Xperi Inc.

Everyone, thank you for standing by. Welcome to Xperia's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the call will be open for questions. I would now like to turn the call over to Mike Iberg, Xperia Head of Investor Relations. Mike, please go ahead.

Thank you. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us as Xperia reports its second quarter 2023 financial results. With me on today's call are John Kirchner, Chief Executive Officer, and Robert Anderson, Chief Financial Officer. In addition to today's earnings release, there is an earnings presentation which you can access along with this webcast on our investor relations website at investor.expery.com. Before we begin, I'd like to provide a few reminders. First, I would like to note that unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are to the same quarter of the prior year. In addition, the second quarter of 2022 was calculated on a carve-out basis prior to Xperia's separation from Xperia Holding Corporation on October 1st, 2022. Xperia Holding Corporation is now known as Audia. Second, today's discussion contains forward-looking statements that are predictions, projections, or other statements about future events which are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and they're subject to risks, uncertainties, and changes in circumstances. For more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from what we discussed today, please refer to the risk factors and MD&A section in our SEC filings including our most recent Form 10-Q. Please note that the company does not intend to update or alter these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances arising after this call. Third, we refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures which are detailed in the earnings release and accompanied by reconciliations to their most directly comparable GAAP measures, which can be found in the Investor Relations section of our website. Lastly, a replay of this conference call will be available on our website shortly at the conclusion of this call. I would now like to turn the call over to Xperia CEO John Kirchner.

