CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ:CEVA) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ:CEVA) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 9, 2024

CEVA, Inc.  isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good day, and welcome to the CEVA, Inc. First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Richard Kingston, Vice President, Market Intelligence, Investor and Public Relations. Please go ahead.

Richard Kingston: Thank you, Jason. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Ceva’s first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Joining me today on the call are Amir Panush, Chief Executive Officer; and Yaniv Arieli, Chief Financial Officer of Ceva. Before handing over to Amir, I would like to remind everyone that today’s discussion contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties as well as assumptions that if they materialize or prove incorrect, could cause the results of Ceva to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements and assumptions. Forward-looking statements include statements about our market positioning, strategy and growth opportunities, market trends and dynamics, Ceva’s ability to execute on backlog deals in the second quarter and to reach total revenue target for the year, expectations regarding demand for and benefits of our technologies and our expectations on financial goals and guidance regarding future performance.

Ceva assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements or information, which speak as of their respective dates. In addition, following the divestment of the Intrinsix business, financial results from Intrinsix were transitioned to a discontinued operation beginning in the third quarter of 2023, and all prior period financial results have been recast accordingly. We will also be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures which we believe provide a more meaningful analysis of our core operating results and comparison of quarterly results. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures is included in the earnings release we issued this morning and in the SEC filings section of our Investor Relations website at investors.ceva-ip.com.

With that said, I’d like to turn the call over to Amir, who will review our business performance for the quarter, review the year and provide some insight into our ongoing business. Amir?

Amir Panush: Thank you, Richard. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Ceva delivered first quarter results that reflected solid royalty trends with good year-over-year growth, while licensing was lower than we anticipated, as some deals we expected to close in the first quarter were delayed. I continue to be very encouraged by our diversified licensing pipeline and stronger backlog. We closed a significant, multimillion-dollar deal, with a strategic customer, in the beginning of the second quarter and there is strong demand for our next-generation IPs that are currently in development and are being licensed by early adopters who are looking to gain an advantage in the market. I will elaborate more on our expectations for our licensing business for the rest of the year shortly.

First, looking at the licensing business we concluded in the quarter in more detail, we continued to expand our leadership in smart edge IP, completing 11 licensing deals across all of our key target markets, namely consumer, automotive, industrial, and infrastructure. These deals range from Bluetooth connectivity for wearables and IoT, 5G for RedCap and cellular V2X, Wi-Fi for access points, UWB for consumer devices and audio for smartphones. Most significantly in the quarter, I am very pleased to report that we signed deals for our next-generation Bluetooth 6 and Wi-Fi 7 IPs. Design activity around our Wi-Fi 7 IP is experiencing strong traction with both new and established wireless players and represents a positive catalyst for our licensing activities in 2024 and beyond.

In the quarter, we concluded a Wi-Fi deal with a strategic customer who is already in mass production with a combo chip based on our Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5 IPs. This customer has managed to successfully compete with the largest incumbents in the wireless combo chip space for consumer, enterprise and automotive and is now beginning to design their next-generation Wi-Fi 7 chips to gain further market traction for the broad consumer devices that will require Wi-Fi 7 connectivity, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, wearables, and smart home devices. In terms of market size, ABI Research forecasts that Wi-Fi 7 chipset shipments will exceed 1.7 billion units annually by 2028. As we have stated previously, due to its technical complexity, our Wi-Fi 7 IP commands a higher license fee and royalty rate than previous generations of Wi-Fi, which in turn drives ASP growth and enables us to drive more value per customer.

Moreover, the large market size entices new entrants to the Wi-Fi market, while the complexity of the technology poses challenges to many of the existing wireless players to develop this technology internally. As the only IP company in the market today offering licensable Wi-Fi 7 technology, and the ability to license it together with our Bluetooth and UWB technologies, we are in an excellent position to repeat our success in the Wi-Fi 6 market for Wi-Fi 7. In Bluetooth, we have added a new Bluetooth 6 customer in the quarter, who is a first-time customer for Ceva, and a world leader in wireless audio. This customer decided to take advantage of our IP to accelerate their product development for the next generation of Bluetooth audio. Although the Bluetooth 6.0 standard is not yet ratified, we are among a small number of leaders, and the sole IP licensing company, that has the expertise and skills to develop next-generation wireless technologies ahead of the market and ahead of the standard itself.

