Diodes Incorporated

mode. At the conclusion of today's conference call, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. If anyone needs assistance at that time during the conference call, please press the star key followed by zero on your touchtone phone. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded today, Tuesday, February 11, 2025. I would now like to turn the call over to Leanne Seavers of Shelton Group Investor Relations. Leanne, please go ahead.

Good afternoon and welcome to Diode's fourth quarter in fiscal 2024 financial results conference call. I'm Leanne Sievers, president of Shelton Group, Diode's investor relations firm. Joining us today are Diode's president, Gary Yu, chief financial officer, Brett Whitmire, senior vice president of worldwide sales and marketing, Emily Yang, and director of investor relations, Gurmeet Dhaliwal. I'd like to remind our listeners that the results announced today are preliminary as they are subject to the company finalizing its closing procedures in customary quarterly review by the company's independent registered public accounting firm. As such, these results are unaudited and subject to revision until the company files its Form 10-K for its fiscal year ended December 31, 2024. In addition, management's prepared remarks contain forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties, and management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. Therefore, the company claims the protection of the safe harbor for forward-looking statements that is contained in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ from those discussed today, and therefore we refer you to a more detailed discussion of the risks and uncertainties in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including Form 10-K and 10-Q. In addition, any projections as to the company's future performance represent management's estimates as of today, February 11, 2025. DAS assumes no obligation to update these projections in the future as market conditions may or may not change, except to the extent required by applicable law. Additionally, the company's press release and management statements during this conference call will include discussions of certain measures and financial information in GAAP and non-GAAP terms. Included in the company's press release are definitions and reconciliations of GAAP to non-GAAP items, which provide additional details. Also, throughout the company's press release and management statements during the conference call, We refer to net income attributable to common stockholders as gap net income. For those of you unable to listen to the entire call at this time, a recording will be available via webcast for 90 days in the investor relations section of DIOD's website at www.diodes.com. And now I'll turn the call over to DIOD's president, Gary Yu. Gary, please go ahead.

Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's conference call. Our above seasonal revenue results in the fourth quarter reflect the improving momentum we have seen over the past few quarters, as the market in Asia gradually improved, especially in China and the Southeast Asia region. We achieved 5% growth over the fourth quarter of 2023, which makes a return to year-over-year growth following the multi-year market slowdown. Even though the overall global demand environment remains challenging, especially in Europe and North America. We're able to maintain our automotive and industrial mix percentage at 42% of total product revenue, which is a testament to the progress we have made on our new product and the content expansion initiatives. BIOS entered a new year having strong POS in Asia for 2024. Improves level of channel inventory and a solid balance sheet. combined with a committed focus on expanding growth in our target market, especially the automotive and industrial markets, and capitalizing on new opportunities in AI-related applications. Based on current data available, we expect 2025 to be a stronger year for DIOS than 2024. In addition to our past effort to lower manufacturing costs and further develop our process technology and capabilities, we're qualifying and running more product in our internal facilities to minimize near-term underloading costs until demand improves. Our focus remains on prioritizing investments in the automotive and industrial markets with our analog and power district products to further improve the quality and the mix of our portfolio. With our revenue contribution from auto and industrial remaining consistently above our target model, We are well positioned for growth and margin expansion as market recovery broadens across our end markets in 2025 and beyond. With that, let me now turn the call over to Brad to discuss our first quarter and fiscal 2024 financial results, as well as our first quarter 2025 guidance in more detail.

