Earnings Call: Q2 2021

Jul 4, 2021

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Power Integration Second Quarter Earnings Call. At this time, all participants' lines are in a listen only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question and answer session. I would now like to hand the conference over Your speaker today, Mr. Joe Shifler. Sir, please go ahead. Thank you, Mel, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. With me on the call today are Balu Balakrishnan, President and CEO of Power Integrations and Sandeep Nayar, our Chief Financial Officer. During the call today, we will refer to financial measures not calculated according to GAAP. Non GAAP measures exclude stock based compensation expenses, amortization of This call is the property of Power Integrations and any recording or rebroadcast is expressly prohibited without the written consent of Power Integrations. Now I'll turn the call over to Balu. Thanks, Joe, and good afternoon, everybody. This was another record quarter for Power Integrations with revenues of $180,000,000 Up 69% from a year ago. Demonstrating the leverage in our model, our non GAAP operating margin surpassed 30% For the first half of twenty twenty one, the revenues grew 63% from the prior year. We are growing well above the growth rate of the analog industry, thanks to broad market share gains and secular trends that will endure even as demand normalizes over the coming quarters. One such trend is energy efficiency, Which has been a key part of our story since the introduction of our EcoSmart technology over 2 decades ago. Energy efficiency has provided a tailwind ever since driving OEMs to redesign their products in response to regulatory standards And consumer demand. At times, these tailwinds have been boosted by highly impactful standards Like the 2007 California regulations on external power supplies, which quickly drove linear power supplies out of that market. Our integrations were an outsized share of that opportunity because our LinkSwitch ICs were an ideal replacement for Lumius. A similar transition has now taken place in the air conditioning market due to China's mandatory standards for our room AC units, Which were announced late 2019 and have been phased in over the past year. China's updated minimum efficiency performance standards essentially rule out fixed frequency AC units, which accounted for nearly half of China's production before the standards took effect. In response to the standards, Manufacturers have transitioned most of their production to variable speed brushless DC motors and have also converted from linear to switched mode power supplies To drive the electronics, Power Integrations is a market leader in switched mode power supplies It has also created opportunities for our BridgeSwitch motor drive chips, which drive brushless AC motors such as those used in variable speed AC units. In fact, we won one of our largest bridge switch designs to date in Q2 at a major customer in the air conditioning market. Thanks to the efficiency and reliability benefits of our products. Our share gains have accelerated As competitors with capacity constraints have prioritized other products ahead of the power supply chips and other competitors Have deemphasized or exceeded the power supply market altogether. These gains are compounding The revenue benefit of rising dollar content in appliances driven by tighter efficiency standards and the increasing penetration of Electronic features such as network connectivity, electronically controlled motors and LED lighting. We also expect meaningful revenues from motor drive applications next year as BridgeSwitch begins to ramp in earnest. Another important secular trend in the power supply market is the adoption of advanced charges for our mobile devices, Which continues to drive strong growth in our communications and computer categories. Combined revenues from these More than doubled year over year in Q2, reflecting the market shares we have gained in OEM branded charges for smartphones, tablets and notebooks as well as multipurpose charges from a wide range of aftermarket brands. We have made it a priority to win share in this market today, knowing the Revenue stream will be stickier, less volatile and more profitable than the commodity cell phone charger business of the past. Charger designs have always had longer life cycles than the mobile devices themselves, which are refreshed every year. But while simplistic low power chargers could easily be redesigned just to shave a few pennies off the bomb cost, Today's highly sophisticated charges are more like appliances with a greater focus on features and performance And longer design life cycles. In short, we expect many of the designs in our pipeline To be in production for a long time and we are pressing our advantage to lock in these designs today. We've got a wide assortment of advanced charger designs in Q2, including a 33 watt in box charger That will significantly increase our penetration at a top tier handset OEM. Another OEM recently placed The largest single order to date for our GaN based InnerSwitch products, which they have selected for a new 67 watt inbox cell phone charger for use with high volume phone models. We also won a 130 watt design For a leading supplier of gaming notebooks featuring 4 charging ports and using 3 GaN based inner switches. As announced in May, we have also been designed into Anker's next generation