Alpha and Omega Semiconductor Limited (NASDAQ:AOSL) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: Thank you. The next question comes from Craig Ellis with B. Riley Securities. You may proceed.

Craig Ellis: Yes. Thanks for taking the question. And just to start, Mike Chang, congratulations on all you accomplished while CEO, you built a great company. And Stephen will look forward to staying in touch with you on these calls and other events. Stephen, I wanted to go back to an earlier question and just maybe frame it a different way. If you looked at your and as you look out to the fiscal fourth quarter, calendar second quarter and if you were to rank them by confidence in which could rebound most materially from potential lows here in the March quarter, how would that ranking look, and any color around that would be helpful?

Stephen Chang: Sure. I would also point to computing as the greatest potential to grow in that quarter. Again, we’re not giving specific guidance, but this is a €“ that is a segment that we saw the most inventory correction and the level that that’s at now is not €“ is definitely in the inventory correction territory. And we believe that as I mentioned that there are some signs of that already starting to recover for that fiscal fourth quarter. So, I think that segment itself has no more room to recover, but the other segments also have opportunity to grow too. We’re still working towards the peak seasons for smartphones. And the fourth fiscal quarter will be usually the ramping time to prepare for that. And then the power supply also tends to follow after €“ follow along with the competing segment.

A good portion of the business are the , and power supplies for computing. We also noted in our earnings release that we believe that gaming within consumer is seasonally low. So, there’s expected to be recovery starting from the fiscal fourth quarter as well.

Craig Ellis: Okay. So that was compute, ahead of product cycles, the PC part of industrial power and then other gaming part of consumer, did I get that right, Stephen?

Stephen Chang: Yes.

Craig Ellis: Yes. Okay, great. All right. So, moving on to a related question. Yifan, if we see a recovery in revenues maybe back towards, but not quite to levels that we saw in the fiscal second quarter, can gross margins move commensurately or will there be, kind of a delay just given the way things could flow through inventory? How quickly can a change in revenues translate into a change in gross margin?

Yifan Liang: You mean then for the fiscal fourth quarter, right?

Craig Ellis: Yes, for fiscal fourth quarter. Thank you.

Yifan Liang : All right. Yes, I mean, we would expect some recovery in the gross margin line once we have top line recoveries. So, I mean €“ but the relationship right now is hard to say. I would say, I mean, depending on the product mix and the utilization also, which tied to the inventory, both our own inventory and channel inventory. So, by-and-large, I would expect that you had some recovery for the gross margin line.

Craig Ellis: Got it. And are you €“ how is pricing holding up out there? I imagine relatively good at your Tier 1s because those are longer-term agreements, but are you seeing competitors now that foundry capacity availability is loosening up? Are you seeing some of your competitors get more aggressive with pricing? How should we think about the ASP dynamic over the course of this calendar year versus what you saw last year?

Yifan Liang: Yes. I mean in the last couple of years, yes, it was pricing wise and it was favorable pricing environment. I mean, now we are in inventory correction mode. So, we would expect some ASP erosions . I would expect again for the calendar year 2023 that probably didn’t back to normal or even worse than historical trend.

Craig Ellis: Okay. And is normal a few percentage points or how should we think about normal levels since it’s been 2 or 3 years since we have that?