Thanks, Gary, and good afternoon, everyone. Revenue for the fourth quarter of 2024 was $339.3 million. compared to $350.1 million in the third quarter of 2024, and $322.7 million in the fourth quarter of 2023. Full-year 2024 revenue was $1.3 billion, compared to $1.7 billion in 2023. Gross profit for the fourth quarter was $110.9 million, or 32.7% of revenue. compared to $118 million, or 33.7% of revenue in the prior quarter, and $112.5 million, or 34.9% of revenue in the prior year quarter. For the full year, GAAP gross profit was $435.9 million, or 33.2% of revenue. GAAP operating expenses for the fourth quarter were $99 million, or 29.2% of revenue. And on a non-GAAP basis, we're $95.5 million, or 28.1% of revenue, which excludes $5 million amortization of acquisition-related intangible asset expenses, $0.6 million restructuring charge, $0.3 million in acquisition-related costs, and $2.3 million for insurance recovery for a manufacturing facility. This compares to GAAP operating expenses in the prior quarter of $96.1 million, or 27.5% of revenue, and in the fourth quarter, 2023, of $91.8 million, or 28.4% of revenue. Non-GAAP operating expenses in the prior quarter were $91.7 million, or 26.2% of revenue. Total other income amounted to approximately $0.4 million for the quarter, consisting of $4.9 million of interest income, $1.2 million of other income, $3.7 million of foreign currency loss, $1.6 million in unrealized losses from investments, and $0.5 million in interest expense. Income before taxes and non-controlling interest in the fourth quarter of 2024 was $12.3 million. compared to $18.8 million in the previous quarter and $27.9 million in the prior year quarter. Turning to income taxes, our effective income tax rate for the fourth quarter was approximately 16.6 percent. For the full year 2024, the tax rate was approximately 18.9 percent. Gap net income for the fourth quarter was $8.2 million, or 18 cents per diluted share, compared to $13.7 million, or 30 cents per diluted share last quarter, and $25.3 million, or 55 cents per diluted share in the prior year quarter. Full year GAAPNet income was $44 million, or 95 cents per diluted share, compared to $227.2 million, or $4.91 per diluted share in 2023. The share count used to compute GAAP diluted EPS was 46.4 million shares for both fourth quarter 2024 and the full year. Non-GAAP adjusted net income in the fourth quarter was $12.5 million, or 27 cents per diluted share, which excluded net of tax $4.1 million for amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, and $1.3 million non-cash mark-to-market investment value adjustment, $0.5 million restructuring charges, $0.2 million of acquisition-related costs, and $1.9 million of insurance recovery. This compares to $20.1 million, or 43 cents, per diluted share in the prior quarter, and $23.4 million, or 51 cents, per diluted share in the fourth quarter of 2023. For the full year, non-GAAP adjusted net income was $61 million, or $1.31 per diluted share, as compared to $222.8 million, or $4.81 per diluted share in 2023. Excluding non-GAAP share-based compensation expense of $5.3 million for the fourth quarter Net of tax, both GAAP earnings per share and non-GAAP adjusted EPS would have increased by 11 cents per diluted share. For the full year, excluding GAAP and non-GAAP, non-cash share-based compensation expense of $18 million and $17.4 million, respectively, net of tax, GAAP and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share would have improved by 40 cents and 39 cents, respectively. EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $40.7 million, or 12% of revenue, compared to $46.9 million, or 13.4% of revenue in the prior quarter, and $58.4 million, or 18.1% of revenue in the fourth quarter 2023. For the full year, EBITDA was $177.1 million, or 13.5% of revenue, compared to $404.2 million, or 24.3% of revenue in 2023. We have included in our earnings release a reconciliation of GAAP net income to non-GAAP adjusted net income and GAAP net income to EBITDA, which provides additional details. Cash flow provided by operations was $81.8 million per fourth quarter and $119.4 million for the full year. Cash flow was $62.1 million, which included $19.7 million for capital expenditures. And for the full year, free cash flow was $46.4 million, including $73 million for CapEx. Net cash flow was a negative $2.4 million, which includes the net pay down of $3.8 million of total debt. And for the full year, net cash flow was a negative $3.8 million, which includes the net pay down of $7.6 million of total debt, as well as total net consideration of $52.6 million for the acquisition of FortMedia, a global company which operates in Asia that develops high-quality solutions and semiconductor products to enhance human-to-human and human-to-machine voice communications. DIOS acquired FortMedia to expand our product portfolio and enhance the company's footprint in advanced voice processing technologies, primarily targeted at automotive and compute markets. Turning to our balance sheet, at the end of fourth quarter, cash equivalents, restricted cash, plus short-term investments, totaled approximately $322 million. Working capital was approximately $849 million in total debt, including long-term and short-term, was approximately $52 million. In terms of inventory, at the end of fourth quarter, total inventory days were approximately 193 as compared to 187 last quarter. Finished goods inventory days were 82 compared to 79 last quarter. Total inventory dollars decreased $7.1 million from the prior quarter to $475 million, Total inventory in the quarter consisted of $18.3 million decrease in raw materials, a $9.7 million increase in work and process, and a $1.5 million increase in finished goods. Capital expenditures on a cash basis were $19.7 million for the fourth quarter, or 5.8% of revenue, and $73 million, or 5.6% of revenue for the full year. which were both at the low end of our targeted range of 5% to 9% of revenue. Now turning to our outlook. For the first quarter of 2025, we expect revenue to be approximately $323 million, plus or minus 3%, representing a 4.8% sequential decrease at the midpoint due to Chinese New Year holiday, but slightly better than typical seasonality. Importantly, the midpoint of guidance represents 7% year-over-year growth and extends our momentum in support of our expectation of growth in 2025. GAAP gross margin is expected to be 32.5%, plus or minus 1%. Non-GAAP operating expenses, which are GAAP operating expenses adjusted for amortization of acquisition-related intangible assets, are expected to be approximately 30% of revenue, plus or minus 1%. We expect net interest income to be approximately $1.5 million. Our income tax rate is expected to be 18.5%, plus or minus 3%. And shares used to calculate EPS for the first quarter are anticipated to be approximately 46.7 million. Not included in these non-CLAP estimates is amortization, of $5.8 million after tax for previous acquisitions. With that said, I now turn the call over to Emily Yang.

