Everspin Technologies, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the conference call to discuss Everspin Technologies' second quarter 2024 financial results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. At the conclusion of today's conference call, instructions will be provided for the question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Cassidy Fuller, Investor Relations for Everspin.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Everspin released results for the second quarter 2024 and to June 30th, 2024, this afternoon after the market closed. I'm Cassidy Fuller, Investor Relations for Everspin. And with me on today's call are Sanjeev Agrawal, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Matt Tenario, Interim Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin the call, I'd like to remind you that this conference call contains forward-looking statements regarding future events, including, but not limited to, the company's expectations for Everspin's future business, financial performance, and goals. Customer and industry adoption of M-RAM technology, successfully bringing to market and manufacturing products in Everspin's design pipeline, and executing on its business plan. These forward-looking statements are based on estimates, judgments, current trends, and market conditions, and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements. We would encourage you to review the company's SEC filings, including the annual report on Form 10K and other SEC filings made from time to time, in which the company may discuss risk factors associated with investing in Everspin. All forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this call, and except as required by law, the company undertakes no obligation to update or alter any forward-looking statements made on this call, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. The financial results discussed today reflect the company's preliminary estimates, and are based on the information available as the date hereof, and are subject to further review by Everspin and external auditors. The company's actual results may differ materially from these estimates, as a result of the completion of financial closing procedures, final adjustments, and other developments arising between now and the time the financial results for this period are finalized. Additionally, the company's press release and statements made 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 definition and reconciliation of GAAP net income to adjusted EBITDA, which provide additional details. A copy of the press release is posted on the investor relations section of Everspin's website at .everspin.com. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Everspin's president and CEO, Sanjeev Argulwal. Sanjeev, please go ahead.

Thank you, Cassidy, and thanks everyone for joining us on the call today. Before I discuss the results, I want to make a moment to welcome Matt Tenorio back to Everspin as our interim CFO. Matt previously served as the company's corporate controller and as interim chief financial officer in 2020, and he rejoined Everspin in June 2024 as an independent consultant to support finance operations. On behalf of the board and management team, I also want to thank Anuj for his hard work and dedication over the past three years, and we wish him well in his next endeavor. Turning to our second quarter results, we delivered revenue and net loss within our guidance range with revenue of 10.6 million and a net loss of 12 cents per basic share. We ended the quarter with a strong balance sheet, including cash of 36.8 million. During the quarter, Everspin had advancements in a number of areas that showcase our key corporate capabilities. I will discuss a few of these here that span our persistent product portfolio, design and technology development services, and foundry services. Starting with our toggle MRAM solution, as expected during the quarter, we continue to experience weakness, partly due to inventory consumption at customers and partly due to unfavorable currency exchange rates in the Asia Pacific markets, which have resulted in a slow recovery for our toggle MRAM products. Looking ahead, we see positive signs of inventory consumption at our customers, giving us increased visibility into demand for the rest of the year. We expect a modest ramp in our toggle solutions worldwide in the second half of 2024. During the quarter, we experienced strong traction with our 4Mb, 228Mb STTM RAM persist family globally, especially in the European and the Asia Pacific regions, where we saw our highest design activity and production volume respectively. As a reminder, this family was brought to production last year. We expect to begin delivering on these design wins later this year or in early 2025, and based on customer discussions, we expect a few design wins to go into production later this year with revenue ramping in 2025. Earlier in the second quarter, we announced that IBM chose our persist 1Gb STTM RAM solution for use in its Flash Core Module 4 for data center applications. This is the fourth generation of IBM's FCM that has featured Everspins STTM RAM technology. With a DDR4-like interface, our persist solution delivers 2.7 gigabytes per second of both read and write bandwidth coupled with non-volatility. Since the announcement, we have seen continued growth and orders from IBM and expect to see sustained growth in this product over the coming quarters. Turning now to our radiation hard programs. On our previous earnings calls, we noted that we were engaged in two rad hard programs utilizing our STTM RAM technology. The first program related to an ad hoc 64 megabit STTM RAM project remains ongoing. The second program is aimed at building a strategic rad hard FPGA. As recently announced, we executed a contract to continue our collaboration on this program with QuickLogic and Honeywell. Under the contract, Everspin will provide its innovative Agilist MRAM technology, logic design, and backend offline manufacturing services to advance the development and demonstration of strategic radiation hardened high reliability FPGA technology. This initiative supports both current and future DOD strategic and space system requirements. Earlier this month, we attended Semicon West where we engaged in meaningful conversations with automotive companies about use cases for STTM RAM chiplets. With increasing vehicle electrification, central processing units require much higher density and faster memory that current technology cannot provide. As a result, we are starting to see increasing interest in our STTM RAM products to handle the vast amount of data that EVs generate. We see this as a meaningful opportunity for Everspin over the next few years and expect to have further conversations with potential automotive customers at the Automotive Chiplet Alliance Conference in October. We're also pleased to share that we entered into a strategic agreement with the leading provider of sensor devices to provide foundry services for the latest generation TMR sensor device. Everspin has fundamental IP for TMR sensors and a long history of manufacturing these devices. This agreement will allow our customer to enable a consistent high quality product supply for their end markets including for industrial and commercial applications. To date, we have manufactured and shipped over 150 million toggle MRAAM, STTM RAM and magnetic TMR sensors from our Chandler Arizona facility. Turning to our outlook for the remainder of 2024. As we have discussed on our last two earnings calls, we expect the year to be weighted more heavily towards the second half of 2024. Despite the short term challenges I outlined above, we continue to see a path towards a stronger second half as we begin to recognize revenue from our new STTM RAM design ones. I will now turn it over to our interim CFO, Matt Tenorio, who will take you through our second quarter financials and third quarter 2024 guidance. Matt.

