Silicom Ltd

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Silicon First Quarter 2022 Results Conference Call. All participants are at present in listen-only mode. Following management's formal presentation, instructions will be given for the question and answer session. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. You should have all received by now the company's press release. If you have not received it, please contact Silicon's Investor Relations Team at GK Investor and Public Relations at 1-212-378 or view it in the news section of the company's website, www.silicone-usa.com. I would now like to hand over the call to Mr. Ehud Hauf of GK Investor Relations. Mr. Hauf, would you like to begin, please?

Yeah, thank you, Operator. I would like to welcome all of you to Silicon's first quarter 2022 results conference call. Before we start, I'd like to draw your attention to the following safe harbor statements. This conference call contains projections or other forward-looking statements regarding future events or the future performance of the company. These statements are only predictions and may change as time passes. Silicon does not assume any obligation to update that information. Actual event or results may differ materially from those projected, including as a result of our increasing dependency for substantial revenue growth on a limited number of customers in the evolving cloud-based SD-WAN, NFC, and edge markets, Given the extent to which solutions are adopted by these markets, the likelihood that we will rely increasingly on customers which provide solutions in these evolving markets, resulting in increasing dependence on a small number of larger customers, difficulty in commercializing and marketing silicone products and services, maintaining and protecting brand accommodations, protection of intellectual property, competition, disruption to our manufacturing and development, along with general disruption to the entire world economy relating to the spread of the novel coronavirus, and other factors identified in the documents filed by the company with the SEC. In addition, following the company's disclosure of non-GAAP financial measures in today's earnings release, such non-GAAP financial measures will be discussed during this call. Such non-GAAP measures are used by management to make strategic decisions, forecast future results, and evaluate the company's current performance. Managing believes that the presentation of these non-GAAP financial measures is useful to investors' understanding and assessment of the company's ongoing cooperation and prospects for the future. Unless otherwise stated, it should be assumed that financial discussions in this conference call will be on a non-GAAP basis. Non-GAAP financial measures discussed by Managing are provided as additional information to investors in order to provide them with an alternative method for assessing our financial conditions and open results. These measures are not in accordance with or substitute for GAAP. A full reconciliation of non-GAAP to GAAP financial measures is included in today's earnings release, which you can find on Silicon's website. And with this now, let me introduce the people we have on the line today. Mr. Sheikha Obach, the CEO, Mr. Liron Eisenman, COO, and Mr. Iran Gilad, CFO. Sheikha will begin with an overview of the results, followed by Iran, who will provide the analysis of the financials. We will then turn over the call to the questions and answer session. And with that, I would now like to hand over the call to Shaiki. Shaiki, please.