Nano 2 chargers, which comes in 30, 45 and 65 watt versions. Notably, the 65 watt version is approximately the same size as the 30 watt charger from the 1st generation of nano chargers. This improved power density is enabled by our latest product, InnoSwitch 4, Which will be produced exclusively with GaN. GaN enables switch 4 To operate at higher frequency, resulting in a significant reduction in the size of the power supply transformer, we pair the InnerSwitch 4 device With our new Plant 0 chip, which implements active client technology to recover losses associated with the higher switching frequency, Enabling a truly exceptional level of efficiency. And when combined with our MiniCapt product, which uses GaN To enable the use of a much smaller input capacitor, we can deliver power density far superior to any solution available in the market today. The synergy between these products demonstrates the value of our comprehensive approach To power supply technology, including proprietary process technologies, high voltage transistor technologies, highly integrated controllers, Proprietary packaging and system level know how. This has always been our approach and we have continued it with our GaN technology, Which we have seamlessly folded into our product offerings. In fact, again, InnoSwitch works exactly like a silicon based InnoSwitch Such that the customer doesn't have to know anything about GaN in order to realize its performance benefits. Other GaN devices offered in the market, including some marketed as ICs are essentially discrete switches that require dozens of external components And many times, even a separate circuit board, which are incorporated into a power supply using an external controller chip Source from a 3rd party. Engineers must learn the idiosyncrasies of GaN to design a working power supply And even when successful, they end up with a design containing 2 to 3 times as many components and multiple circuit boards. This greatly complicates manufacturing and brings compromises on reliability, time to market, Cost and form factor. While the transition to GaN is a secular trend that will lift many boards, The benefit of integration are inescapable, and we believe our approach is proving superior in the GaN world, Just as it has with silicon over the past 3 decades. In fact, based on recent design wins, we are Accelerating our capacity additions for GaN to accommodate a substantially higher level of growth than previously expected. Looking ahead, we have been anticipating significantly lower revenues in the second half, reflecting reduced demand for cell phone customers After aggressive handset bills meant to capitalize on the Huawei sanctions, we now believe That a significant portion of this adjustment took place in Q2 as evidenced by a sharp reduction in sell through As customers rapidly adjusted their charger inventories. With this correction largely behind us And taking into account our continuing market share gains and new design wins, we expect a more moderate reduction in the second half revenues Compared to our prior expectations, for Q3, we expect a 3% sequential decline in revenues, Plus or minus 5 percent. And we believe we are on track for a full year revenue growth in excess 40% compared to a projected growth rate of about 20% for the analog semiconductor industry according to WSTS. With that, I'll turn it over to Sandeep. Thanks, Paolo, and good afternoon. As usual, I will focus my primarily on the non GAAP results, which are reconciled to GAAP in our press release tables. Revenues for the June quarter $180,000,000 up 4% sequentially and above the midpoint of our guidance. Consumer revenues were up about 10% sequentially, driven by broad based growth in appliances and consumer electronics. Industrial revenues were also up about 10% sequentially, driven by a range of verticals, including home and building automation, Lighting application and broad based industrial applications. Computer revenues increased mid single digits driven by share gains in notebook Communications revenues were down mid single digits, reflecting the lower demand from cell phone customer, Offset partially by channel replenishment. Revenue mix for the quarter was 35% communication, 31% consumer, 26% industrial and 8% computer. We stated last quarter that March Would be the low watermark for gross margin and that is proving to be the case. Non GAAP gross margin rose to 51.4% in the June quarter, Up 200 basis points sequentially, driven primarily by more favorable end market mix and manufacturing efficiencies. Non GAAP operating expenses were $37,600,000 for the quarter, up $1,400,000 from the prior quarter, Driven by annual salary increases and higher R and D investment, but slightly below our expectations, Reflecting the pace of headcount additions. Non GAAP operating margin for the quarter was 30.5%. While I expect operating margin to settle back into the high 20s over the next couple of quarters, Crossing the 30% threshold in the June quarter clearly demonstrates the leverage in our financial model. This leverage can also be seen in our EPSCo. Non GAAP earnings were $50,800,000 in the June quarter or $0.83 per diluted share. That's an increase of more than 150% from the Q2 of 2020 on a revenue growth of 69%. Cash flow was also strong with $67,000,000 generated from operations, While CapEx was just over $8,000,000 we paid out just under $8,000,000 in dividends And utilized $26,000,000 for share