Welcome to the Nordic Semiconductor Q4 conference call. For the first part of this call, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the Q&A, please press five star on your telephone keypad. This call is being recorded. I'll now hand it over to Ståle, Head of IR. Please begin.
Thank you, Rasmus, and good morning, everyone. We are recording this presentation, and it will be available on our Nordic website under the IR section. On the IR section, you will also find the earnings press release, quarterly report, and the quarter presentation. Joining me today we have the CEO, Svenn-Tore Larsen, and CFO, Pål Elstad. They we'll be discussing our latest financial result, as well as review recent business activities. After the presentation, we will open up for Q&A. We will do both call in, and we will do the call-in questions first, and if anyone are writing in questions on the webcast, we will do that afterwards. As usual, the presentation contains forward-looking statements that involve risk and uncertainties. Actual results may difference materially from those expressed or implied in such statements.
We encourage you to review our full quarterly report for more information on the risk and uncertainties that may affect our business. Without further ado, I hand over to our CEO, Svenn-Tore Larsen.
Good morning, and welcome to our presentation for Q4 and full year figures for 2022. I'm Svenn-Tore Larsen, and with me, as always, I have my CFO Pål Elstad. We reported 12% revenue growth for Q4, which was within the guidance we provided. The development reflects a very turbulent environment with varying demand across technologies, verticals, geographies, and customer segments. In term of technology, Bluetooth revenue increased by 26% year-on-year, and obviously then you understand that the revenue from proprietary products and cellular IoT declined in the same quarter compared to 2021. Gross margin was around 53%, and this generated a flat gross profit of $101 million for the quarter.
We maintained the EBIT margin above 20% despite high R&D costs, and this is because we do have a strategy, we do have project with customers now that we are continuing to execute on. Our guiding for Q1 2023 is lower. Demand for legacy products, proprietary, and first generation of the 51 family is lower than expected, especially in consumer verticals. We had a strong PC sales previous quarters. We see that through after COVID, we basically see that this is softening. In terms of geographies, we see softer contribution from China due to both low allocation and weaker demand. At the same time, we remain in competition with the automotive industry for wafers for our 52 family and the 53 family.
This will also continue into Q1, that's a challenge for us, and hence we guided pretty low in Q1. This means that we're guiding for $140 million-$160 million for the first quarter. We believe this will be the low point in terms of revenue for 2023. Gross margins for Q1 are expected to be bigger or greater than 52%. As a final note on wafer supply situation, we are making investments to secure future supply. We need to do that because we have so many projects in pipeline. In Q1, we are making a pre-payment of $100 million for deliveries from 2024.
Our largest customer continuing to grow. They are maintaining a high demand despite what you see in the economy, because there's new projects coming out that never been basically in the market previously. We see that our concentration is getting higher, but we are rewarding their commitment and prioritizing allocation to their products. The top 10 customer share of Bluetooth revenue increased from 40% in 2021 to 44% in 2022. If you isolate Q4 only, where it was more than 50% of the top 10 customer were the tier-ones. As we are prioritizing some customer in a situation with scarce supply, this means that others have not been getting the volumes they wanted. The combination of overall scarce supply and lower demand in some markets means that we have seen a relatively lower sales in SMEs, in the broad market, and particularly in China.
Next slide. Weak sales to the domestic customers in China is really been difficult for us. We saw that the share of China used to be around 20%-25%. Currently, it's declined to less than 10% in Q4 2022. We also see the outlook for Q1 pretty weak. The pace of and the potency of a rebound in China is extremely important for us and is going to determine some of the outlook for the product demand going forward. As we talked about in 2022, we've been working much better to align the size of the order backlog to actually delivery capability. As you can see, we are getting close from Q3, reflects increased order consolidation, but also normalizing of lead times to our larger tier-one customers.
We have committed volume deliveries to these customers and have, at the same time, asked them to return to normal order patterns with shorter lead times, which has reduced the order backlog. Given the supply-demand imbalance through 2021 and 2022, it's clear that order backlog has not been a good indicator of neither real demand or future earnings. If you look at certification and market share, we are maintaining steady and high share of designs with around 40% share. As you can see, the overall numbers of design has been around 1,100-1,400 new design. Given the increased value of the total Bluetooth market, this is a indication that value per design is increasing. This really fits well with the trend of our own designs and sales, with more high-volume application for tier-one customers.