Thank you, Brad, and good afternoon. Revenue in the fourth quarter was above the midpoint of our guidance and slightly better than typical seasonality. Our global POS decrease in the quarter, but the good news is our channel inventory was lower, both in terms of dollars and weeks. I will also note POS in Asia for 2024 was strong. especially the second half of the year where we saw double-digit growth over the same period in 2023. Looking at the global sales in the fourth quarter, Asia represented 80% of revenue, Europe 12%, and North America 8%. In terms of our end markets, industrial was 23% of Dio's product revenue, automotive 19%, compute 25%, consumer, 18%, and communication, 15% of product revenue. Our automotive industrial revenue combined total 42% of the product revenue, which is the same as last quarter. Maintaining our product mix above our target model reflects our ongoing contact expansion and design wing initiatives, even though both of these markets continue to undergo inventory and demand adjustments. A key component of Diode's successful increase of content at new and existing customers has been our focus on technology and product development over the past several years. In 2024 alone, we introduced 755 new part numbers, with 330 of this specifically for automotive market, where we have increased our addressable content per car over 30% this past year from approximately $160 to 213. Now let me review the end market in greater details. Starting with automotive market, we maintain the product revenue at 19%, even though the inventory rebalancing continues throughout the quarter. We expect inventory adjustments and slower demand to persist into the first quarter. Our focus continues to be on content expansion and market share gain to position dials for the growth as the auto market recovers. As I mentioned earlier, DIOS introduced a high number of new automotive compliance products during the year. These products are targeted at our key focus areas of connected driving, comfort style safety, and electrification applications. In terms of product adoption and demand creation, we're seeing strong momentum for our small link PCI Express packet switches, USB Type-C redrivers, and active cross-moxes for the rear seat entertainment and smart cockpit applications. Our LDO product family received solid demand for ADAS, infotainment, and wireless charging applications. And our SBR product is seeing design wins in auto display applications. We also experienced strong growth in the quarter from our switching power DC-DC products for connected driving applications Additionally, our power discrete product including MOS power, TVS, SBR, and bipolar junction transistors are seeing demand growth across multiple auto applications. We have also been ramping up new design wings for our high voltage hall switches being used in the tailgate lift, door harness, and electric steering control across multiple customers around the world. Also in automotive, our LED driver business continues to see strong demand in various lighting applications, while our butt LED drivers and multi-mode LED driver controllers gain traction in applications such as front, high, low beam, as well as rear and exterior lighting. In the industrial market, the inventory correction continues. Similar to automotive and market, we expect this may last into the second quarter. Despite the demand softness, we continue to make progress in our design-in, design-win initiatives. Our high-voltage hot switches are seeing design wins for window openers, DC fans, and motor applications, while our photocouplers and LDOs are seeing traction in E-meter industrial equipment, motor control fans, and power tools. Additionally, our protection devices are being designed into battery backup units as well as programmable logic control units. Our bridge rectifier has multiple design wings in the switch mode power supply for surfer power. We also saw several new silicon carbide SBD designing activities in rear power supply and electric motor as well as Tier 1 energy storage applications. In the computing market, we continue to see strong growth momentum for the PCI Express packet switches, USB signal conditioners, and ultra-low jitter crystal oscillators in AI server and data center applications, including 800G and 1.6T switches and optical modules. Our high-speed serial interface logic crystal oscillators and PCI Express clocks are being adopted in the NICAR and GPU cards for the system reference clock. Our addressable content in the AI Surfer today is approximately $90 per box, which compared to $53 per box last year for traditional surfers. Also in the computing market, we receive solid demand for our LDOs across various applications as well as our ideal diode controllers, MOSFETs, and compact power switches for input power O-ring and power path sequencing control applications. Additionally, our bus switches solutions for enterprise SSD and next generation portable gaming consoles are being well received as they have helped SSD customers double the supported capacity without redesign of their storage controllers. and also protect against software piracy for gaming console customers. Lastly, high bandwidth cameras in the notebook are driving demand for our MIPI DeFi redrivers. And we continue to achieve momentum for our shocky and protection products in notebook and docking station applications. In the communication market, our eUSB2 repeaters has become the standard interface for CPUs and SoC processors in the mobile communication, where our one and two channels of eUSB repeaters are gaining traction. DIOS LDOs are also seeing solid demand, and our production devices are winning new designs in the smartphones. Also in the communication markets, our bipolar junction transistors Sharky and SBR products are seeing new design-ins for 5G CPE and 5G modules. We also saw strong momentum for USB power delivery and ACDC PWM controllers products in smartphone charging applications. Lastly, in the consumer market, our SBR and SBD products in chip-scale package are securing new designs in power delivery charger and battery pad applications. Additionally, our bridge rectifiers are being designed into gaming applications, while our high voltage buck converters are being adopted in the smart home IoT applications. We also have new design wings for bipolar junction transistors products in personal care devices. In summary, we're pleased to achieve the first quarter of year-over-year growth in the fourth quarter following the multi-year market slowdown. Although we have not yet seen a broad market recovery, especially across the automotive industrial markets, we continue to focus on demand creation and executing on our new product initiatives to drive increasing content opportunities as the global market recovers. With that, we now open the floor to questions. Operator.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star, then one on your touch tone phone. If you are using a speaker phone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. If at any time your question has been addressed and you would like to withdraw your question, please press star and then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. And your first question today will come from David Williams with Benchmark. Please go ahead.