Thank you Sanjeev and good afternoon everyone. I'm pleased to return to Everspin at such an exciting time. Now turning to our results. For the second quarter, we are pleased to deliver quarterly results within our guidance range with revenue of $10.6 million compared to 15.7 million in the second quarter of 2023. MRAM product sales in the second quarter, which include both toggle and STTM RAM revenue was 9.9 million compared to 13.4 million in Q2 of 23. Decrease was the result of a decline in product sales due to the timing of customer demand. Licensing, royalty, patent and other revenue in the second quarter decreased to 0.7 million compared to 2.3 million in Q2 of 23 due to a decline in revenue from our RadHard projects. Turning to gross margin, our gross margin was 49% for the second quarter down from .4% in Q2 of 23. The decrease was due to a decline in product sales and licensing revenue related to our RadHard deals. Gap operating expenses for the second quarter of 2024 were 8 million compared to 7.6 million in the second quarter of 2023. The slight increase in OPEX was largely due to expenses related to our new XSPI family of STTM RAM products. Due to these factors, our second quarter results were a loss of 2.5 million or a loss of 12 cents per basic share within our guidance range of a loss of 9 cents to 14 cents based on 21.6 million weighted average basic shares outstanding. This compares to net income of 3.9 million or 18 cents per diluted share in the second quarter of 2023. Adjusted EBITDA was a negative 0.2 million compared to 5.4 million in Q2 of 23. Looking ahead, we expect to see a modest improvement in our loss per share next quarter. We're pleased that our balance sheet remains strong and debt-free. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of 36.8 million up from 34.8 million at the end of the prior quarter. Going forward, we continue to believe our capital is sufficient to meet our anticipated capital requirements for the next year. Cash flow generated from operations was $1.7 million for the second quarter. Turning to guidance. As we mentioned on our last two earnings calls, we had anticipated lower revenue for the first half of 2024, which is proven to be true. Looking to the second half of the year, we still believe that we will begin to see a ramp in revenue as well as design wins, and we have already begun to see positive signs of recovery in inventory consumption of our customers. Taking these factors into consideration, we expect Q3 total revenue in the range of 11.5 million to 12.5 million and gap net loss per basic share to be between five cents and 10 cents. In summary, we remain optimistic for the second half of the year and remain focused on scaling our business and converting design wins to revenue. We are focused on growing our Persist, Toggle MRAM and STT MRAM products and anticipate modest growth for our products for the remainder of this year. We also expect to see strong growth in our data center products in the second half with our high density STT MRAM. Overall, we remain confident in our ability to expand and scale our business in the second half of 2024. Operator, you may now open the line for questions.

Thank you. And as a reminder, if you do have a question, simply press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw yourself from the queue, press star 11 again.

Please stand by for our first question. Any comments on the line of Quinn Bolton with Needham and Company,

please proceed.

Hey guys, thanks for letting me ask a few questions. Just wanted to start, you mentioned some increasing design win momentum, especially in Europe and APAC. I wonder if you could give us some more details there. Are there particular applications for these designs? Is it nor flash replacement? Are there other applications? I assume a lot of these are sort of embedded industrial type designs, but just wondering if you could give us some more color perhaps on some of that design win momentum.

Sure, Ken. I think as we have discussed in the past, these design wins are targeted towards the programmable logic controllers in the industrial automation area. And we're seeing them both in Japan as well as Europe. And also we are seeing some traction with the FPGA companies and the aerospace and defense industry. So basically we have three different areas where we are starting to see some traction. With the FPGA, like you mentioned, it's basically targeting nor flash replacement. With the programmable logic controllers, so backing up a little bit, our low density STDM RAM part basically has both interfaces compatible with nor flash as well as SRAM. So when you're looking at FPGA, that's where they're taking advantage of the nor flash type interface. And we're looking at programmable logic controllers that are taking advantage of our SRAM type interface. So those are the primary design win areas that we're looking at and verticals that we're looking at.