We have successfully achieved this for a number of generations of both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi standards and have built an unrivalled position as the industry leader and trusted partner for wireless IP over many years, with more than 100 customers and billions of devices shipped. Finally on licensing, in relation to the licensing pipeline for the remainder of the year and our ability to extract more revenue per deal, I would like to share a few thoughts and datapoints. Ceva is one of a few select companies that have the technical capabilities, talent and unique know-how to develop wireless, sensing and edge AI IP to the level required by most demanding customers. I firmly believe that we can command higher licensing fees and royalties for our leading-edge products, and many of our ongoing customer discussions reinforce this belief.

While a few deals that we had anticipated closing in the first quarter were delayed to later quarters, those deals remain in our sales pipeline, and some have already been signed since the first quarter close. Our value proposition around the three major smart edge use cases, connect, sense and infer, is clear and well understood by our customers and partners. In addition, we have already closed a meaningful, multimillion-dollar deal in the second quarter, with a strategic customer for a next-generation IP that we are currently developing. I will update you more on this deal in the next earnings call, but wanted to share that this deal reinforces our strategy to extract higher value for our technology due to our unrivalled technical leadership and the ROI gains that can be achieved when partnering with us.

We believe this in turn will serve to increase shareholder value through higher revenues, margins and profits over time. We are laser-focused on this value-add strategy leveraging our strong broad portfolio of smart edge IP offering. Turning to royalties, we are pleased with our start to the year with a robust quarter, showing an impressive 33% revenue growth year-over-year and just a 14% seasonal sequential decline, compared to a 28% sequential decline a year ago. We saw shipment volumes up 25% year-over-year, and increase in every end market we serve, as restocking continued across the broad IoT markets. Smartphone units, while up year-over-year, were down quite sharply from the fourth quarter, a similar trend to what we saw last year. Also, the infrastructure market remains soft, reflecting low CapEx for 5G networks globally.

From conversations with our customers, we expect smartphones to improve in the second quarter and throughout the year. Overall, the first quarter shipments increase our confidence that we are well positioned to grow our royalty business in 2024, augmented during the year by new customer ramps deploying our portfolio of wireless IPs for consumer and industrial devices, and our embedded application software for spatial audio in headphones and sensor fusion software for intelligent robots. Now some commentary regarding developments in the quarter. In the first quarter, we also invested further in cementing our market leadership, expanding our product offerings and strengthening our ecosystem. We announced a new UWB wireless IP for consumer devices, one that builds on our success in UWB solution for automotive, and which we already licensed successfully to a customer this quarter.

UWB is primed for take-off in the consumer market, as the majority of smartphone OEMs are now integrating this technology into their latest devices, which is a precursor to mass market deployment in endpoint devices. ABI Research forecasts that the global market of UWB-enabled device shipments will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14% over the next five years, from 435 million units in 2023 to nearly 1.3 billion units by 2028. We’re ideally positioned to leverage this market opportunity as it develops, already having a mature IP available for licensing and the ability to license it integrated with our Bluetooth Low Energy IP. In terms of our ecosystem, we announced a new partnership with Arm targeting 5G Advanced infrastructure and non-terrestrial networks, NTN, aimed at lowering the barriers to entry for developing products targeting these two large markets.

NTN or satellite communications is a hotbed of innovation these days, and together with Arm, we can deliver the processing power required by satellite companies and new entrants to bring 5G Advanced networks to Orbit, enabling the promise of global broadband connectivity and a host of new use cases on earth that can leverage truly ubiquitous connectivity. We continue to gain market share in wireless connectivity, with an unrivalled portfolio of wireless IP, spanning the most common standards like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 5G, through to emerging standards like UWB and Matter. Connectivity is no longer considered a feature for electronic devices. Moreover, it’s the very foundation of innovation that allows AI to be deployed and accessed by edge devices.

Without connectivity, there is no AI. We are incredibly proud of our central role in the industry, enabling the connectivity in more than 1 billion devices annually that allows them to interact with AI and improve our daily lives. On sensing and inference, we continue to experience strong demand for our software and hardware products targeting these use cases. Our Generative AI NPU scalable IP portfolio with market-leading performance is undergoing intense evaluation with a number of customers that we have identified as strategic design partners for this technology and we will update you as these deals come to fruition. Our embedded application software, particularly around spatial audio is also experiencing significant traction, and we reached an important milestone in the quarter, with the first headset integrating our RealSpace spatial audio and headtracking software going on sale to the public.