Thank you, Mike, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on our second quarter 2023 earnings call. We're pleased to deliver another quarter of significant strategic progress and solid financial results. I'll let Robert walk you through the details in just a moment. But let me touch on revenue and growth rates. Revenue in the quarter was $127 million, up 1% from the prior year. But as some of you may recall, last year's Q2 included a significant one-time benefit from a mobile imaging customer, impacting consumer electronics revenue. When excluding this benefit, year-over-year growth would have been in excess of 10% due to strong growth in media platform and connected car. Our first half revenue was consistent with the growth rate projections we discussed at our investor day last September, with media platform and connected car growing rapidly, consumer electronics showing modest growth, and pay TV down mid-single digits. The net result of our first half performance, coupled with initiatives underway, is that we remain on track and expect to achieve our full year outlook. Lastly, we're pleased to see strategic momentum continue in key growth areas of our business, particularly in media platform and connected car. Our efforts are focused on four key growth areas, and we're making significant progress in each. These are connected TV advertising, where we offer our TiVo operating system to power smart TVs and monetize ad supported viewing, in-cabin entertainment, where our DTS AutoStage combines broadcast radio, internet metadata, and video to enhance the automotive experience. In-cabin monitoring, where DTS AutoSense combines our imaging technology and machine learning to improve automotive safety, comfort, and convenience. And IPTV, where we offer our industry-leading content-first video over broadband platform. Each of these markets is expected to expand rapidly over the next several years as internet connectivity, streaming, and consumer expectations cause entertainment to be more ubiquitous and advertising dollars shift to new delivery methods. I'd like to walk you through some of our significant accomplishments since our last earnings call. Within media platform, earlier today we announced that Sharp is the second TV OEM to launch TVs powered by TiVo. We're excited to be partnering with Sharp on a multi-year, multi-million unit relationship that is expected to ship TVs starting in Europe next year. In addition, we signed a third smart TV OEM to integrate TiVo OS. We now have three TV OEMs with plans to ship product in 2024. And importantly, we expect to have distribution in both Europe and the US. Our pipeline remains robust. and we anticipate having other OEMs under contract by the end of this year. This is a tremendous accomplishment and strong validation of our strategy. As outlined on last quarter's call, we expect Vestel to have TVs powered by TiVo in the European market for the upcoming holiday season. These initial shipments are an important first step. However, the monetization of these TVs will build as our footprint grows and users engage with content. In addition, Sony, a longtime partner of Xperia, will deploy our web browser technology within their Smart TV lineup, enabling content search and discovery and creating an additional pathway to add supported content monetization over time. Overall, we're very pleased with the progress of our independent media platform strategy and its long-term growth prospects. Our connected car business also saw continued momentum in the quarter. As you've likely seen, the automotive industry is making extensive investments in making cars more connected, as internet connectivity is dramatically altering the in-cabin entertainment experience. As part of this transformation, our DTS AutoStage in-cabin entertainment platform is expanding rapidly. AutoStage is now deployed in more than 4 million cars across five automotive brands globally, and we expect the momentum to continue. BMW's decision to deploy DTS AutoStage video service, powered by TiVo, in their 5 Series later this year is a good example of our progress. In addition to the initial success of AutoStage, we expect this combined footprint to grow rapidly, driven by model and geographic expansion, creating the long-term opportunity for advertising monetization and feature upselling. To further improve the user experience, we recently signed agreements with broadcast groups representing over 4,000 radio stations across North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. This extensive network of broadcasters will enhance the in-cabin experience by sending additional metadata that Autostage will combine with internet content to enrich the user experience. Enhancements include additional content such as album art, lyrics, personalized recommendations, and a real-time guide showing what is currently playing on other stations. Turning to DTS AutoSense, our in-cabin driver and occupant monitoring system continued its momentum during the quarter. We signed a new contract with a top three automotive OEM with plans to go into initial production in late 2024 for the 2025 model year. We now have design wins from six automotive brands encompassing over 80 different models. In addition to these next-gen platforms, we continue to make progress in our well-established HD radio business. This quarter, our HD radio solution has been launched on more than 10 additional models for the North American market, increasing our share of new car production. The in-cabin entertainment and monitoring markets are expected to double over the next five years, and the success we're seeing today sets the stage for meaningful, long-term connected car revenue growth. Within the pay TV business, IPTV continues to make steady progress, helping to mitigate the secular decline in linear pay TV subscribers. Our IPTV solutions had another consecutive quarter of healthy double digit subscriber growth, adding more than 150,000 net new subscribers in Q2. The continued momentum in IPTV is being driven by new broadband service providers offering our IPTV services, And at the same time, customers increasing the velocity of IPTV adoption as they package our solution together with their broadband services to create a more attractive bundle. In addition to collecting a monthly subscriber fee for IPTV, we also monetize the viewing of ad supported content through TiVo Plus, where we offer nearly 160 channels of free ad supported television content. As the market is shifting towards more fast content being consumed, Our video service provider customers are increasingly offering TiVo Plus to expand the entertainment options to their subscribers, whether broadband only or video. Lastly, our momentum continues with the expansion of TiVo Plus availability across 25 additional video service providers during the quarter, bringing more scale to this element of our monetization footprint. In our Discovery product line, we license search and recommendation technology to our customers. enhancing their ability to drive consumer engagement. During the quarter, we significantly expanded our relationship with a top five U.S. video service provider, increasing our footprint by millions of additional households and demonstrating the value of our deep heritage of applying AI to personalized content discovery. Turning to consumer electronics, we signed several renewals with major consumer electronics manufacturers. These license agreements allow consumer electronics manufacturers to continue integrating DTS audio and PlayFi wireless technologies into their products for the next several years, validating the market appeal and longevity of these innovative technologies. In addition, we celebrated the 30th anniversary of DTS, our immersive audio technology first deployed in the 1993 classic film Jurassic Park, now pervasive across consumer electronics and mobile devices. Turning to Perceive, we're continuing down the path we set out last quarter and expect first revenue this year against the backdrop of tremendous interest in large-scale AI. We continue to make progress in our development efforts to scale our compression technology and are engaged with customers and partners on its applications deploying large language models, or LLMs. Recognizing the magnitude of this opportunity, We're exploring options for strategic partnering to help accelerate our path to market. We expect to report additional progress over the coming quarters. In summary, it was a successful quarter from many perspectives. We continue to hit specific milestones that both validate our solutions and reaffirm our strategy. We remain on track to achieve our strategic objectives and long-term financial targets. With that, I'll turn the call over to Robert to discuss our financials.