As we stated in our third quarter presentation, we saw that a tougher economic environment was creating a more uncertainty short-term outlook. Our project base continues to expand, but we see financial support for many of these medium-sized small customers, which are startups, has been a little bit slow, and a lot of these customer have not really get into production. But we believe they've been getting and are going to get into production with a cellular IoT project in the second half of this year. The outlook remains cautious also for the first quarter, but we expect to see growth return with increased sales and revenue later this year. We do show this slide every year, every quarter. New product launch in the quarter include both B luetooth-powered toys, such as Harry Potter Magic Wand.
It's a combination of the nRF52832 and our PMIC, the nPM1100. It really shows that we now are getting this adjacent component beside our radio into designs. Customers have also launched cellular IoT product, and we also here see that there is combination of both bluetooth and cellular IoT. We are pretty excited to see that the strategy that we put out in 2019, that we should combine both bluetooth and cellular, is actually working now. That gives us really good hope for the long-term strategy that we have. One market I know many of you have want to hear more about is the audio vertical, and I'm happy to report that we see good traction. We are engaging both with developers, design partners, and we have shipped more than 2,000 audio development kits, which is also a huge number.
We also are delivering parts today to products that are in the market, both in the hearing aid and in the headphones, microphones, and speakers. I'm also happy to report that we're now shipping our Wi-Fi 6 enabled, the nRF7002 development kit in volume through our distributors. The nRF7002 is a low power, very robust and secure companionship designed to be used alongside our Bluetooth family products, and can also be obviously working with our nRF91 Series cellular SiP. We showcase this in the first third-party Wi-Fi in CES in Las Vegas. We have seen strong interest in these development kits. Actually, we got 2,000 kits in here just before Christmas, and we have already shipped them out. Next. Moving on to power management, we are continuing to expand our portfolio.
We just added a new nPM1300 to the family. This is a powerful charging and a broader set of management features, and will enable us to take another part of the market and also will be able to increase the ASP a bit. This product will be out in volumes from mid-2023, adding to the rest of the family that's already in the market. As a final note, I'm glad to see that we are back on the road with our Nordic Tech Tours. After a couple of years where COVID made travel extremely difficult, we were able to visit 45 cities across U.S. and Europe with more than 1,700 customers attending. When you ask them, more than half of these are planning for a project to use Nordic.
If you look, focus on this year's Tech Tour was the new standard, the Matter standard. We spent quite a bit of time on cellular IoT and Wi-Fi, and these are new product lines that adding to our Bluetooth revenue. Well, we are really excited and looking forward now to help our customers to be successful with our new products based on new products with new standards. Exciting times for Nordic. I would like to hand over to Pål.
Thank you, Svenn-Tore. I'll now run through the financials for the fourth quarter of 2022. As Svenn-Tore mentioned, revenue increased 12% year-over-year in the quarter. For the full year 2022, we achieved a very strong 27% growth. Revenue came in at the lower end of our guided range. These top-line figures hide significant changes in the revenue composition over the course of the year in terms of both product technologies, customers, and geographies. At the back end of COVID in 2022 started a very strong in the consumer PC markets. During the year, our focus has shifted towards industrial and healthcare. Bluetooth revenue increased by 26% in the quarter and 33% for the full year. Growth is well above our previously communicated 20%-30% rates.
The growth in Q4 2022 reflected a combination of price increase and somewhat higher volumes. During 2022, we've also been able to increase the revenue and ASP from our high-end Bluetooth products. Compared to last quarter, Bluetooth revenue is down 4%, mainly as a result of lower ASP due to customer mix. As Svenn- Tore mentioned, proprietary product revenue declined by 56% in the quarter and by 10% for the full year. The 10% full year is more or less in line with previously communicated targets for proprietary. Proprietary is now just 10% of total revenue for the year. The decline mainly reflects lower demand for PC accessories and other home office equipment after a boost during COVID, as well as the technology migration to Bluetooth Low Energy.
