shipment. This half, my first mail regarding question about shipments for kits says around 30,000, but it was saying 30 million.

I thought, "No, that cannot be correct." Even 30,000 kits is a great sales. We see that it's a significant contribution from our advanced parts. What does advanced part means when we talk revenue? It means higher ASP. It's a leading indicator for market growth, and it also shows our position in this market. We have an attractive and competitive solution. Why do I dare to state that? Because this is a third-party slide showing that Nordic get more certifications this quarter than previous quarter. We continue to win designs. It's a 30% increase year-on-year, 23% increase quarter-on-quarter. Strong. We are pleased to see that. We knew it's going to look like this, but it's always nice to see it when third-party put this together. The most important thing, what have you guys invested in? I would like to show you.

Here is a beautiful model from Qorvo. They've done world-class engineering, and there is a world-class radio inside this module. This is the Ultraship module. Send this around. We have production silicon in-house. It's feature complete, it's power and performance optimized, and all testing, characterization, and certifications are in progress. Quite a few of our competitors had the impression that we were lagging behind them, and I'll show you later on, we're not lagging behind anyone. We've done our first NB-IoT trials at several networks in Europe. We are getting ready with the production silicon to lead customers. We have got design wins on the beta module. Our beta module has had advantages over production modules from competing solutions customer. I don't feel that we are trailing behind any competition anymore. The feature and readiness for deployment is there.

We have a challenge level of integration, power, and ease of use. I will show you some example later on. We delivered 30 new lead customers in Q2. Diversified set of customers. We diversify the customers in large customers and early adopters and fast- to- marketer. That's why we call it a mix of big and fast. We have objective to ship more than 100 customers these parts throughout the year. We see now demand for the first production quantities end of this year. Now we see it. We have forecast it will happen. It's a different view from forecasting to actually seeing. We have the first design win secured. It's a European customer in asset tracking. As I said, we switch from a competing solution they've been struggling with. We are not lagging behind any other competitors in LTE modules.

We will start general availability in Q4. Our priority now is to secure our lead customers to get into volume ramp. This is number one priority. We're going to be successful on that. I talked about first IoT design win, a significant milestone. Less than four years after we started this project, four years after I went to the board and said, "I need to spend a lot of money the next coming years," now we see customers putting these beautiful modules onto their PCB. It demonstrates our ability to compete, power, performance, integration. If you look at our integration, our customers love it, and it's easy to use. We get trust when we do demonstration of these products now. Customers can see it. What is the best customer for Nordic? It's a guy that has been struggling with his previous experience with LTE.

Make it easy has always been the mantra for Nordic. Now we see it pays off. We have a strong pipeline of opportunities for more design win. We are on track with objectives for cellular IoT. We're doing a strategic cooperation with Q-Free, a Norwegian company based in Trondheim. Well, almost like Nordic, a Norwegian company based in Trondheim. They're doing smart parking, reduced time to park in urban areas. This is basically a project that I have to dig into the ground. I don't want to dig it out every two months. I want to ensure it can be there for a long time, that it has low power consumption. Agree? This is a NB-IoT. Some of you might think that Nordic has been lagging behind on Narrowband IoT. We've been focusing too much on LTE-M. This is based on Narrowband IoT.

Q-Free selected Nordic to enhance and to accelerate this smart parking project. Ultra-low power performance and features was really the key. We're proud of cooperating with Q-Free. We think the product idea is great. It's a great company to work together with. Their objective is to have the first deployment end of 2019. They have ongoing pilots with license-free solutions today. There's a strong interest and support from operators on the cellular solution. This just shows that existing LTE customers are understanding the value of the Nordic module, the beautiful module that's running around here. I need to get it back, by the way. We are on track for a strong 2018. We met the provided guidance range. Revenue was up driven by 50.2% year-on-year growth on Bluetooth. EBITDA margin went up with 31%. Our gross margin expanded 2.3 year-on-year.

We were pretty depressed a year ago when we saw and had to show you a 47% margin. That's not where Nordic want to be. Also sometimes that's the effect when you want to get a early adoption in the market. We are very proud of that strategy, because that's why we're winning a lot. We were early out there and supported customer, despite that we had some yield issues in the beginning. Full year outlook, continued growth. We are on track to meet our objective. That means that we should grow around 20% year-on-year. If nothing really bad happens, we're on track to meet profitability. We are expanding and expect to be shipping to 100 customers or more on the Ultra project.

