Everspin Technologies, Inc. (MRAM) Earnings Call Transcript

Good afternoon, and welcome to Everspin Technologies Second Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Monica Gould, Investor Relations for Everspin.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Everspin released results for the second quarter 2026 ended June 30th, 2026, this afternoon after market close. I'm Monica Gould, Investor Relations for Everspin. And with me on today's call are Sanjeev Aggarwal, President and Chief Executive Officer; and Bill Cooper, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin the call, I would like to remind you that today's discussion may contain 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 MRAM 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 10-K 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 are based on the information available as of the date hereof and are subject to further review by Everspin and its 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 that the financial results for the 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 definitions and reconciliations of GAAP net income to non-GAAP net income, which provide additional details. A copy of the press release is posted on the Investor Relations section of Everspin's website at www.everspin.com. And now I would like to turn the call over to Everspin's President and CEO, Sanjeev Aggarwal. Sanjeev, please go ahead.

Thank you, Monica, and thanks, everyone, for joining us on the call today. We are pleased to report second quarter revenue of $18.7 million and non-GAAP EPS of $0.11. These results reflect the highest revenue quarter in Everspin's history, which exceeded our guidance range on both the top and bottom line, driven by strong product revenue growth and the $40 million agreement we announced with a U.S. prime contractor on our last earnings call. During the quarter, we began to recognize nonproduct revenue under the 2.5-year agreement. As a reminder, Everspin is a subcontractor on an existing prime contract and is providing engineering services to develop and qualify Toggle MRAM process technology capabilities for U.S. defense industrial-based customers. In addition to this new contract, we also recorded strong product revenue growth, which rose 38% year-over-year and was up 9% sequentially. This growth was driven by strength in industrial automation, energy management and aerospace and defense applications. Growth in Industrial and Energy Management was driven by a continued recovery in customer demand, particularly in Japan and Europe, respectively. In aerospace and defense, we saw continued broad-based growth across our customer base, including several low earth orbit customers, who are expanding the mission profile, where Everspin MRAM delivers long-term reliability for mission-critical applications. Recently, Astro Digital selected Everspin's PERSYST 64-megabit STT-MRAM for use on an upcoming Raven Bus Geosynchronous Earth Orbit or GEO satellite mission. Our MRAM is deployed as the primary fail-safe memory for the system boot memory, which stores the essential code needed in case of power loss and fast access to initialize spacecraft electronics during start-up or recovery. As we noted last quarter, our $14.6 million contract with a DoD contractor to develop a sustainment plan for our MRAM manufacturing facilities to provide continuous onshore MRAM capabilities to their aerospace and defense customers is beginning to wind down. In the second quarter, we recognized $0.5 million in other income related to this contract and $13.3 million to date. We expect this business to continue to wind down over the coming quarters with estimated completion in the first half of 2027. Turning to some of our product development efforts, our first UNISYST family of MRAM products, the 256-megabit xSPI is on schedule to tape out later this year. As a reminder, this is a test chip designed on 16-nanometer FinFET CMOS at TSMC. Engineering samples are expected to be available in early 2027 with ramp to production later in the year. The UNISYST family of products will serve the high-density stand-alone NOR Flash market, which will expand our addressable market by approximately $3 billion. Our goal is to capture 5% to 10% of this market in the early years and then grow further. We are pleased to announce that our high-density 128 megabit and 256-megabit xSPI high-reliability parts were made available to our customers ahead of schedule. During the second quarter, we released 128-megabit high reliability parts to production. Subsequent to the quarter end, we released all SKUs of xSPI 256 megabit density to production, including high reliability parts. Customers now have these parts on hand to evaluate them in their designs. We kicked off our project with Microchip in April to build MRAM capabilities in their Gresham, Oregon fab. This project comprises 2 phases with the first phase focused on Toggle MRAM and the second phase on STT-MRAM. We are finalizing the installation of unique MRAM equipment and completing process gap analysis, if any, for the non-MRAM equipment. This project is on schedule with a goal to deliver the first qualified silicon in 18 to 24 months from project kickoff. We continue to see strong growth across our existing business, while executing on our product pipeline and developing solutions that will further expand Everspin's addressable market and drive long-term growth. One of these future opportunities is focused on expanding our TAM in the data center market, and we are planning to introduce some new products over the next 3 years based on the Compute Express Link or CXL interface. To provide a little background, in the memory hierarchy, there is 100x to 1,000x latency gap between storage with a latency of approximately 100 microseconds and main memory with a latency of approximately 100 nanoseconds. CXL attached random access memory can provide approximately 100x lower latency when compared to SSD solutions available today. We continue to advance our development work on CXL interface-based MRAM solutions, which will address the demand for nanosecond class persistent memory solutions, bringing storage closer to XPUs, enhancing compute and power efficiency, resulting in significant overall cost savings. We are targeting to improve XPU utilization from 60% to 70% currently to as much as 90% to 95%, especially from small rights, for example, meta or log data. We are currently working on developing proof-of-concept demo vehicles to validate the expected gains. Subsequent to quarter end, we signed a contract with a high-performance data interface and controller company to develop and provide CXL controller IP for MRAM. We are collaborating on an AMD UltraScale plus FPGA-based platform using the CXL controller IP under development to connect to Everspin MRAM DIMMs dual in-line memory modules. We plan to demonstrate this solution at the SNIA Developers Conference, or SDC in September. We also recently announced that we signed a memorandum of understanding with MaxLinear to evaluate the use of Everspin CXL attached MRAM with MaxLinear storage accelerators for next-generation storage and acceleration architectures. Together, we will assess opportunities to apply persistent bytaccessible, low-latency MRAM to storage functions such as metadata, log data, write buffers and caches with the goal of improving system performance, reliability, power efficiency and data persistence in next-generation storage architectures. By combining Everspin's industry-leading MRAM with MaxLinear's storage accelerators, we believe we can enable new persistent memory solutions for hyperscale cloud, AI infrastructure and enterprise Tier 1 customers. I will now turn it over to our CFO, Bill Cooper, who will walk you through our second quarter financials and third quarter 2026 guidance. Bill?

