PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

William Jellison: Hi, good afternoon, and thanks for taking the question. I’ll ask two and then get back in queue. The first one is I’m wondering if you can share any more color on the analytics revenue per customer metric, any updated metrics on that front, or just overall observations? And then within that, the level of module uptake you see within your existing customer base as well?

Adnan Raza: Yes, absolutely. And look, every quarter we post this metric, as we did the last quarter as well, and we’re calculating that number, finalizing it to post for the analyst day itself. But over the last few quarters, we’ve seen the trend of that number going up and we would expect that this quarter that would be the case as well. In terms of continued – in terms of adoption with additional customers, it’s nice to see that customers are using our products on a larger scale, as were referenced by the comment that we made in the call about the two large customers with the large deals that we talked about, the double-digit-million-dollar deal. So stay tuned for that metric as we post our deck in the next few days about the investor – about the details on some of those metrics.

William Jellison: Absolutely, okay. And then the second question relates to your investment in sales and marketing. I remember getting the impression from your analyst day last October that a lot of the incremental gross profit that PDF is going to get as it approaches that 75% margin target was going to get reinvested into a more concerted effort in sales and marketing. And I was just wondering on the level of intensity PDF is presently investing there to capture those opportunities and whether or not we should expect that to step up even further as it pursues more of those opportunities?

Adnan Raza: Yes, look, I mean, through this year and frankly early on in the year, we talked about increased spend that we would plan to do at the sales and marketing side. And candidly, if you – I know we reported it as a combined number within the SG&A bucket, but I’ll tell you, G&A is not where we have put some of that growth. It’s really been the S&M side. We have hired some new people, especially given some of the M&A and the dislocation in the market that we saw to grab some of the good salespeople and add them to our portfolio. And back to the question Blair asked. You compare – you add the two together and you say, okay, great, your spend on S&M, what are the early proof points? I think the tone on the call that you’re hearing from us is along those lines.

You’re catching us at a good time. This is the time of the year we also prepare our annual operating plan and present to the board. And early views of that, we do a top-down view and then as we present it to the board, we end up looking at every deal with the timing for the year. And that’s how we’re able to give you this guidance that we are sharing today. So yes, we’ve increased the spend in S&M. It’s starting to show early results in the strength of the pipeline and hopefully, the two deals in Q4 that we did chalk up some of that benefit already and hopefully more to come.

John Kibarian: Yes, I think, just to – Willie, maybe you asked a little bit around, okay, what does that mean for this year? I think when you look at a quarterly basis, we crept it up every quarter. But now, as we get into this year, we will make modest incremental investments. But a lot of the reason why sales and marketing expenses this year will be higher than last year is you have a full year’s accounting of the increase that happened throughout 2023. So we don’t expect that we’re going to incrementally increase it at a much more rapid rate. In fact, arguably, it’ll be at a more muted rate, but because you have a full year’s expense on an annualized basis, it will be a higher number than it was last year, right? But on a quarterly basis, not a lot higher than Q4. Just modestly go up over Q4. I think that might have been what you were kind of looking for.

William Jellison: Yes. Both are very helpful. Thank you, John and Adnan.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Gus Richard from Northland.

Gus Richard: Yes. Good afternoon, guys. Thanks for letting me ask some questions here. The two large deals that you signed in the quarter, were those sort of enterprise-wide fab test assembly, or were they more point products? And could you give any color on, is it like analog, industrial, or leading edge? What kind of customers?

John Kibarian: Sure. So I can handle that. Both of them are front-end fab related. Both of them are process control related with advanced analytics capability in one case and more basic capabilities in the other one. They’re both enterprise-wide in that they go across all of their facilities worldwide, and both, as a result, are relatively large. These are customers that are – have been customers before and now are deploying more broadly, in one case with more advanced capabilities on top of the base capabilities. And so, yes, these are – we’ve been talking throughout the year that there’s a number of large contracts that we’ve been working on. These were two of them. There are others that we are continuing to work on. This is, again, kind of getting back to Will’s questions around the investment in sales and marketing.

That’s some of the early fruits. We expect a substantial step up again in this first half of the year as we close a number of other larger deals in this first part of the year that are all kind of related to these investments, building even larger than what we did in those two. Those were pretty substantial for us.

Gus Richard: Okay. And then can you give us a sense of the size of your pipeline? You closed a couple of deals. Are there 5,10? How many more of these enterprise-wide deals are you currently working on?