The decline started early in the year. Revenue has relatively flat compared to last quarter. Cellular IoT revenue declined by 14% in the fourth quarter, although it increased by 49% for the full year and accounted for about 3% of total revenue in 2022. For new technologies like PMIC and Wi-Fi, we are seeing increased design in and will start reporting details when we have meaningful revenue in these technologies. Looking at sales from another perspective, in terms of end-use market, we see that growth within the consumer segment stalled in the quarter, whereas industrial and healthcare continue to grow at a reasonable healthy pace. However, consumers still are by far largest market with 57% of the total, although this is actually going down. It was 62% in last quarter.
Consumer is down 5% compared to last year and 14% compared to last quarter. As discussed earlier, this is a mix of reduced proprietary, low demand in China, and low demand among small and medium-sized customers. Industrial continues to be strong and is up 34% compared to last year and flat compared to last quarter. Industrial is now 27% of our total, and we see especially strong demand in the European market. Healthcare, with $22 million in Q4, shows strong growth both compared to last year and compared to last quarter. Turning to gross margin, we delivered a gross margin of 52.7% in Q4. This was lower than in Q4 2021. However, December, or Q4 2021 was very special, as we had large price increases and the supplier costs first came in or took effect until Q1.
We do not see the same effect this year. If we compare gross margins to last quarter's, the gross margin reduction is driven by mainly three factors. We took a write-down of some cellular inventory of $3 million, impacting gross margins by almost 2%. As commented by Svenn-Tore, revenue to our largest customers are exceptionally high, with above 50% in Q4. We also have very low proprietary revenue, and proprietary revenue has, over the later years, shown strong gross margins. On the positive side, we continue to sell more of our high-end Bluetooth products. Now I'm gonna turn to our operating model performance for Q4. Although revenue is at the low end of our expectations, we continue to deliver EBITDA margins for the group above 20%. If we just look at the short-range business, EBITDA margins is still around 30%.
Gross profits are the same as last year, but the reduction in EBITDA margins comes as a result of continued high investments. Although we see a reduced growth for Q4, we see an overall strong long-term demand for our products and continue to invest to capture this future growth. Total R&D is up from $40 million last year to $45 million this year, which is from 23.3% of revenue to just below 24% of revenue. SG&A is down this quarter, mainly as a result of operational leverage and also positive FX effects. Both R&D and SG&A have already been favorable, very favorably impacted by stronger USD compared to NOK and EUR. We continue to invest, we're of course monitoring the situation closely.
We are investing for growth. Total cash operating expenses amounted to $61 million in Q4 when adding back capitalized development expenses and deducting depreciation and equity-based compensation. This compares to $56 million in Q4 2021 and $55 million last quarter. The 9% increase is of course well below our revenue growth. $42 million relates to payroll expenses, only marginally higher than Q4 2021, despite the 21% increase in the number of employees. We're now above 1,450 employees in the group. This mainly reflects the favorable FX development, which have lowered the payroll measured in US dollars by about 6%, $6 million. Adjusted for the $6 million, salary expenses increased by 17% year-over-year. Other OpEx increased from $50 million in Q3 last year to $19 million this year.
The increase comes partly as Svenn-Tore, we're now much more on the road, selling the products, and we're also doing several tapeouts to be ready for the future. CapEx was $8.4 million in Q4, so slightly higher than what we've seen earlier in 2022. It mainly reflects investment in additional test capacity and IT infrastructure. CapEx intensity overall remains below the previously indicated level of around 4% of revenue. Finally, I'll go through the cash flow, cash position. We continue to see healthy cash flow and a strong cash position in the company. During Q4, we overall added $26 million to our cash balance and ended at $379 million at the end of December.
Operating cash flow was $36 million in Q4, mainly driven by a strong EBITDA, only partly offset by increased working capital. We did see, although, an increase in net working capital of $13 million, mainly driven by higher accounts receivables and inventory. Net working capital is now around 22% of revenue. As Svenn-Tore mentioned, during the first quarter 2023, Nordic will make a prepayment of $100 million related to ongoing initiatives to strengthen supply resilience and diversification. Svenn-Tore, I'll now hand over to you so you can run through the Q1 outlook.