The Nirvana Eutopia headphones from India’s #1 wearable and hearable OEM, boAt, also features our Bluetooth and Audio/AI DSP, making this product a perfect illustration of “connect, sense and infer” strategy, where we can provide multiple IPs to a single product and work directly with the OEM to bring the product to market. Overall, we are very excited about our product lineup targeting smart edge devices. Our dialogue with customers is very open, and we understand the recurring pain points that our customers share with us when discussing their smart edge roadmaps. With AI set to transform every industry and technology, semiconductors and OEMs need to define their strategies, not just to deal with the inference workload, but also how to connect their devices and enable them with the ability to use sensors for voice, sound, vision and motion.

Without these three use cases being addressed in every smart edge device, from smart MCUs all the way to autonomous vehicles and 6G virtual RAN equipment, companies will not be able to compete in the smart edge era. We are ideally positioned to fill the knowledge and R&D gaps at companies that lack the ability to excel in all of these areas. Our portfolio of IP for connect, sense and infer use cases is highly synergistic with a broad range of semi and OEM customers across multiple industries, including the high volume MCU players, where we already have significant traction for our connectivity IPs, and the TWS and wireless headphone markets, where we estimate our Bluetooth customers to have 45% and 50% market share today, excluding Apple products.

We intend to fully exploit our leadership in wireless connectivity to offer additional IP for sense and infer as the use cases for smart edge devices grow, driving larger licensing deals and higher royalty fees per unit. In summary, we have begun 2024 with royalty-bearing shipments up across all the end markets we serve and we have a solid pipeline of new customers set to reach production as the year progresses. In licensing, the first quarter was challenged with a few licensing [Technical Difficulty]

Operator: Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, it appears we have lost the connection to our speaker. Stand by while we reconnect. We thank you for your patience. Pardon me, ladies and gentlemen, we have reconnected with the speakers. You may proceed.

Yaniv Arieli: Sure. Did Amir finished his prepared remarks before we got disconnected?

Richard Kingston: No, I think the best thing to do, just to repeat the summary paragraph.

Yaniv Arieli: Okay.

Amir Panush: Perfect. Okay. Thanks, Richard.

Richard Kingston: Thanks.

Amir Panush: In summary, we have begun 2024 with royalty-bearing shipments up across all the end markets we serve and we have a solid pipeline of new customers set to reach production as the year progresses. In licensing, the first quarter was challenged with a few licensing agreements delayed until later in the year, but overall the quality of the licensing deals signed and the overall demand for our next-generation IPs is very encouraging. We have the portfolio of technologies that meets some of the critical pain points of semiconductors and OEMs for their smart edge roadmaps and I am confident that we can meet our total revenue target for the year and we have built a healthy backlog which reinforces my belief on this. Overall, I remain very positive that 2024 will be a growth year for Ceva and will set us up to reach our longer-term revenue, margin and profitability targets.

I look forward to meeting with many of you at conferences and roadshows during the quarter. Now I will turn the call over to Yaniv for the financials.

Yaniv Arieli: Thank you, Amir, and sorry about the blip. I’ll now start by reviewing the results of our operations for the first quarter of 2024. Revenue for the first quarter was $22.1 million, as compared to $26.3 million for the same quarter last year. The revenue breakdown is as follows: Licensing and related revenue was $11.4 million, reflecting 52% of total revenues, as compared to $18.2 million for the same quarter last year. Royalty revenue was $10.7 million, reflecting 48% of total revenues, as compared to $8 million for the same quarter last year. This represents an impressive 33% revenue growth year-over-year and just a 14% seasonal sequential decline, compared to a 28% sequential decline a year ago. Gross margin was 89% on a GAAP and 90% on a non-GAAP basis compared to 87% and 88% on GAAP and non-GAAP, respectively a year ago.

Total GAAP operating expenses for the first quarter were $24.5 million, at the lower end of the range. Total non-GAAP operating expenses for the first quarter, excluding equity-based compensation expenses, amortization of intangibles and deal costs, were $20.7 million, below the mid-range of our guidance, due to specific cost monitoring and cost controls, as we talked about in the prior earnings call. GAAP operating loss for the first quarter of 2024 was $5 million, as compared to a GAAP operating loss of $2.6 million for the same period in 2023. GAAP and non-GAAP taxes were $1.7 million, above our estimates, due to the geographies of deals signed. GAAP net loss for the first quarter of 2024 was $5.4 million and diluted loss per share was $0.23, as compared to net loss of $2.7 million and diluted loss per share of $0.12 for the same period last year.