Great, and just maybe a follow up question. Just you mentioned starting to see signs of momentum in the customer base in terms of inventory digestion. Where do you think we are in that inventory digestion process? And perhaps more importantly, do you think you get back to sort of shipping in line with consumption say by the end of the year? Do you think this inventory burn for various customers potentially lasts into early 2025?

So we are seeing signals of inventory consumption. We are also seeing our customers placing orders with very short lead times. So even though our lead times will be 20 to 26, we'll get an order where they want us to fill the order within a week kind of timeframe. So all of this is basically suggesting that our customers have inventory that is being consumed and they're hand to mouth. And just because they're trying to conserve their cash, we're getting the orders last minute. So I think the behavior is gonna change over time where they're really starting to see orders come in and they will want to build inventory on their side as well. So I think by the end of the year, we should see returning to normal lead times and inventories over here.

Great, and then I guess a couple for Matt. The gross margin down at 49%. I certainly understand the mix shift away from some of the royalty income is gonna have a big impact on the gross margin, but it looks even if I account for that mix that the product gross margin was probably in the mid upper 40s to get the blended gross margin at 49%. Can you just give us a sense, what's going on in the product side? Is that just purely absorption on lower revenue? Were there other issues that might have affected product gross margin in the quarter?

That's a great question and I think you've got it. But really also what we're seeing is a mix to some of the lower margin products. And then also because we are running lower volume, we are having to absorb our fixed costs over that volume, but we do expect that to improve as the year progresses.

Got it, thank you very much.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Richard Shannon with Craig Hallan, please proceed.

Good guys, thanks for letting me ask a couple questions. First one I guess is just on the third quarter guidance, trying to fit this into the theme here of second half improving over first half. I guess I wanna get a sense of whether products is expected to grow at all sequentially or is this all coming from the license and royalty bucket?

Yes, we are expecting our product revenue to go up sequentially.

Okay, and can you characterize whether there's, I assume there's very little if any persist revenues in there, but how about toggle versus high density STT? Is there any pickup in the high density stuff or is it all toggle?

Well, I think as we mentioned, we do expect high density STT products to ramp up as well in the next half. Okay,

fair enough. Sanjeev, maybe a kind of a multi-part question, you're kind of looking at some of your major projects that are recognized in the license and royalty bucket or specifically the RadHard projects in contract you announced I think last week maybe. Why do we think about the revenue stream here going forward comparing it to what we've seen over the past year and a year and a half or so? And then how long do these contracts, I think you've talked about three of them, how long do they go on for?

Yeah, how are you doing Richard, thank you. You know, with our RadHard revenue as you have talked in the past, it is always a little bit lumpy, but we have talked about two RadHard projects right now. One is the ongoing one where we are building out a HADOC 64 megabit STT MRAM for Honeywell and that project is basically reaching a point where I think Honeywell would be ready to qualify those devices once they complete processing in the individual fabs. As far as the QuickLogic project is concerned, building out this strategic RadHard FPGA, it is a project in several phases. So this is the next phase that has been renewed. Basically as QuickLogic announced, it's $5.2 million. AvispnShare is $1.8 million that we announced in the press release. And we expect you to continue this project going forward. What this covers so far is just the design part. We still need to go ahead and build the device and then characterize it and bring it to production. I think those phases will get funded as we keep moving forward. But for now, the funding on this phase is simply to complete the design.

Okay, is that something that lasts through the end of the year specifically to the strategic RadHard contract or does it extend beyond that?

It extends into Q1 as well, Richard.

Okay, okay, fair enough then. Maybe touching on the Persist product line, some nice commentary here. I just want to get a sense of how do we think of the scale of the revenue potential over the next several quarters relative to the product revenues you had today? Obviously, hopefully the building nicely on what space you have in toggle so far. Why do we think about the potential for the design when you have in those that you're expecting to close on soon? Can we get to revenue level in say a couple of years that's half of what toggle is doing today or any ways you characterize how we can try to quantify and build our models for this new product family?

So without giving any guidance, Richard, using Anuj's phrase. Yes, that is our desire, right? We would like to reach toggle type or 50% of toggle type revenues over here in the next couple of years. We will start converting some of the design towards the second half of the year, more probably towards the end of early 2025. So I think meaningful revenue would be only in 2025, but there will be some recognition in 2024 as well.

Okay, fair enough. I think that's all the questions I mean. I will jump it along guys, thank you.

Thanks, Richard.

Thank you. And a fair reminder, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, simply press

star one one to get in the queue. And as I

see no further questions in the queue, I will conclude the Q&A and conference for today. Thank you to all who participated and you may now disconnect. Thank you.