Robert? Thanks, John. As Mike mentioned earlier, unless otherwise noted, all comparisons are against the same quarter in the prior year. Total revenue for the second quarter was $127 million, up 1% from the prior year. Last year's Q2 included a significant revenue benefit from a mobile imaging customer. Excluding this one-time benefit, our Q2 year-over-year revenue growth would have been greater than 10%. Pay TV, our largest revenue category, was down 4%, an improvement compared to the 6% decline we saw in Q1. Strong growth in IPTV during the quarter helped to mitigate declines in our core Pay TV product lines. Consumer electronics was down 20%. primarily due to the one-time revenue event last year. Nonetheless, we saw solid traction and audio renewals during the quarter for both DTS and PlayFi that helped to bolster the overall performance within consumer electronics. Connected Car was up 13%, primarily due to high HD unit volume, HD radio unit volume, as car manufacturers increased production following several years of supply chain issues. As our customer programs advance, we also saw a doubling of the combined revenue for our AutoSense and AutoStage solutions. Media Platform was up 149%, with more than half of this increase due to growth and monetization, and the rest due to incremental revenue from the viewed acquisition. I've included a slide on the first half of revenue results And although I won't go through this in detail, our first half performance by business unit is broadly consistent with the expected growth rates we articulated at our investor day last year, and has us well within the range of our full year revenue outlook. Our non-GAAP gross margin for the quarter was $97 million, or 76%, a decrease of approximately 300 basis points from last year, driven primarily by a shift in margin contribution from consumer electronics to media platform due to the one-time high margin mobile imaging customer revenue that occurred last year. Non-GAAP adjusted operating expense for the quarter was $98 million, up 5% from the prior year's carve-out financials, but down 1% sequentially. Our adjusted EBITDA was $5 million, resulting in an adjusted EBITDA margin of 4%. After accounting for tax and interest expense, our non-GAAP loss per share was $0.09. Moving to the balance sheet, the company ended the quarter with $112 million in cash and cash equivalents, a slight increase from Q1. Our cash flow from operations in the quarter was a usage of $2 million due to modest changes in working capital. We expect operating cash flow in the second half of the year to be positive, while the full year is currently expected to be a usage of cash, primarily due to an uptick in DSOs and an increase in unbilled receivables from strong execution and multi-year deals. Overall, we remain comfortable that we have sufficient cash to run the business. Turning to our financial outlook for 2023, we are reaffirming our previous guidance ranges and providing the following commentary. We continue to expect full-year revenue to be in the range of $510 to $540 million and adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the range of 6% to 10%. We are lowering our full-year non-GAAP tax estimate from $20 to $25 million to approximately $20 million. Our tax expense is not linear throughout the year, due primarily to the timing of foreign withholding and certain federal and state taxes. So, while the non-GAAP tax was approximately $5 million in the first half, we expect the second half to be approximately $15 million, distributed equally between the two remaining quarters. Basic share count is still expected to average $43 million for the year, and fully diluted share count is expected to average approximately $50 million for the year. That concludes our prepared remarks.

Let's now open the call for questions. Operator.

At this time, I'd like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press Start, then the number 1 for your telephone keypad. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster.

Your first question comes from Steven Frankel for Rosenblatt Securities.

Steven, please go ahead.

Good afternoon. John, could we just get a little more detail on last year's mobile imaging transaction? Was that an upfront payment? Was that a catch-up? How should I think about that anomaly?

It was the resolution of a... a contractual matter that dated back a few years prior, coupled with the execution of a go-forward license.

And then to focus on more important things going forward, it sounds like you made some good progress with TiVo OS, and you talked about entering the North American market. Could you tell us whether that's from the new OEM or one of the two that you had going into the quarter that now tells you they're going to North America?

I think we're going to end up with multiple players in North America next year, Steve, and I think that's all I really can say for competitive and strategic reasons.

What are you learning on the monetization front from the pay TV business that maybe helps the way you're thinking about TVOS as it rolls out? Or is it monetizing at this early stage where you think it should be?