Thank you, Pål. As you have understood, we have had mixed near-term outlook across different segments, even though we maintain our positive view on our long-term outlook. I mentioned that our large tier ones are taking a higher share of business, and we are continuing to see strong Bluetooth demands from these customers. However, players in the automotive industry continue to drive competition for the 55 nm wafers, and this has limited the shipment of our high revenue maker, the nRF52 Series and the nRF53 Series. We see weaker demand for our legacy products, the proprietary products, and the first generation of the nRF51 Series. We are also seeing a temporary slowdown for cellular IoT, which we expect to turn in the coming quarters.
Across verticals, we see that the consumer verticals are more exposed than the industrial. We see continue to see strong growth in healthcare applications. Obviously being a responsible company, we have decided to ship 100% to healthcare applications. As mentioned, we see generally low demand in China, where we now are rounding off the Chinese New Year. It remains to be see how demand will develop. The pace of rebound in China is one of the key question marks for 2023. Summing up, this means that we have to guide for a lower revenue. The revenue range we guide for is $140 million-$160 million for Q1. We're going to see a higher share of revenue from tier 1 customer. We expect the gross margin in Q1 to remain above 52%.
Nordic set up for a plan to reach $1 billion in a Capital Markets Day in 2019. We have stuck to that plan. We have delivered, and we also were so eager when we saw that we have more design wins than expected, so we pulled that forward one year. Unfortunately, we didn't manage that, but we did deliver on the promises we gave on the Capital Markets Day back in 2019. We have seen growth around 40% annually over the past three years, as you have heard today. We are now seeing a more uncertainly near-term outlook. We are slow start to 2023. We no longer can expect to meet the $1 billion goal already in 2023. We expect to be back to a run rate of $1 billion revenue in the second half of this year.
Our long-term growth ambition remain intact, we will continue to invest in R&D and organizational development to make sure we take the most of our growth opportunity. These long-term ambition build on assumption of continued economic growth and continued demand growth from both customers and consumers and industrials. This is in line with what our larger customers also indicate to us. Obviously, if we see a persisting negative macroeconomic development or major change in customer behavior, we will obviously adapt to that situation. We haven't seen that yet. We know this is a short-term bump. We have a capital-light model with fabless production, external distributors, and this leaves us with high flexibility to adapt to changes in the business environment if necessary. I would like to leave the microphone back to Ståle.
Thank you, Larsen. We will soon open up for Q&A. To accommodate as many as possible before the market opens, I would like to say to everyone that we take one question for everyone and a follow-up question if needed. We will start with the call-in first and then we will go over to the question asked in the webcast page. I hand it over to our operator to open up the Q&A.
Thank you, Ståle. If you have a question for the speakers, please press five star on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press five star again. We'll have a brief pause while questions are being registered. The first question is from Harry Blaiklock from UBS. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Hi. Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering, could you provide a bit of detail on what visibility you have on the recovery to the $1 billion run rate in H2? Yeah, it would just be useful to know what gives you confidence in that.
What we see is that we are bringing more new products to the market, and we also have major project at tier one customers, so what we need to get is more wafers. We have taken action to secure supply in 2024.
Got it. Okay. Just a quick follow-up if I could. On the wafer side, if you're seeing slowdown in some end markets or customers, how easy is it for you to shift that supply over to other customers? Say, if you're seeing weakness in amongst Chinese customers, shifting that to Europe where demand seems stronger?
Fortunately, we have different technologies, and the 55 nm wafers is the one that most new or all new applications are using, and those are the one that we have more shortage than the older technologies. It's just the mix of wafers available that make this additional extra difficult. It's been basically a slowdown in the older technologies.
Okay. Great. Thank you.
Thank you, Harry. Our next question will be from Christoffer from DNB. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Yeah. Good morning, and thanks for taking my question. I want to piggyback on the previous question in terms of the bridge from here to the billion run rate in the second half, which you didn't answer Svenn-Tore. Currently it seems that, you know, the guidance on midpoint of $160 million. I don't know, can you give some more on the mix there? Because this is basically what you had in revenues on a quarterly basis for the 55 nm-based product back in 2020, 2021. If we kind of factor in the price hikes that you guys have out in the market, it seems you're basically getting less wafers than you got in 2021.
How should we have any faith that you guys will get from that medical priority effictively?