Hey, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question, and congratulations on the growth here.

Thank you, David.

Emily, maybe you could speak a little bit to the seasonality that you're talking to and how that's affecting you in China, especially with the Chinese New Year, and maybe you as it relates to automotive and industrial, kind of what you're seeing there, are you expecting that to be down maybe further than some of the other segments, or just any color around the demand trends in China would be helpful, I think.

Yeah, so first of all, I think Chinese New Year, I think is pretty much within our expectation. We didn't see anything abnormal. I think there are some customers with extended shutdown, but not all the customers. I think overall, It's actually within our expectation. I think we actually included a Chinese New Year return of employees and overall market, everything together. We actually guided a 4.8% down for the Q1, which is actually slightly better than our usual seasonality. And Q1 never was a strong quarter for us because Chinese New Year impact, I would say all in all, it's actually within our expectation.

Great. I certainly appreciate that.

And then maybe, Brent, on the gross margin, the sequential improvement there feels a little stronger than I would have anticipated. What are you kind of seeing on the gross margin, I guess, just given the nice bump sequentially there?

Yeah, so I think from the gross margin point of view, and, you know, usually revenue goes hand-in-hand with the gross margins. So I think what we really try to do is really more on the product mix initiative improvement overall. We continue to focus introducing new products. As an example, I think I just talked about it. We released more than 700 new part numbers in 2024. And out of that, more than 330 is actually automotive parts. So you can actually see the commitment and driving of the new product and new technology continue to expand our available content market expansion overall. So that will continue to be the focus. So a couple of things that really drive the margin improvement. So one is on the product mix improvement initiative. The other side is actually on the underloading situation. So like Gary mentioned, we continue to actually minimize the impact continue to pour additional products into our own internal FAB as the alternative. Unfortunately, that takes time, but slowly we're going to see some of the results. I would say that's the reason you're actually seeing probably better than your expected gross profit margin overall based on the guidance.

Okay. Is there a way to think about how far you are through that porting over process? Is there a threshold or maybe just a way to think about the magnitude that's happening to the gross margin at this point?

I think that would be an ongoing quarter-by-quarter effort, right? I think, you know, not only we need to qualify the process, the technology, the devices, we also need to work with the customers to qualify that device onto their board. So I would say it's an ongoing process, and it's probably going to take, you know, other number of quarters continue to improve over time. But I, you know, we strongly believe that with the belief 2025 is actually going to be a better year. So that also going to drive some of the revenue at the same time driving some of the loading. So we actually pretty confident that overall you're going to see improvement throughout the quarters within 2025. Great.

Thanks so much.

And your next question today will come from William Stein with Truist Securities. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my question. First, I'm hoping you might give us some clues as to how you expect revenue to perform in each of the end markets in Q1.