Well, I think there's a couple of aspects as you think about long-term monetization and TVOS that are important. One is you need you know, meaningful video service infrastructure that, you know, we have in spades serving up tens of millions of households through our pay TV business and IPTV. We also have quite a bit of history and experience, you know, in looking at, you know, data that's coming off these TVs through, you know, IPTV and our various software layers that sit, you know, on various boxes in the field. And I think that will enable us to to prepare various data segments that are of interest and we know from direct experience to, you know, to our advertising partners. So I think, you know, the back end infrastructure that is essential to, you know, turning on, you know, the monetization engine and then obviously scaling it and accelerating it over time is really, I think, something we have been working on for some time and is really a reflection of the business we have. And the key issue for us is getting footprint out there, which I think as you see multiple players in the market in 24, that build will begin to ramp. And certainly as we exit 24 and get into 25, we expect that monetization to be coming online at faster rates. And I think it positions us well to have a slice of this market that is both attractive and generates good long-term growth as well as very attractive margins over time.

Great. I'll jump back in the queue. Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of Hamed Korsan with BWS Financial.

Hamed, please go ahead.

Hi. So the first question I had was, from a competitive landscape in auto, what are you seeing in the form of auto sense? And are you losing any share competitively to anyone? And how do you feel about winning more share and the timing of when all of this becomes into revenue for you?

Well, I think kind of responding in reverse order, I think it will build over time as our existing design wins find their way into various models across the customers we have. As we said, we have nearly 80 models that are now contracted to support or in-cabin monitoring technology. And I think we have some very unique technology and solutions. And as a result, I think we are routinely winning shootouts for broader OMS or in-cabin monitoring. Occupancy monitoring, there's a bunch of different terms that the industry uses around it. And so I think the long-term prognosis for the business is good. And so I don't see us out there you know, really losing business. As a competitive matter, certainly there are others in the space. There certainly are also some, you know, some tier ones and tier twos that are, you know, working on potentially building solutions. But one of the unique things that we bring to the game is we bring decades of detailed imaging expertise through all the work that we've done around facial recognition and body posture that partially comes out of our substantial mobile imaging work for many, many years. And so we have a bedrock of both data as well as expertise in that space. And I think we've been working for a couple of years now to apply it to the car. And I think it is showing very well as we're in the competitive pitching process.

Okay. And then looking out into the second half, Would the revenue breakdown look almost similar to what the first half looked like? Or are you expecting some sort of pickup in one of the four segments?

Well, I think when we look, this is Robert, when we look at the revenue breakdown for the remainder of the year, we expect that the profile, or rather that the timing of the revenue in the year is actually pretty similar to last year. So if one was going to kind of forecast out the revenue for Q3 and Q4 in aggregate, I think it follows the pattern from Q3 and Q4 as a percentage basis. I think if you were raising last year by about 5% or 6%, you'd get there. And in terms of that mix, I think it's what we're getting at. We've seen kind of continued progress along what we expected strength in the automotive connected car business as well as media platform. And I think even for the remainder of the year, probably contribution from consumer electronics.

Okay. And then one clarifying question is regarding SHARP, is that purely for Europe or will that broaden out to other regions?

It starts initially in Europe, and I think we'll have more to say about broadening that relationship over time.

Okay. Thank you. Your next question comes from Matthew Galinko from the Maxine Group.

Matthew, please go ahead.

Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. I think the idea of a North American entry for Tivo OS is maybe a little unexpected relative to maybe what you've signaled in the past. So I guess I'm curious what's changed in either the market or your positioning that the U.S. has become, you know, or North America has become more addressable than, you know, other regions?