I can put some color on Christoffer. I mean, if you recall Q2, Q3, we said that we have been pulling in wafers from coming quarters. We have done that through the year. This was not really successful in Q4, and it's not going to be successful when we look into Q1, which we are in now. We're also being committed higher wafer amount from Q2 and onwards throughout the quarter.
Can you give some more.
We can tell.
Sorry.
I mean, we can tell you we get higher volumes of wafers from Q2 and outwards. If I knew exact numbers, it would be easy. We didn't expect the Q4 to end like this, neither allocation for Q1 to end like it's turned out. Unfortunately, I can only say we get more wafers, and it makes us pretty sure that we are at a run rate that will support the $1 billion in 2024.
That's a pretty-
Somebody's speaking. I can't hear anything.
Yeah. On, you know, the mix for Q1. This guidance seems like it's, you know, basically zero, essentially zero revenues for proprietary and cellular and these other areas, or a significant step down in wafer allocation sequentially. Which one is it?
We don't comment on the mix. It's a different customer mix, obviously. We are continuing to support the tier one customers, both loyal to our medical health support and to our largest customers.
Yeah. I'll jump in the back of the queue. Thank you.
Thank you, Christoffer. Our next question will be from Oliver Pisani from Carnegie. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Thank you for taking the question. My question was on FTE investments. I think you added about 70 employees in this quarter. How do you think about sort of hirings and investments in the organization for 2023 in light of the new economic environment?
I can answer. We grew 21%, 2022 versus 2021. Of course, we are looking at the overall environment, so we'll adapt our investments, compared to what we see in the market.
Okay. Very good. Thanks.
Thank you, Oliver. As a reminder, if you have a question for the speakers, please press five star on your telephone keypad. Our next question will be from Adam Angelov from Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Yeah. Hi. Thanks for letting me on. Just two from me, please. Firstly, I wanted to just confirm if you have or have not seen any weaker demand on Bluetooth. In other words, is the demand specifically just related to the legacy nodes or are you also seeing from SMEs some weaker demand on Bluetooth as well?
We have a legacy node on Bluetooth mainly used by early adapters and also where we used to have our revenue out of from China. If you saw the slide, I mean, we've been reducing revenue in China with close to 65% year-on-year, and these were legacy Bluetooth products. On the new products, we have extreme demand from new project at tier one customers. Obviously, legacy products proprietary has weakened after COVID.
Yeah. Okay. Just to confirm before I move on to the other question then, it's basically, for the lion's share of Bluetooth revenue, it's a supply issue, not a demand issue. That's what you're saying?
What I'm saying is that we are short of 52 wafers, which is 55 nm wafers.
Okay. Okay. The other question, just to confirm, the one-off on write-down you had in Q4, do you expect, you know, that to continue maybe? Or is that really something, you know, if trends go as you're expecting and demand picks up, that's really just a Q4 story and it is a one-off, and it's not something we should essentially expect through 2023 to happen again?
All that's related to the write-off of some cellular products that was one time in Q4 related to older products of the cellular that was in the inventory. When demand picked up, we have. You look at our inventory in the balance sheet, you will see that we have significant amounts of inventory versus last year. A lot of that is related to cellular and proprietary, and we have a good plan to deplete this inventories.
Okay. Thank you. Maybe could you just explain what the write-off was, why you had to take that?
It was a technical issue with one production batch with our cellular IoT products.
Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you, Adam. Our next question will be from Christoffer from DNB. Please go ahead. Your line will now be unmuted.
Thank you. My second question is on the outlook for 2024. You mentioned that you're doing prepayment of $100 million in the current in Q1. Can you tell us a bit more in terms of understanding what that actually gives you? What we're getting in return for paying up that $100 million, and when that will mean you can start delivering significant volumes?
It will put us in place to deliver volumes in 2024 until 2026.
Beyond. Yeah. Yeah. On new product lines.
On new product lines.
Yeah.
How much can that help?
We don't have guide for the product mix in 2024 currently.
We are pretty sure it will take us above the $1 billion at the sort of same timing we lined out for in the capital markets day in 2019.
Okay. Thanks.
Thank you, Christoffer. As there are no further question at this moment, I'll hand it back to the speakers for any written questions.
Thank you, Rasmus. We have a few questions on the webpage. We can start with Rob Sanders, Deutsche Bank. Can you discuss the Chinese sales collapse? Is there any element here that Nordic now prefer to leave this business to other competitors?
