Akoustis Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:AKTS) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Anthony Stoss: Great. Very good. Thanks, guys.

Jeff Shealy: Thank you,

Operator: Thank you, Tony. Our next question is from the line of Craig Ellis with B. Riley Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Craig Ellis: Yeah. Thanks for taking the question, guys. I wanted to follow up on the earlier questions and just better understand the dynamics in March. So it looks like revenue is going to be up about $1.3 million sequentially, led by Wi-Fi followed by defense. Within Wi-Fi, can you characterize the incremental gains in the consumer part of the market versus the enterprise part of the market for March quarter?

Jeff Shealy: Hey. Good morning, Craig. Let me pull Dave in and give you kind of what we see on the mix in Wi-Fi. Maybe I’ll add some comments thereafter.

Dave Aichele: Yeah. Good morning, Craig. So it’s finally an evenly split between the consumer side and the enterprise side. There’s two dynamics that we’re seeing. So we’ve got good traction with Wi-Fi 6E programs that we’ve done with carrier market that is going to start picking back up. It’s gone through this inventory slowdown, so we expect that to pick back up. Plus, we’ve got, per the design win announcement we made in this recent call today, is that we’ve got two consumer programs that we’ve already seen substantial POs on for our new Wi-Fi 7 products that we launched probably about three — five months ago. And then, the other one is, our Tier 1 enterprise customer is going to start ramping and also their previous platform is picking back up.

They’ve had a slowdown probably for the past six months. So we have both of those coming together. Plus, we announced in the call today another enterprise customer that’s also going to be planning to ramp. And both of these enterprise customers have a significant amount of filter content per system. So even though the volume of the system shipping are less than the carrier side, you still get very good dollar content and also total ASP per system. So I think it’s going to be a balance between the 22 of them. We’re still focusing on the big box retail side that we don’t expect, any real growth contribution probably until the second half of calendar year 2024. So I put an emphasis mainly on the carrier of the enterprise side.

Craig Ellis: Yeah. That’s really helpful, Dave. Thank you. And then the follow-up question is somewhat similar but for the second half of calendar ‘24, first half of fiscal ‘25, guide. If we’re getting to cash flow break even at mid-team’s revenues, then our revenues are going to basically double through the year. So can you just help us understand what your assumptions are around mobile’s contribution to that ramp and to the extent that it exists. How much of that is Tier 1 customers versus the Tier 2 that’s ramping a little bit in the first half of calendar ‘24 and then beyond mobile just the relative contributions out of Wi-Fi defense, et cetera.? Thank you.

Jeff Shealy: Thank you. Okay, Craig. So, second half of calendar 2024, we see continued increase in transition in Wi-Fi. I think Ken had touched on some of the new products with a more favorable gross margin profile. That’s going to be certainly a driver towards a cash flow breakeven. But it’s continued ramp with programs in Wi-Fi, Dave gave some outline of what that looks like in terms of — some of that mix. I did want to emphasize in these Wi-Fi programs we’re moving from programs that we may have eight to 10 type filters in a Wi-Fi 6E to some of these programs. We have multiple products and up to more than 30 filters of content in the box. So Wi-Fi is a big part of that story. The other part that we’re seeing is, we do see a recovery of network infrastructure as we go in the second half of 2024.