Thank you, Sanjeev. During the second quarter, we delivered record revenue of $18.7 million, up 42% year-on-year, exceeding our guidance range of $15.5 million to $16.5 million, driven by both strong product and nonproduct revenue growth. MRAM product sales, which include both Toggle and STT-MRAM revenue were $15.3 million, an increase of 38% over the second quarter of the prior year and up 9% sequentially. Licensing, royalty, engineering services and other revenue increased to $3.4 million from $2.1 million in Q2 of '25, primarily due to initial revenue recognition on the $40 million subcontract agreement with the U.S. prime contractor we announced on our last earnings call. Our GAAP gross margin increased to 53.9% from 51.3% in the second quarter of 2025 due to a favorable mix from higher nonproduct revenues. GAAP operating expenses were $14.5 million, up from $8.7 million in the second quarter of 2025 due primarily to litigation costs of $4 million and $1.1 million of nonrecurring engineering costs. Other income of $0.5 million decreased from $0.8 million in the prior year quarter as our $14.6 million contract with the DoD contractor begins to wind down. We recorded second quarter non-GAAP net income of $2.9 million or $0.11 per diluted share based on 25.9 million weighted average diluted shares outstanding. This exceeded our guidance range of non-GAAP net income of $0.00 per share to $0.03 per share and compares to non-GAAP net income of $0.7 million or $0.03 per share in the second quarter of 2025. Our reported non-GAAP results exclude the impact of stock-based compensation, litigation expenses as well as nonrecurring engineering expenses related to the build-out of the MRAM manufacturing line at Microchip's fab in Oregon. Our balance sheet remains strong and debt-free. We ended the quarter with cash and cash equivalents of $43.9 million, up $3.4 million from $40.5 million at the end of the prior quarter. Cash flow generated from operations decreased to $0.2 million for the second quarter, down from $0.6 million in the first quarter, primarily due to litigation costs. We believe our cash and cash equivalents are sufficient to meet our anticipated capital requirements to continue to execute upon our foundry services agreement with Microchip, our subcontract agreement with the U.S. prime contractor and continued investment in product development to support our future road map and enable the company to drive growth. Turning to guidance, we expect Q3 total revenue to be in the range of $19.5 million to $20.5 million and GAAP results per fully diluted share to be between a net loss of $0.05 per share to $0.10 per share. On a non-GAAP basis, we anticipate earnings between $0.10 and $0.15 per fully diluted share. These non-GAAP figures exclude the impact of litigation costs, NRE related to the Microchip MRAM line and stock-based compensation expense. In summary, we are pleased with our solid performance this quarter and remain committed to maintaining financial discipline, while focusing on scaling our business and converting additional design wins to revenue. And finally, I want to thank all of the Everspin employees for their continued contributions and supporting the company's growth. Operator, you may now open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Neil Young of Needham & Company.