Okay. All right. So, you know, automotive still going through inventory rebalancing and coupled with weaker demand overall, right? especially from the Europe territory. So we think Q1 is still going to be a challenging quarter overall. As you can see, even with the Q4 challenging, we try to maintain the 19% overall of the product revenue. So I think that will continue to be the focus. It's actually focused on the content expansion. and the market share gain overall. So over industrial market, we're still seeing ongoing inventory rebalancing. Some customer situations are worse than the others. Definitely some are better, so not everything equal. But all in all, we see that will continue, probably linger through the second quarter. And compute market segment for Q1, we expect it probably be slightly down, because also Chinese New Year, manufacturing, a lot of that is in Asia, so that will be impacted overall. And the consumer was never a strong quarter in the first quarter, so we don't expect consumer to be a growth quarter as well as communication. I think on the communication side, on the enterprise traditional networking, we are actually seeing some of the inventory rebalancing improving overall, so that might give us some of the upside, but the smartphone It's actually going to probably be challenged in the first quarter. So I would say all in all, it's still going to be a down quarter. So as a conclusion, right, so we guided 4.8% down for the whole quarter.

But that's still the better than the seasonality first quarter.

Yeah. Okay. Let me ask about operating leverage again. Compared to the December of 2022, quarter is two years ago, but your revenue is down 32%. Your OPEX is only down 10%, which is fine. I assume it means there's significant fixed cost in your OPEX. But as your revenue recovers, assuming we – even if we don't get back to that exact level, but as you grow – should we think there's going to be sort of similar positive operating leverage on the way up or have you added costs that make the, uh, that might, you know, make the leverage less severe or less significant as it was on the way down?

I would say that you, um, will that we have, there's no real structural things that we've added across that window. You know, we, um, We basically had picked up the OnSemi and the Detix Instruments factory across the last number of years. And then what we've done is you saw that across the last couple of years, we brought down overall OPEX spend from 22 to 23 and then 23 to 24. I think what you'll see is there's a good bit of leverage to that as we go forward. I think we get a lot of that. We've talked about the leverage we get in our margin. Not only as we start to grow, we get the benefit of pulling some of the sourcing of those products inside versus out. And then that infrastructure obviously is inside the company now versus outside in terms of some of the manufacturing footprint. But I think you're going to see the leverage is good. I don't expect that to scale back up. I actually think that what you're going to see is that OPEX as a percentage of revenue, you know, start coming back down, kind of plateau, and then start coming back down as revenue starts to grow, which we feel strongly that, you know, fourth quarter was year-over-year growth. First quarter, we're guiding year-over-year growth, and we expect that to continue. You know, through the year, we don't guide out further officially, but that's our feeling. That's our expectation. And that's what you'll see on the OpEx side is it will continue to kind of come down across the quarters.

Great. Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Again, if you have a question, please press star and then one. And your next question today will come from David Williams of Benchmark with a follow-up. Please go ahead.

Hey, thanks for taking the follow-up, and forgive me if I missed, my line dropped out, but I wanted to ask maybe on pricing trends, what you're seeing there, have you seen erosion is greater than you would typically see, or does that seem to calm down a bit just from a pricing perspective?

Yeah, David, I think the pricing is pretty stable within our, remember I talked about 1.5% to 2% bill in per quarter. It's still within that range, so I wouldn't say, you know, the overall environment changed a lot. We see more price competition from the commodity and commodity area. That's also the area we have been strategically defocusing. And so I would say all in all, it's actually stable.

And another important thing is we probably can emphasize a lot on our product portfolio enhancement on that. We introduced a lot of new products, not only limited automotive, but also for the different kind of segments. So we can enjoy a much better ASP and a GP% on those kind of new products we introduce to the market so we can balance those likely commodity loss in some market.

Okay, great. And then just one last thing, if I may, on the AI side, you've seen some really nice growth this year per box, as you mentioned. Is that driven more by there's just trader sockets available, or is it your product portfolio, or what's really driving that opportunity within that server kind of market for you?

I think it's a combined of all, right? So we are expanding our product portfolio. We're having some of the newer products overall supporting the Surfer or the AI Surfer applications. We also see with the AI Surfer applications with certain chipsets, there is additional PCI Express port required. And we actually have this PCI Express packet switch portfolio that's very well-suited to really support this kind of application with the requirement of additional PCIe ports. So I would say combination of quite a number of different things. Of course, you know, the volume and the change overall market, it's all beneficial to our overall growth.

Great. Thanks again. Certainly appreciate it.

This concludes our question and answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Gary Yu for any closing remarks.

Thank you everyone for participating on today's call. We look forward to reporting our progress on next quarter's conference call. Operator, you may now disconnect.

The conference is now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.