Thank you, Ehud. I would like to welcome all of you to our financial results conference call discussing our first quarter 2022 results. I would first like to welcome Liron Eisenman to our call for the first time. As of July 1st, He will transition to the position of president and CEO, replacing me, and I will become executive vice chairman of the board. Over the past six years, as part of a carefully structured long-term transition plan, I have worked closely with Liron, and I have every confidence in his ability to capitalize on our strong market position and bring Silicon to the next level in its long-term development. Liron has served in key executive roles within our company, currently a CEO and CEO of our North American subsidiary, Silicon Inc. Liron was the visionary behind Silicon's edge networking solutions strategy and was instrumental in driving the company to its leadership position in the SD-WAN edge platforms market. While I will continue to work very closely with Liron as part of my new role, I wish him much luck in the new position. Now to the results of the quarter. We are pleased with our start to 2022 with strong first quarter results demonstrating 11% revenue growth year over year to $32 million. This is at the center of our expected target range of between 31 and 33 million. We reported our 69th quarter of continued profitability with net income of $3 million and earning per share at 44 cents. We are all the more pleased to continue demonstrating growth despite a continued background of significant component shortages and tight supply chains, which are significant headwinds, and the impact is being strongly felt across our entire industry. It is clear that given the continued high market demand, which is well in excess of supply, analysts do not expect the shortage to abate during the current year. We continue to place significant effort into maximizing what we're able to manufacture and deliver, meeting as much of the high demand for our products as possible. And I will further address the efforts were taken later on in the call. And indeed, the exceptionally strong market demand is broad and is across our full product range. This includes our server adapters, SD-WAN slash edge devices, as well as in 5G slash O-RAN products. This has now led to the highest ever backlog in Silicon's history. And this underlies my optimism that we have a significant runway of expected growth ahead of us. Given such high market demand, and record backlog levels on one hand, and the component shortages on the other to support expected product sales, we took the strategic decision to significantly increase our inventory levels. As you may notice, our inventory today stands at about $95 million, which is an increase of almost $20 million in one quarter. Using our strong cash position to build our inventory levels to support the current demand, while protecting us from shortages and non-commits by chip vendors will continue to remain a strategic priority for us. Our ability to do this is a significant competitive advantage for us. It allows us to serve our existing customer base, delivering products which are not easily available today, while attracting new customers and new business. I believe that in today's market, this strategy will provide the highest long-term return on our existing cash position. We continue to capitalize on the trends of disaggregation and decoupling, which are among the most significant transitions of IT architecture in recent history. The markets to which these trends play into are the fast-growing SD-WAN market and the developing 5G ORAN market. These are both key strategic markets in which we continue to demonstrate and build on our very strong capabilities and positioning. The SD-WAN market today contributes tens of millions of dollars to our revenues and is in a growth phase, while the 5G Oran market is still in the early introduction phase. Our ongoing success in SD-WAN makes us optimistic about our potential in the 5G Oran market which have been endorsing the disaggregated and decoupling approach. Our existing wins, our highest ever backlog, combined with the potential opportunities in our pipeline, underlie our optimism that our achievements so far are just the tip of the iceberg. I would like to discuss some of the new recent wins we announced. In February, we added a new tier one European telco customer to our growing list of top tier telco clients. This new customer selected a customized version of our edge networking platform and placed a $1 million purchase order forecasting a ramp up to an annual approximate run rate of $5 million per year. We won this design win through our partnership with a leading provider of SD-WAN software, we chose our hardware as the highest performance complement to its next-generation offerings. This follows our May 2021 design win with the global telco giant Telefonica and a few other design wins with US Tier 1 telcos and service providers. The win confirms our strong positioning in the SD-WAN ecosystem and demonstrates the competitive advantages of our edge network solutions. Strategically, It emphasizes the value of our strong cooperation and partnerships with many SD-WAN software vendors in the current era of hardware and software decoupling. Last month, we announced a major edge networking design win from an existing customer, a leading U.S. communications service provider for customized high-runner edge networking products. We delivered $3 million in equipment for the project's first phase, and received second-phase purchase orders totaling a further $3 million to be delivered this year. The customer forecasts that the total value of the design will reach approximately $15 million. This is another demonstration of the proven ability of our edge products to increase network throughput and decrease latency, which are key differentiating advantages for us. I'd like to provide more color on how we've been addressing the component shortage. We have already been living under the issue for a year, and our achievements of continued revenue growth, stable gross margins, and continued profit growth under these conditions demonstrate that we are overcoming many of the problems successfully, which is why we remain optimistic. The steps we've taken and continue to take are as follows. One, as you've seen, we have leveraged our strong balance sheet to build up our inventory of raw materials. These are backed by customers' existing POs and commitments, buying available stock of components, both from the vendors and in the free market, and expediting delivery if need be. Two, we are working with customers to optimize product availability and providing them with alternative solutions. For example, replacing products of which the delivery is challenging with other products with better availability. And finally, we've been redesigning our products to use more available components to achieve optimized availability. Obviously, when designing new products, our current initial criteria is optimizing for component availability. Moving forward, while we predict that the shortages will persist for the coming year, despite this, given that our experience and success in dealing with the issue, combined with a very strong market demand for our connectivity solutions and our broad range and increasingly large design wins, all support our expectations for continued, solid, double-digit growth rates for 2022 and beyond. Which brings me to our guidance for the second quarter of 2022. For the second quarter of 2022, we expect revenues at between $33 million and $35 million, which at the midpoint represents growth of approximately 12%, over that of the second quarter of 2021. I would like to note that these growth rates represent our estimates as to the level of our success in indeed mitigating the component situation. Had there been no such situation, our forecast would have been much higher. In summary, we remain very pleased with our performance to date, and 2022 has started well. This is despite the supply chain difficulties and shortages. Even despite the shortages, we continue to stand by our expectations that given the current strong demand in the market, we expect to see double-digit compounded revenue growth for the coming few years, which will accelerate once the global supply chain issues are finally resolved. Our expectations are built on the base of our recent major design wins. The scales of each is well ahead of what we have traditionally experienced. Furthermore, our backlog is at the highest level it has historically been for silicon, and all this provides us with strong revenue visibility over many quarters and years. More broadly, Our focus on some of the fastest growing markets in the networking space, which are developing out of the trends which we had correctly predicted and positioned ourselves for, as well as our current long and deep pipeline, makes us further optimistic. With that, I will now hand over the call to Eran for a detailed review of the quarter's results. Eran, please go ahead.