Non-GAAP net loss and diluted loss per share for the first quarter of ’24 were $1.3 million and $0.05, respectively, as compared to net income of $1.2 million and diluted income per share of $0.05 reported for the same period last year. With respect to other related data: Shipped units by Ceva licensees during the first quarter of 2024 were 371 million units, up 25% from the first quarter ’23 reported shipments. Of the 371 million units shipped, 61 million units, or 16%, were for mobile handset modems. 283 million units were for consumer IoT products, up from 250 million units for the first quarter of last year. 27 million units were for IIoT products, up from 18 million for the first [year] (ph) of ’23. Bluetooth shipments were 202 million [dollars] (ph) for the quarter, up 6% year-over-year.

Cellular IoT shipments were 36 million units, up 24% year-on-year. Wi-Fi shipments were 31 million units, up 50% year-over-year. As Amir mentioned earlier, shipments were up year-over-year across all of our end markets, and total royalty revenues excluding mobile handset modems was the highest quarter since the third quarter of 2022, surpassing $8 million. As for the balance sheet items: As of March 31, 2024, Ceva’s cash, cash equivalent balances, marketable securities and bank deposits were approximately $159 million. In the first quarter of ’24, repurchased approximately 57,000 shares for approximately $1.3 million. As of today, around 643,000 shares are available for repurchase under the repurchase program as expanded back in November of last year.

Our DSOs for the first quarter was 58 days, back to its more normal levels and higher than our prior quarter’s 32 days. During the first quarter, we used $7.3 million cash from operating activities, on-going depreciation and amortization was $1 million, and purchase of fixed assets was $0.9 million. At the end of the first quarter, our headcount was 433 people, of whom 359 are engineers. Now for the guidance of the second quarter of 2024. As Amir stated earlier, we have signed a number of deals at the start of the second quarter, and also have good visibility into the second quarter potential deal flow for our wide range of technologies and markets. On royalties, we expect year-over-year growth in the second quarter and are monitoring the timing of new product introductions from our customers.

All in all, we forecast sequential growth in overall revenues for the second quarter of 6% to 16%, primarily from licensing. Gross margin is expected to be similar to the first quarter, approximately 88% on a GAAP basis and 90% on a non-GAAP basis, excluding an aggregate of $0.2 million of equity-based compensation expenses and $0.1 million for amortization of acquired intangibles. GAAP OpEx for the second quarter is expected to be in the range of $24.5 million to $25.5 million, slightly higher than the first quarter and in-line with our annual plans. Of our anticipated total operating expenses for the second quarter, $3.8 million is expected to be attributable to equity-based compensation expenses, and $0.5 million for amortization of acquired intangibles.

Our non-GAAP OpEx is expected to be in the same level as the first quarter, in the range of $20.2 million to $21.2 million. We’ll continue to monitor our expenses closely and look for ways to further improve our operating efficiency. Net interest income is expected to be approximately $1.3 million. Taxes for the quarter are expected to be approximately $1.7 million. And the share count for the second quarter is expected to be around 25 million shares. Hey, Jason, you could open the Q&A session, please.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from Matt Ramsay from TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Matt Ramsay: Thank you very much, everybody. Good afternoon and good morning. I have a few questions. I guess, the first one on licensing, guys, it’s totally normal for deals to sort of flip around across quarterly boundaries and — but I know you’ve mentioned in the script, there were some deals that might have — you might have expected to sign, they got pushed a little bit, but it didn’t sound super clear to me whether all of those things that slipped out of Q1 were just kind of across the quarterly boundary and going to get done in Q2, or if they might have been slipped a little bit longer than that. And if it’s the latter, maybe you could just kind of talk about what’s going on in the environment that might be delaying a few of the deals longer than would be typical? Thanks.

Amir Panush: Yeah. Thank you, Matt. I would say, first, some of the deals, as we also mentioned in the prepared remarks is that we already signed in Q2. And then, we expect also some of that to still sign in Q2, which is — but also there are some deals that get delayed more towards the next quarter after that. As part of the overall evaluation that takes longer in some cases, especially for the more complicated system that our customers need to evaluate sometimes all the way into the hardware capabilities of their own system.