I think you will see that we have a continuous design win momentum, both on Bluetooth. In a year's time, most probably we start tracking the LTE design wins. We're looking forward to start that exercise. I think we go to any questions. Pål.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Thank you. Christopher here from DNB. If you could just start with the design win with Q-Free. I understand that this was initially something that they worked with u-blox on. Does this mean that you have replaced u-blox in this project?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

I can't detail answer about Q-Free, but I think you can ask them. They have a presentation later this week.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Secondly, on the design wins. This is Q-Free and an additional design win for asset tracking? There's two design wins on LTE.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Absolutely. Q-Free is not the first design win. The first design win is the asset tracking.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Okay. Previously, I understand that you said that for 2019, you expect to have multiple customers who can demand more than a few hundred thousand units per customer per year. Are these design wins those kind of customers? Can you also elaborate on what kind of asset tracking solution this is?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

I think these two are specific examples. Some of the other design wins we have, some might be in the fast, early to market, and some are obviously in the big category since we have this split of big and fast.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Rounding off for me. On the profitability improvement that you aim for year-over-year, is the profitability improvement we've been seeing so far this year what we should expect for the first year, or is it a bit lower or better in terms of the margin?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

What we see is that when you do produce semiconductors, you do always have a wafer bank, and it depends on when you produced your wafers and when you used the wafers. The same product will basically take advantage when you get into the new production batch with maybe lower cost and even better yield. It will be a continuous until you sort of empty out the old die bank.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Thinking on the EBITDA margin.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

That will absolutely make our gross margin better and improve EBITDA.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Yeah, sure. Thank you.

Andreas Bertheussen
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

Andreas Bertheussen, Kepler Cheuvreux. Two questions from me. I see that you're working on certifications with the European carriers. Previously you have alluded to perhaps moving firstly to the U.S., North American market. Has this strategy changed during the last 6 months?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

It's not changed at all. We are working with the U.S. operators, but we have got some European customers that are accelerating, and we are working pretty heavily to enable them to be able to roll out, but it's nothing changing our strategy.

Andreas Bertheussen
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

Okay. Secondly, can you tell us a little bit about what sort of subscription prices, we are seeing in the Nordics in terms of what the carriers are charging per year-

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

No.

Andreas Bertheussen
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

-for Q-Free?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

No.

Andreas Bertheussen
Analyst, Kepler Cheuvreux

Thanks.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Yes. Aksel from ABG. Svenn-Tore, you mentioned during the presentation that there were a couple of different reasons for the higher diversification in the Bluetooth sales among the top 10 customers. Could you give some more color on those reasons?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

What you see if you look at our market segments, they've been pretty stable for a long time. If you look to the last one called others, that's increasing heavily. That is product that doesn't fit into any of these other segments that we define.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Yeah. You would say that it's the other category and higher share of module sales that is

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Module is part of it, there is also other segments that are contributing to revenue, which we don't manage to fit into existing market segment.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Okay. Second question. You cited that the uptick in gross margin is among other driven by yield on the nRF52 Series. Previously you have said that you are still shipping most of your Bluetooth chips on the nRF51 Series. Can you give us an updated view on the split between nRF51 and nRF52?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

I can do, it's basically two questions in one here. The first one is that it's not only yield that improves margin. It's also, if you look at the consumer versus non-consumer, as long as non-consumer is growing, that will also contribute a bit. When it comes to the split between nRF51 and nRF52, forward looking, you will see most probably nRF52 will cross over and be the biggest. Maybe I should get some help from Geir here, I would anticipate end of this year, beginning of next. He agrees with me?

Geir Langeland
EVP Sales and Marketing, Nordic Semiconductor

Yeah.

Yeah.

We also see that on the design wins. We show it's mainly the nRF52 that's coming in now, although there's still some traction on the nRF51, especially in healthcare.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Yeah. A follow-up question on the gross margin, because you say that you expect to hit the 50% threshold in at least one of the quarters in H2, you also say that you have a good and favorable product mix for Q-Free. Coupling those two together, it sort of implies that you expected 50% in Q-Free. Is that correct reasoning?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

That's your job, I think you're doing a good reasoning. We are sticking to our guidance.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Yeah. Next question on big and fast. I understood the general split, but can you give us some more detail on the parameters that puts one in the fast and one in the quick?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Yeah. It's big and fast, the one that there is some very large customers that need attention, we are following the large customers very closely, despite that might not be in production end of 2018. We also would like to get revenue end of 2018. We put efforts on smaller opportunities that will be faster into the market.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Yeah. How slow will a large customer be in terms of time to market?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

It's a definition of slow.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Yeah.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

I think it depends on how complex if the infrastructure of these large companies' end product. If you have a simple product that just needs to be connected to the network.

It doesn't need such a big infrastructure. If you have a complex customer with a relatively complex infrastructure, it could take maybe a year or two to get all pieces together.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

One final one on the cost related to the cellular business. You had a cash cost of $6.8 million in the quarter.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Yeah.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

We have seen the cash cost come up and the capitalization of the cellular cost also come up related to you being closer to commercialization.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Yeah.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Is this sort of the level we should expect on cash cost related to cellular also in Q-Free?

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

Yeah.

I think it was, as I mentioned, it was pretty high cost on tape-outs and sort of getting the product ready during this quarter.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Yeah.

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

We've added some people, but not a large amount of people. I guess between this and last quarter, it will vary a little bit depending on the tape-outs when they come in the quarter.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Yeah. For the couple of next quarters.

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

We're not adding on a lot of people, for example, now.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

Okay.

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

This will vary based on external. Yeah.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

I would like to add something to the comments. We do all the cost out of Finland as LTE cost. There is actually ongoing quite a bit of Bluetooth work in Finland. We do work where we have resources, and we have resources and availability of resources in Finland.