repurchases, buying back 335,000 shares Roughly 0.5 percent of our float at an average price of less than $79 per share. Buyback activity has been ongoing since the end of the quarter and will continue to be driven by our preset pricevolume matrix. Cash and investments on the balance sheet rose by $24,000,000 from the prior quarter and stood at $515,000,000 at quarterend. Internal inventories held steady at 92 days, while channel inventories recovered From the unsustainably low levels reached last quarter, ending June at 5.2 weeks, still below our expected steady state levels Of about 6 to 7 weeks. Looking ahead, we expect 3rd quarter revenues to be down 3% sequentially, plus or minus 5%. At the midpoint of the range, that would be an increase We believe we are on track for revenue growth in excess of 40% for 2021, and we believe we are very well positioned for growth in 2022 based on the market share gains and the secular drivers that Balu outlined in his remarks. Our gross margin outlook for the year has improved, reflecting our expectation for end market mix and the impact of manufacturing efficiencies. I expect non GAAP gross margin for the 3rd quarter to be approximately 51.5% and around 51% Operating expenses will continue to rise gradually as we add headcount in both R and D and sales And we're to bring more products to market with our industry leading technologies such as FluxLink and GaN. For the September quarter, non GAAP OpEx should be between $38,500,000 $39,000,000 For the full year, expenses should grow about 9% to 10% coming off a flat year in 2020. Other income for Q3 should be in the range of $300,000 to $400,000 while the non GAAP effective tax rate should remain at approximately We have the first question comes from the line of Ross Seymore from Deutsche Bank. Your line is now open. You may ask your question. Congrats on the solid results. I wanted to talk about the channel first and foremost and really what it means to your 2nd half expectations being higher or less bad than you said a quarter ago. The channel looks like it Got back closer to normal. Is that going to be a tailwind and get back to normal in your second half expectations? Or do you think that the sell through is going to be strong enough that refilling the channel is going to So as we said, our normal levels are 6 to 7 weeks. And here we are at 5, right? The predominant growth in the channel came from the cell phone area. And we believe because of the share gains that we have had and the secular drivers, we are going to It will be relatively flat for Q3. There is a possibility it could go a little bit higher in Q4. You mentioned it will go to our normal, but that's our best guess at this point. Got it. And I guess as my follow-up, nice performance on the gross margin side of things. Sandeep, you talked about the two reasons. Mix, I think we can see a little bit of that mix And why that would happen, but was the manufacturing side a little bit more of a surprise to you? That you're usually pretty accurate on that. It's It's always good to be surprised to the upside more than the downside. But I just wanted to get a little bit more color on the drivers, especially on the manufacturing side, what happened there and sustainable it is? Well, the volumes are going up and we've had the yields improvements, test time reduction. And also, As the mix in communication moves to aftermarket chargers, that helps our margin also because volumes are lower and it has a favorable contribution. And with the environment where we are, where costs have gone up, we do value pricing. And as a result of that, when we're competing against the And you're doing value pricing that also helps a bit. Yeah, utilization and also test Cost improvements are probably the biggest manufacturing cost improvements. And in the test, we have migrated to a new test platform, which is more cost effective. That happened over the last 12 months or so. So that has helped us. But as Sandeep said, even in communications, we are Seeing improving gross margins for the reasons you mentioned like the aftermarket and the fact that everybody is going to very high end charges. Next question, we have the Christopher Rolland from SIG. Your line is now open. You may ask your question. Thanks, guys, and congrats So I actually wanted to talk about the non GAAP operating margin for a second here. I think your long term model is 20 plus. And I know you guys had an outstanding quarter of plus 30 This quarter, and I know you said it was going to go back into the high 20s. But I was wondering if you had any plans on updating that long term Margin target and where that might go over time? Our long term model continues to grow our top line low double digit for revenue growth with OpEx growing at about 60%. And we have always talked about this to be over a 3 to 5 year We have had a step function increase in the revenues that has caused our operating margin to move up. And our goal has always been there to maximize our operating margin over a period of time and not in a particular given year. Yes. Would you say that 30% plus could be a stretch goal for you guys over time? Well, I really think, as you remember, I talked about 20%. And again, you have to look over a 3 to 5 year period. Could we we had talked about this mid-twenty We are not ready to again state it, but I think being in the mid-20s plus seems to be definitely in the direction where we are. And Obviously, our goal