QUALCOMM Incorporated

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Qualcomm fourth quarter and fiscal 2020 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press star, then the number two. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the numbers. please limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded November 4, 2020. The playback number for today's call is 877-660-6853. International callers, please dial 201-612-7415. The playback reservation number is 137-117-66. I would now like to turn the call over to Mauricio Lopez-Hedoyen, Vice President of Investor Relations. Mr. Lopez-Odoin, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. Today's call will include prepared remarks by Steve Molenkopf and Akash Palakawala. In addition, Christiana Mullen, Alex Rogers, and Don Rosenberg will join the question and answer session. You can access our earnings release and a slide presentation that accompanied this call on our Investor Relations website. In addition, this call has been webcast on Qualcomm.com, and a replay will be available on our website later today. During the call, we will use non-GAAP financial measures as defined in Regulation G, and you can find the related reconciliations to GAAP on our website. We will also make forward-looking statements, including projections and estimates of future events, business or industry trends, or business or financial results. Actual events or results could differ materially from those projected in our forward-looking statements. Please refer to our SEC filings, including our most recent 10-K once filed, which contain important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from the forward-looking statements. And now, to comments from Qualcomm's Chief Executive Officer, Steve Mollenkopf.

Thank you, Mauricio, and good afternoon, everyone. Fiscal 2020 was an extraordinary year, presenting both a unique set of opportunities as well as challenges. We achieved a number of significant accomplishments, including scaling 5G devices globally with our partners while navigating the sudden onset of the global pandemic. In March, with the safety of our employees as our top priority, we rapidly aligned our operations to a completely different work environment. We were able to limit the number of on-site essential workers while simultaneously executing on product commitments and driving our business forward. The challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic highlight the critical importance of our technology and products. I want to thank our 41,000 Qualcomm team members for their steadfast commitment to our mission of inventing and commercializing breakthrough wireless technologies. As you can see from our results, the early stages of the 5G ramp are well underway with our strategy playing out largely as expected. We delivered Q4, non-GAAP revenues of $6.5 billion and a record non-GAAP earnings of $1.45 per share, representing year-over-year growth of 35% and 86% respectively, both exceeding the high end of our guidance. QCT revenues of $5 billion were up 38% year-over-year. It's worth noting that our Q4 QCT revenue, a near record, included only a partial quarter impact from a large U.S. OEM customer. This strong result demonstrates the breadth of our customer traction. While our transition from a 4G leader to a 5G leader was faced with numerous challenges, our employees remained focused throughout. Since January 2016, confident in our ability to execute on the upcoming 5G ramp, we spent $30 billion to retire 25% of our shares at an average price of approximately $64.50, amplifying the benefits of the organic growth you are seeing today. As you can see in our results, we have successfully commercialized our innovation leadership and our product business through a combination of higher dollar share of content combined with significant 5G design wins with leading OEMs around the world. Our foundational 5G innovations, unmatched patent portfolio and ecosystem collaborations enable us to drive the industry forward to facilitate the rapid global adoption of 5G. Our continued innovation drives success and stability in our licensing business. All major handset OEMs are under license, and we now have over 110 5G agreements. In fiscal 20, our focus on innovation continued at an accelerated pace despite COVID-19 challenges. Year over year, invention disclosures were up over 60%, and 5G-related invention disclosures more than doubled. We continue to drive innovation advances in 5G through releases 17, 18, and beyond. which will enable the adoption of wireless technology broadly beyond smartphones and into other industries. We have sustained this focus despite unwarranted legal challenges, and we now look forward to continuing our decades-long commitment to fundamental transformative innovation. Over the years, we have built strong portfolios in several key areas that converge with and enable wireless systems and applications, such as multimedia, security, and artificial intelligence. Our proven ability to invent and commercialize leading technologies is the foundation of how we drive long-term value for our stockholders. The early success of our 5G rollout is a great testament to our strategy of investing well in advance of these large opportunities. 