The first question I wanted to ask was sort of on end market strength. So I know you guys cited the industrial automation, energy management and A&D as sort of the growth drivers. And you talked a lot about in the aerospace and defense being driven by LEO. But if I recall from some of your comments at conferences intra-quarter, I thought you guys talked a little bit about drones and maybe some strength you're seeing there. So maybe if you could just expand on anything that you're seeing outside of the LEO satellites within defense and yes. Thanks.

Thanks, Neil. What I would say is, certainly, right, we continue to engage in that sector. We haven't announced any particular specific deals on that area. And certainly, we still see very healthy demand across all segments of the business.

And then the second one I wanted to ask was about the $40 million contract. So last quarter, you only had about, if I remember correctly, 2 months of that was recognized in the quarter.

That's right.

So should we expect maybe another step-up now in 3Q that's a full quarter? Or is it not going to scale sort of in an evenly manner?

Yes, that's correct. It won't necessarily scale in a very linear manner. So I would expect to see nonproduct in the similar area from Q2 to Q3.

Our next question comes from the line of Richard Shannon of Craig-Hallum.

Maybe I'll ask a way of thinking about the last question more directly here in terms of the guidance for the quarter here and thinking about it holistically here, I'd love to get a sense of the degree to which products versus licensing will be growing here. And I just want to -- I guess, I'd also love to get a sense of the -- quantify the amount of contribution in the second quarter from the $40 million contract so we can convey that over the third quarter as well. Let's start with that one.

Yes. Richard, a couple of things. I would say, yes, definitely, the significant majority of the nonproduct revenue did come from the new $40 million subcontract and some of the revenue that was recognized for that. But as Neil rightly pointed out, it was only for a partial quarter. And then in terms of, again, as we go forward, it won't necessarily be linear. And so we'll see possibly some sort of more -- something more like a bell curve as well.

Fair enough then. As I oftentimes ask here, I noticed in the second quarter, your product gross margins were a bit lower than the first quarter and kind of similar to the range you had in most of 2025. I want to get a sense of kind of the forward outlook there. Is this kind of the baseline to think? Or can we get back towards that 50% level? Just kind of high level, how do you think about that?

Yes. Good question. So what I would say is definitely saw some headwinds in product costs, both in terms of -- in Q2. And so what we've always guided is, hey, we expect product gross margins to kind of be in that mid to upper 40s range. And then in total, we expect the company to be north of 50% for total gross margins.

So Richard, just to add a little bit to that, right? We did see some headwinds like Bill was saying, from price increases that we saw on the back end. And I think that is impacting or directly showing up in the gross margins for our product revenue. So even though we might have made improvements from Q1 to Q2, some of them are lost in the price increases that we see with the back end. And by back end, I mean, packaging and [indiscernible] test in -- at the OSATs.

That sounds like a sustainable dynamic here as well that you don't expect to improve anytime soon. Is that fair, Sanjeev?