as we move forward will be keep enhancing that towards the number that you indicated. But At this point, what we want to do is talk in terms of 3 to 5 years, but I think we have achieved the mid-20s and hopefully can sustain that And we will start going in the north direction from there. Yes. Okay, great. And then, it does seem like there are 1 or 2 new organic companies out there looking to go public. And And maybe you can talk about that market, how you see share shaking out And then ultimately pricing dynamics moving forward as we have some more newer entrants into the market. Sure. Just to be clear, all other GaN companies offer discrete devices. They don't provide a system level solution. But I think that's where we have a huge advantage. GaN is very difficult to use. It's a very fast device. A lot of customers struggle with it. Whereas when they use our product, the GaN is embedded within our product. So we take care of all of the idiosyncrasies of the GaN. We deal with that. As far as the customer is concerned, they can't even tell the difference from a design point of view. Of course, they can tell the difference in terms of performance. That's how easy they made Ganzo customers. As far as the other side of it is that the number of components required to implement our solution is far less. We typically have anywhere from onetwo to onethree the number of components, which is really needed to make the power supply small. It's not just a question of using GaN. You have to be able to reduce the size of the power supply. For that, you have to reduce the component count. We also have to implement features like current limit inside of our product In a lossless way, otherwise, you end up having additional losses outside, which really negates the use of GaN. So talking about GaN as a device It's not very useful. You have to look at the system. And that's why GaN has had the challenges for many, many years now, and we are able to break through that. Lastly, I would say that in terms of the technology, we believe we have the most cost effective technology in the world in And that's because our structure is very different from everybody else's and it's uniquely different because we wanted the most We are now in a fantastic position compared to any of the other competitors. We have the next question comes from the line of Tarek Svan Berge from Stifel, your line is now open. You may ask your question. Yes, thank you and congratulations on a Few records. I think it's revenue, operating margin and operating cash flow. So congratulations on that. Okay. First question is On the communications business, it was down sequentially this quarter, but you said that the correction seems to be behind you. I Seem that business is still going to be down in Q3. Is that how we should read it? We So the best we have we can model this slightly down in Q3. I think the Huawei distribution Has completed the best we can estimate, and that's why we saw a significant reduction offset by, of course, our channels replenishment. But in Q3, we think that will be slightly down, yes. Got it. So what takes the revenues down then? Is the consumer business going to take a breather? Well, the consumer business should be relatively flat from what we can tell. Even though It's usually seasonally down because of AC. AC is down in Q3, but we have so many new design wins that will we believe will offset that. So that's the reason, Tore, we have given the range as we do. It gets hard to get precise from what we have guided to if we take The 3% decline is also minus. That's where it gets there will be a let me know directionally communication is going to be slightly down. And typically, air conditioning goes down in Q3, but we think because of share gains that would offset that and be flattish. And industrial has so many moving parts that it gets a little difficult to be very precise. So that's why the range gets difficult to say, but it's the best directional That's all we can give at this point. That's great. Thanks for that color. Moving on to the product. So BridgeSwitch, It sounds like that product line is really hitting a momentum. You talked about some big design wins there. How should we think about the margin profile of In the consumer market, it will be similar to the consumer gross margin we have, And we expect it to grow very nicely next year. We have many design wins this year. We will get A few $1,000,000 in revenue this year, but it will really start accelerating next year. The revenue growth on BridgeSwitch Has been delayed because of COVID because in appliances, when they go to a totally new platform like BridgeVeg, It takes quite a bit of design work, and we were unable to physically go and help them. And so it made the design in process Much longer trying to help them remotely, but the interest level always has been high, but we are finally seeing The benefit of this revolutionary product, we think it's going to do extremely well going forward. Great. Just one last question. I know the trend that the fast charger market has been for kind of Charlie moving out of the box, but You talked about several inbox design wins. I think you said even your largest single order to date InnoSwitch for 67 watt inbox. So is there still sort of a mixed bag as far as where the trend is Between out of box and inbox? Yes. That's still true because the Chinese OEMs are really focusing on charge You can imagine 57 watts is a lot of power. If you are