We might continue to add more people in Finland.

We want to employ the guys that can bring Nordic forward, and we don't care so much where they are placed.

Aksel
Analyst, ABG

I see. Okay, thank you. That's all for me.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

That's it for me.

Fredrik Stensrud
Analyst, Pareto Securities

Fredrik Stensrud from Pareto Securities. Solid 49% gross margin in Q2. At the Q1 presentation, you urged some caution with regards to expecting lower gross margin in Q2 versus Q1. Does this mean that you saw an increasing trend on gross margin during the quarter and maybe it was even close to 50% in June coming out of the quarter?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

I think we stuck to the guidance, again, you're reasonable in your thinking.

Fredrik Stensrud
Analyst, Pareto Securities

Okay. On our proprietary revenue was down 18% in this quarter, and I think implicit in your guidance, it's down some 20%-25% in the second half. Is this a bigger decline maybe than you have indicated earlier? Can you elaborate a bit on that?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

It's very difficult for us because we don't have, as I said, too many customers contributing with volume in proprietary at the moment.

Fredrik Stensrud
Analyst, Pareto Securities

Yes.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

What we see is that it's seasonal, and some of the customers have a good quarter, and other had an average quarter, I don't think your number is what we're going to end up at. I don't think we end up at a 25% down.

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

We've said around 10%, I think we said a year ago, and I think your numbers are more below the 20% you indicated.

Fredrik Stensrud
Analyst, Pareto Securities

Okay.

Just on guiding for H2. Is there any cellular revenue included in that guidance?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

We have a goal of having some cellular revenue in H2, but it's not at the size that it should-

Fredrik Stensrud
Analyst, Pareto Securities

It matters.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

sort of matter. It's just that it shows that we are starting to get customers to pay for these products.

Fredrik Stensrud
Analyst, Pareto Securities

Last one from me for me. The first year after inaugural Bluetooth year, you had NOK 20 million of revenue. You think that's a good proxy for 2019 on cellular?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

We haven't start budgeting for 2019 yet. We looked at opportunities, I will respond to you when we have gone through the opportunities.

Fredrik Stensrud
Analyst, Pareto Securities

Okay. Thank you.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Christopher from DNB again. You said that you expect to see low or some more activity towards tier 1 customers going forward. Does this mean that you will see pressure on the gross margin in 2019?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Obviously, volume is an important parameter when it come down to price on semiconductors. Remember that volume sales from Nordic Semiconductor also mean volume purchase to our vendors. The important thing there is to get that balance correctly. Let me come back to you when we have done negotiations at both sides.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Also moving into 2019, could you say something more about kind of how you expect to utilize the proceeds from the equity issue in terms of how should working capital move as you start to see revenues on LTE? Are there any other things that you will spend cash on?

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

CapEx, this year to date is $6 million or $7 million, more or less the same amount as last year. Up to now, we've mainly invested in software and in test equipment for the manufacturing. The test equipment we added this year was a test equipment that's at our vendors in Asia. We invested quite a lot on that in Q2 because we're adding more complex products, so we need more flexibility and capacity. Going forward, as Svenn-Tore mentioned, we'd need to increase the lab equipment, et cetera, for both our customers, but also to improve our yields. We haven't guided on how much that is, Svenn-Tore gave a flavor of what we're doing, but it will of course increase CapEx versus the historical, where we've been on average of $1 million a month. It will increase.

That's part of the use of the proceeds. The second part is, of course, the working capital buildup that we will get when we start manufacturing modules. The LTE business is based on modules produced by Qorvo, and that will require more working capital. When we make the budgets and when we present our guidance for the cellular business, it will be easier to see what number that ends up with. The 26% working capital ratio will definitely increase.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Thanks. Just lastly, you expect to see some revenues from Thread by the end of the year. Is this kind of like LTE, it's not meaningful, or is it more meaningful than the LTE? If you could kind of quantify that in some way.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

It has been in the works longer than LTE, and it's come longer, and will be more meaningful than LTE revenue.

Christopher
Analyst, DNB

Great. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 8

Just a quick question in terms of clarification. You mentioned that you had diversified your customer portfolio over the past year. Also you mentioned that might change slightly going forward in terms of opportunities. Could you elaborate somewhat in terms of those larger opportunities that are out there?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

On the large opportunities, I would love to do it, again, we can say that asset tracking is some of the leading applications we're working on. I stop there.

Speaker 8

Just quickly, do you see that next year we'll see significant rise in the kind of share of revenues coming from the top 10 customers? Is that what you tried to say earlier today?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

I think we're going to see some swing back that we'll have some larger customers that will skew the picture a bit.

Speaker 8

On Bluetooth or on LTE?

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Next year, Bluetooth.

Speaker 8

Bluetooth, yeah. Super. Thanks.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Great.

Pål Elstad
CFO, Nordic Semiconductor

Okay.

Svenn-Tore Larsen
CEO, Nordic Semiconductor

Thank you for coming on this beautiful day. Go back and enjoy the sun.