Matt Ramsay: Got it. So, it sounds like nothing atypical or different in the environment, just kind of normal course of business type stuff. Is that fair?

Amir Panush: That’s fair. I would say that the one thing that we highlight more specifically for this quarter the strategic deal with the customers that we already have a multimillion-dollar deal that we expected to close in this quarter, in Q1. The evaluation of the technology, the agreements on both the technology and the commercial agreements was all set within the quarter, but the process — signature of the customer took longer than anticipated, and this deal was already closed, because the timing and the magnitude of the deal, we mentioned that specifically.

Matt Ramsay: Got. No, thanks for all that. I guess, for me on to some maybe more important technology questions. I wanted to ask about sort of two emerging technologies that you guys seem to be investing in a lot and are well positioned for, I guess, the first one is Wi-Fi 7 and the second one is UWB. So, on Wi-Fi 7, maybe you could give us a little bit more on expected pace of adoption of the technology and what the — both the licensing and royalty economics look like for your company relative to Wi-Fi 6? And UWB, I’d be sort of interested in hearing about what the breadth of different relationships, and, I guess, what the pipeline looks like for UWB deals, both breadth and timing? Because these are both sort of exciting new technologies. I’m kind of interested to hear where you guys are in the progression on each one. Thank you.

Amir Panush: Yeah, definitely. Actually, I’ll start with the Wi-Fi and take even a step back before Wi-Fi 7. Even with Wi-Fi 6 in terms of royalty overall, we are still early so called in the cycle of our customers transitioning from Wi-Fi 4 to Wi-Fi 6 in the high volume. And so, we expect it to be a very good tailwind as we go through the rest of the year on the royalty side. In terms of licensing, definitely, we are extremely encouraged to see some of our existing customers as well as new customers start licensing Wi-Fi 7. This is specifically as you mentioned that we signed this quarter was about a customer that already licensed in the past Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth from us, extremely encouraging to see that the trough that we have in the marketplace and the performance that we achieve to our customer that they repeat and come back to us.

And the question of Wi-Fi 7, in terms of licensing and development of those technology, is really right now ramping up quite nicely through 2024. It has started as an access point. Now we see more also on the client side. It is high performance, high throughput type of technology. So the propagation starts more from the high end and then over time will propagate lower in terms of the different tiers of the market. But also, for us, the transition from Wi-Fi 4 to Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 7, it’s a great tailwind in terms of the average deal size, as well as the average royalty that we get per device, because we really provide more value, more sophistication and time-to-market advantage to our customers. So, all in all, this is a very strong trend, and we are encouraged to see also the Wi-Fi volume increased very nicely year-over-year this quarter.

Going to the UWB questions, definitely, Qualcomm announcements and coming to market with a UWB combo with the data technology for their mobile devices, this is a very important precursor for the UWB to penetrate beyond automotive into the consumer. And most of the previous deals that we talked about were in the automotive. Now this quarter, we have a very nice deal in the consumer space. And we definitely see the Qualcomm announcement, the penetration into mobile phones and overall, the understanding of more of the use cases of UWB and FiRa 2.0 certification body also really ratifying their solutions, putting a very good tailwind for the demand in the marketplace. Having said that, overall, I would say UWB technology penetration rate is going to be, on average, smaller or lower than what you typically see with the more incumbent Bluetooth or Wi-Fi technologies out there.

The other piece, of course, for UWB, a lot of demand for UWB with Bluetooth technology and in the more high-end devices, even with Wi-Fis combo. So again, we are well positioned to take advantage of that trend.

Matt Ramsay: Thank you for all the details, Amir. I’ll jump back in the queue. Thanks, guys.

Amir Panush: Thank you.

Operator: The next question comes from Kevin Cassidy from Rosenblatt Securities. Please go ahead.

Kevin Cassidy: Yes. Thanks for taking my question. Just as you’re writing more licenses — coming up with agreements with licenses that include more technology, as you mentioned, the strategies to sell sensing, connectivity and the processing, is that considered one license now? Or just is there going to be a change as the value of the license goes up and there will be fewer numbers when you report each quarter? Or are they still going to be considered separate licenses, but just in one design?