I think there. Actually, when we analyze it, there is a mix. Yes, there is quite a lot of low complexity Bluetooth designs in China. We also have had historically quite a few designs with volumes in China, and they've been basically affected by the strong lockdown. We have run through our customer base. These customers hopefully will get back when doors are open again in China.
Thank you. We have, a question from Kristoffer Pedersen, Nordea, on the same topic. How comfortable are you that demand will recover in China, given that you have not prioritized these clients over the past couple of years?
What we have done is that we have kept some customer alive, and we have seen that these customers have had a dramatic downturn on their revenue. The customer feedback we get is that they are expecting some pickup through 2023, and that's what we relate to.
Thank you. We go over to the topic guidance. Petter Kongslie, SpareBank 1. Q1 2023 revenue guidance of $150 million and a backlog of +$800 million. What is the best proxy for run rate revenue potential in NOD?
It's very much driven by wafer supply on 55 nm, and we will guide quarter by quarter, and I think it will be evidence when we show our guidance for Q2 after Q1. Currently, we need to see that the capacity support plan from our vendor is coming back to what's already been indicated to Nordic.
Thank you. Then from Kristian Spetalen, Arctic, "Q1 revenue guidance is below total Q4 revenue. As such, do your Q1 revenue guidance only reflect lower demand or are wafer allocation lower than Q4?
As I said during the presentation, we've been pooling in wafers through all of 2022 from the quarter ahead, the same exercise all quarters. We are not managing to do that for Q1 2023.
We have supply capacity. Kristian Spetalen, Arctic, "Can you say that supply constraint persists, but at the same time you are encouraging customers to return to normal purchasing pattern of placing orders only two quarters ahead? Can you elaborate more on why you do this?
We have had discussion with tier one customers and committed to deliver through the true volume they need through 2023, and hence they don't need to put and place orders for a long time.
Thank you. We have a question regarding backlog, and this is from Petter Kongslie, SpareBank 1 Markets. "Order backlog declined from Q3 to Q4. How much is order cancellations?
We haven't been calculating the exact cancellation part of it. This has been a active sort of exercise from our regional sales managers to align, as I showed in the presentation, the backlog to our revenue.
Thank you. We have two questions regarding gross margin. Christian Spetalen, Arctic, "You mentioned lower demand among small, medium enterprises while the tier one is holding up. Does this change in customer mix represent a risk to above 50% gross margin for 2023?
As we commented on the Capital Markets Day, or one of our main focus is to keep gross margins above the 50%, so we consider this not a risk.
Thank you. We have a question regarding OpEx. Petter Kongslie, SpareBank 1 Markets, "How should we think about OpEx intensity given lower revenue in 2023?
The OpEx is of course a mix of salaries, and as I commented some in one of the questions, we are managing salary compared to where revenue is, but although a lot of our salaries is of course a fixed cost. The same on OpEx. We can of course adjust travels, et cetera, but a lot of the tapeouts cost, which are really the big part of OpEx, are fixed because we have to get our products out in the market to secure future growth.
Thank you. We have a question regarding price increases. Petter Kongslie, SpareBank 1 Markets, "Can you say something about expected price increase in the rest of 2023, and when will they take place, take effect, and what is the net effect will be on the gross margin?
We are in the process of doing price adjustments just now. It will be effective from Q2. We will be sensitive to, I would say, verticals and products that would be affected negatively, and we might be able not to put any increase on this. Other verticals, we will put the price increase on. That's something we evaluate with each individual customers that are contributing with high volumes.
Thank you. Our final question today comes from Rob Sanders, Deutsche Bank, "Can you discuss when Matter should be visible as a growth driver for your business?
It's certainly visible for us for Nordic at the moment. It's maybe one of the verticals we are working most on. We are working with larger companies, and I think you're going to be able to see revenue from this at least in 2024, and some of it will already appear in end of this year. The major revenue burst, I think you're going to see in 2024, driven by some tier one customers.
Thank you. I'm concluding our Q&A session for today and hand over to Svenn- Tore Larsen for closing remarks.
Thanks for everyone to join and listening in to our quarter presentation, and this concludes today's call, and have a good day. Thank you.
Thank you.