used to the 5 watt cube charger, this is substantially higher. About 13, 14 times higher in charge rate. And they believe that their protocol allows them to do that. So they're not too anxious to go to a standardized protocol like GSVPD because they think they'll lose their advantage. They're able to Something that other people can't do. So we don't see them transitioning in the near future. Could it happen in the long term? Yes. But is it going to happen quickly? I think it's happening slower than even we anticipated. As you already know, One of the major OEMs have switched to USB PD. Another one is switching partially to USB PD. But beyond that, we have not seen a significant move to USB PD, which is actually good for us because it's all different designs. And therefore, The fact that they are focusing on fast charging means that they're going to continue to put it in box because each generation As a much higher feature level, whether it's higher power or higher performance, so they use it as a marketing tool. Thank you. We have the next question comes from the line of Gus Richard of Northland. Your line is now open. You may ask your question. Yes. Thanks for taking the question and my congratulations on a good quarter as well. Just real quick, can you Talk a little bit about channel inventory on the consumer side. You said it built up in communications, but I was wondering if that was true for consumer as well. It's not gone up as much in the consumer because the demand on the appliance side continues to be extremely Strong. And as we have said and we had talked earlier, the normalizations in different end markets would happen at different points of time. But the demand on the consumer, especially on the major appliances, continues to be very strong. And That's an area we're waiting to see when that normalizes because it has been way above normal levels. But also the other part which is very good that is happening as we talked about in our remarks is where our games have accelerated Because of people prioritizing other stuff plus people exiting this marketing or defocusing, the Gains that we would have had over a period of time that actually accelerate. And that is going to be a very positive even when things normalize because that will be a nice To that, the share gains. Got it. Got it. And then just thinking about the model going forward, If one were to assume that you hit normal seasonality, whatever that is, Going forward, would your op margin stay above 25% to below 30 Going through next year? I think at this point of time, because even though I haven't done my I feel glad, but I'll do my stomach. I feel if you take where we will end up this year, Which will be in the range somewhere in the range that you're telling, I think it's in the middle of the range, I think it will be give and take that. Yes, I think next year to the first We can model will be similar to the whole year gross margin this year Because we believe we are going to grow next year. It's hard to tell how much, but we feel very good about growing next year. Right. And Is the gross margin of the communications market better We've got more aftermarket guys that are taking smaller volume. Is that a good way to think about it? Exactly. Yes. Our communication gross margin is increasing because of that. Okay, got it. And then So I've talked to you guys and talked to your competitors And trying to suss out what topology is the best and their argument In other words, they don't current and voltage don't cross over at the same time. Could you talk about that Policy versus yours and why you think your topology and having how that relates to how you spend Current, etcetera. Can you, in layman's terms, explain what's going on? Yes, absolutely. This is almost strange because our Inno3 product is up switching. It's called quartz resonant converter. And InnoSwitch 4 is even better. It's 0 We'll be switching, which is even more efficient by using our time zero product. So I don't think anybody can even come close to our efficiency at all. It's just if you want to build the smallest adapter in the world, we are a guest today. And does that enable you to use smaller magnetics? Yes. So we talked about it in my prepared remarks that our latest product, Inno4, operates at high frequency. And that's why it's only uses GaN. It doesn't have a silicon switch at all because of the higher frequency operation. And when you go to higher frequency, you can reduce the size of the transformer, But you end up increasing the losses in the transformer and the switch. To recover that, we have another companion chip called clamp 0, Which recovers the losses and the sensitivity output. So you can not only maintain efficiency, you can actually further increase efficiency Using 0 voltage switching. And so on top of that, we also have mini cap that nobody else has, by the way, that will also reduce the size The size of the transformer and capacitor, which are the biggest components in the power supply. So in both cases, we've reduced it by about 40% each one of them. And then to make the power supply small, even that is not sufficient because you have to have very few components so that you can actually fit it into a small enclosure. That's where we really excel because we have typically 1 third the components A competitive GaN based design. I understand. Thank you. And last one for me, you said You're going to ask me for GaN products because of the demand. Is that MLCVD? Is it testing? What do you need to add? We will have to add primarily on the front end. I can't go into details, but I could say that from a packaging standpoint, we already have enough capacity. We are expanding as we speak, But we'll have that's easier to do because of the smaller shorter lead times. But it's the back end I'm sorry, the front end where we are Significantly expanding capacity in preparation for substantial growth, not only next year, for the next several years. Very good. Thank you so much. Thanks, Next question, we have the line of Karl Ackerman of Cowen. Your line is now open. You may Yes. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I wanted to follow-up to the last question that Gus had asked, which was And some of your prepared comments, you indicated that channel inventory could possibly creep higher into Q4 and maybe eventually get back to normal. I know you had invested in late 2020 early 2021 on additional capacity adds on the front end, Which did prove fortuitous for you as others struggled with capacity. But my question is, does a normalization in channel inventory Dant, any plans for you to further expand capacity from here? And I have a follow-up. Well, first of all, Until the market normalizes, we want to keep as much inventory with us because that way we can serve the real demand Most effectively, if our inventory gets distributed among many customers and distributors, it makes it really hard for us to take care of Upside, like we are seeing in appliances, we are seeing a significant upside that we did not anticipate simply because our share gains have suddenly However, as things normalize, we will be able to build inventory as close to a normal as possible. It happened in Q3. I don't think so. I think the demand is still pretty high. And in Q4, there's a likelihood that we could go up or creep up A little bit, but it's also possible that we won't be able to do that. It all depends upon how much how long this Normalization will take in the cell phones, the normalization has happened to a large extent in Q2. But in appliances, it's still very, very hot. I mean, the demand is very high. And so it It's possible to take 1, 2 or 3 quarters for it to normalize. But having said that, we are continuing to expand capacity Across all of our technologies, especially GaN. GaN is where we see the most dramatic growth In terms of capacity requirements, so we are focusing on that. But we also need silicon capacity, which we are As we speak, and we'll have more capacity available next year. You can see, we are going to grow 40% are we on target to grow 40 plus percent. And the only way we could have done that is we had the capacity in place. We put the capacity in place. We have built enough inventory. So we are in a much better position than almost anybody in the semiconductor industry. And we also have a very unique manufacturing model. We don't use what we call standard foundries. We use We use fabs that are owned by product companies who have excess capacity to give it to us, And it's committed to us because we are committed through contracts. So we are able to do this much better than Almost any other sort of competitor company you can pick up. The other thing I'd like to add is our internal inventories are only still sitting at 92 days. Our running model is 125 days. So we are well below the model that we would really like to run. And in spite of the growth that we have this year and the growth in the Earlier, we feel very good because of the share gains of the secular that we will grow again very nicely next year. I appreciate that following Sandeep. Very helpful. There has been much discussion on today's call regarding, I think your competitive differentiation within GAM, and so I don't want to I'll leave that point, but I think what is interesting is, and one of the questions that I've received quite a bit intra quarter is the growth trajectory That your peer has articulated over the next couple of years for TAM. And the question is, is that indicative Are they rapidly expanding TAM? That's also very beneficial to you. Or does that constrain your growth? And so as you address that question, I was hoping you could also talk about whether you are seeing new opportunities to maybe move into the server market Yes. Let me ask the last question first. That is that GaN will enable us to go to much higher power levels With an integrated switch. However, we don't talk about the products In the higher power areas until we have them. So that's one of the reasons we don't go crazy on what this could be in the next 5 years. If you're going public to us back, you can you have complete freedom to show whatever you want for the next 5 years. So we are just Very, very conservative in that regard. As far as the GaN propelling Other companies, yes, GaN is a very, very important technology. So when as GaN gets popular, It lists all the votes, obviously. The question is who's going to benefit the most. And I believe the one who will benefit is the one who makes it easy for our And secondly, the company that has the most cost effective and reliable technology. And I think we have really proven that by shipping very high volume for the last 4 years that we have a very reliable technology and a very This is the first large volume GaN design that we know of, where we are in a very high volume Charger design with 1 of our OEMs. Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.