5G represents the single largest opportunity in our history, creating new opportunities to extend our leadership. This will continue to play out over many years as wireless disruption will impact many industries. As an example, several years ago, we identified RF as a unique transition opportunity to address many of the technical challenges of delivering a 5G experience. I am particularly proud of how the team has executed against this opportunity, creating a leadership position in a short period of time. In fiscal 20, we delivered $2.4 billion of RF front end revenue, up 60% year over year. Qualcomm is now one of the largest RF suppliers with design wins across all our premium-tier smartphone customers and with a long-term roadmap to continue to grow our RF leadership as 5G is adopted in other industries. Our 5G design wins continue to be powered by our RF front-end solutions, whether they support 4G, sub-6 millimeter wave, or both 5G bands, and whether they are in smartphones or other products, such as embedded modules for PCs, IoT solutions, or mobile hotspots. As we have in RF, we have built beachhead positions in both auto and IoT. Our scale enables us to make multiple profitable bets in areas where we expect a tailwind as each of these industry roadmaps adopts cellular technologies. As you can see taking place today in automotive, where we have emerged as a strategic technology partner to the automotive industry, with nearly all the major OEMs adopting our products. Next generation 5G telematics design wins, in addition to our 3G and 4G design wins, solidify our position as a leader in connected cars. We are also extending our mobile RF front end leadership into automotive, where 100% of our next generation 5G and a majority of our next generation 4G telematics design wins include our automotive qualified RF front end products. In addition, Our digital cockpit solutions, now in the third generation, enable best-in-class capabilities across premium, mid, and entry-tier solutions. Our automotive design wind pipeline is now approximately $8 billion, up from almost $6.5 billion at the start of the fiscal year, giving us great visibility into meeting the long-term revenue targets we provided at our analyst day last November. The automotive industry is transforming at an unprecedented rate, and we are incredibly well-positioned to lead the industry with a long-term opportunity to expand our dollar share of content in auto as we have done in smartphones. Turning to IoT, we are extending our IP investments from across the company into our portfolio of connected and non-connected products with a broad portfolio of technologies, including connectivity, lower power processing, and security. We are also diversified across multiple product areas and industry verticals as we have nearly 13,000 customers. In fiscal 20, we saw better than anticipated performance in IoT with strong revenue growth driven largely by demand in networking, retail, industrial, tracking, and utilities verticals. Our high performance Wi-Fi solutions continue to drive Wi-Fi access point toward record levels. And looking forward, our Wi-Fi continues to evolve. Our execution on Wi-Fi 6E has put Qualcomm into a leadership position. We've also brought wearable solutions to our smartphone OEMs, as well as the broader ecosystem of consumer product companies. Our inventions, technology, and roadmap have also enabled us to establish a leadership position in XR. With over 30 commercial devices, our Snapdragon XR solutions that connect physical and digital spaces are the consumer and enterprise platforms of choice. We have been driving the cost and performance curve of low power, high performance compute since our first launch of the Snapdragon in 2007. We are also investing in next generation infrastructure and edge compute, two areas today that we believe will create significant opportunities in several years. Our objective is to provide technology differentiation that will enable us to achieve a leadership position. As the cloud converges with the mobile internet, wireless networks are transforming and becoming virtualized. Beyond the cost and operational benefits for service providers, virtualization is enabling new service provider models where infrastructure is intersecting with digital services, such as you have seen with Rakuten and Jio. Turning to inference, with over 10 years of AI R&D and over 1 billion AI-capable devices enabled with our technology and fundamental assets such as low-power compute, process node leadership, and signal processing expertise, we are well-positioned to extend our smartphone AI leadership into growing applications such as data centers, edge appliances, and 5G infrastructure. Building on our modem and RF expertise, we recently announced our new 5G RAN platform offerings. These platforms will provide foundational technology for high-performance infrastructure and will accelerate the cellular ecosystem transition towards virtualized and interoperable radio access networks, a trend driven by 5G. Our expanded portfolio, which is scalable from macro to micro sites, will include integrated support for 5G millimeter wave and sub-6 gigahertz spectrum networks. across all key global bands. Together with our partners, we are helping to drive the VRAN transition with commercial products expected by calendar year 2023. In summary, with leading technology and intellectual property, a differentiated product roadmap and 5G, we are well positioned for a multi-year growth opportunity. I would now like to turn the call over to Akash.