Hey, Matt, I don't know that it necessarily has been any recent event. We've been in pipeline discussions for some time, you know, kind of globally with different countries. different partners. I think there is, however, a wide and growing recognition that, you know, for the brands who, you know, don't have the resources perhaps to build their own, and, you know, we believe it's a substantial amount of TVs that exist in the North American and European markets, that, you know, an independent media platform becomes really important and one that can you know, provide the benefits that TiVo OS offers. And that is, you know, the brand's ability to own their customer, to share the data, to have a content neutral platform that really is all about driving the best user experience and therefore monetization, and then ultimately participating in the back end economics of the long tail of the TV. And I think that value proposition is something that has a lot of resonance. And I think, you know, some have been sitting on the sidelines kind of watching us further develop. But I think it's very clear now that we're coming to market with multiple players. And as we have more success, I think that imbues ever more confidence. And I think the quality of the solution that we're showing, I think, has also been instrumental in getting people comfortable that, you know, we've got a solution that'll make it easy to find, watch, and enjoy what consumers want. And the higher the engagement, with content, the higher the potential revenue monetization and sharing and partnership with these TV brands. So in short, I think it's what we expected. I think in some ways, maybe it's moving even more quickly than we expected, but we still have a lot of work to do. But we are very, very excited about the trajectory and where it will end up here in the next couple of years. Completely consistent with what we more or less outlined last September in our investor day and likely ends up better sooner.

Got it. Thank you.

And then can you maybe touch on or expand on what a strategic partner might do for you and perceive in terms of accelerating towards the LLM opportunity? Can you cover that in a little bit more detail?

Sure. As you look to the LLM market and the wide-scale deployment of these larger AI solutions, I think it's very clear, just given the size and scale of that opportunity, that there's going to be a need for additional resources, capabilities, you know, perhaps distribution scale, financial resources, and whatnot, if you're really going to tap in to maximizing the value of the technology. And I think it's, you know, that recognition that I think has made the conversation interesting with strategic partners. And as we're engaged in various conversations, I think, you know, there's a tremendous amount of interest in the fundamental challenge, which is if you want to bring the goodness to consumers en masse, how do you deal with the inherent scalability challenges of these massively large models? And I think Perceive is very much focused on advanced compression technology that can address that challenge and ultimately bring ever higher performance and much greater power efficiency to bear. And I think that is going to be essential to folks as one looks to scale this. So, you know, in short, I think it's a recognition that the market opportunity is vast, and we as a technology player with part of the solution, you know, likely, you know, will be best off as we work with a strategic partner or partners to bring that technology to market.

Okay. Thank you.

At this time, I'd like to remind everyone in order to ask a question, press start and the number one on your telephone keypad.

Your next question comes from Nick Zangler with Stephen.

Nick, please go ahead.

Yeah. Hey, guys. Is there any way to, well, congrats on the new relationships here. Is there any way to size up I guess the three TV relationships that you have now just in totality or maybe relative to each other, or maybe said another way, do these relationships that you've cemented thus far get you to that 7 million active account number that you have targeted for 2025, or do you still feel that you might need a few more wins?

No. With what we have, I think what we laid out is certainly achievable. And I think, you know, I think we'll have more to say on this topic, Nick, as we get, you know, a couple quarters down the way.

Gotcha. And then I did want to ask about the – and sorry if you already discussed it, but the commentary within media platform that Sony is going to deploy a content browser – If we're talking Sony TVs, you know, my understanding was that, you know, the Google TV OS is exclusively utilized on Sony. So I'm just curious if you could flesh out what exactly is happening here. You mentioned another pathway to monetization. So just if you don't mind elaborating on that new relationship as well.

Sure. So Viewed, as you'll recall, we acquired them last year, has a web content browser. that has been deployed on various systems, including Android TVs. So it's the use of that in connection with their TVs. And I think it just is one more example of, let's call it, some of the value that we were able to gain through the VUTE acquisition.

Understood. Thanks very much, guys. Thanks, Nick. This concludes the Q&A session.

I'll now turn the call back over to the company for closing remarks.

Thanks, operator, and thank you, everyone, for joining today's call. We're excited about our continued strategic momentum and our solid operating performance. I'd like to thank our employees, customers, and partners for helping us continue to achieve our objectives, and we look forward to reviewing our Q3 results with you in early November. This concludes today's call.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.