Napatech A/S (NAPA) Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, and welcome to Napatech Q4 2020 Interim Management Statement. Today, I'm pleased to present the CEO, Ray Smets; and CFO, Heine Thorsgaard. Please go ahead with your meeting.

Good morning. I'm pleased to welcome you all to Napatech's Fourth Quarter 2020 Interim Management Statement Presentation. I'm Ray Smets, CEO of Napatech. I'm joined today by Heine Thorsgaard, our Chief Financial Officer. Today's Q4 2020 IMS was released earlier this morning on the OSE and is available on the Investor Relations page of our website at napatech.com. For your information, a recording of this webcast will also be available on the Napatech website as soon as possible later today. As always, we want to be available to answer your questions following the presentation today or any time via e-mail. We'll be conducting a Q&A session following our presentation, and we'll be taking your questions via text, which you can submit on the webcast page using the button below the presentation. Alternatively, we can take your questions on the phone. If you'd like to ask a question, follow the instructions on this slide. I would also like to invite you to our Capital Markets Day event planned for March 17 at 2:00 p.m. CET. This event will be virtual this year, and we're excited to have several key customers, partners and industry analysts who have agreed to speak to you. The event will also include a presentation by me and my team to paint a more complete picture of our progress and aspirations for 2021 and beyond. Please note that this presentation contains forward-looking statements that are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties. Our actual results may differ from those discussed in forward-looking statements. So now let's jump in. I plan to present a summary of our progress over the last few years, a summary of key financial achievements for Q4 and for full year 2020, an update about our business and market as well as a review of additional comments about recent key press announcements to give you further insight into how we are doing and potentially how we will be doing in the coming year. Heine will then provide a detailed review of our Q4 and full year 2020 financial results, and then I will close with our outlook for the full year 2020. I thought it would be a good place to start with a short retrospective of our business over the last few years as well as give you a perspective of which direction we are going. When I joined Napatech in 2018, my mission was to quickly make the needed changes and demonstrate our potential to build a growing and profitable tech business. These changes that we put in place brought us new opportunities, and our team has capitalized on them. We focused on our core competencies, with our FPGA software expertise. We streamlined our business to create operating leverage, and we recommitted ourselves to transparency and building trust. In 2019, we set realistic expectations, and then we strive to reach higher by executing a 3-pronged product strategy that both solidified our core product revenues while investing in new product innovation. As we gained momentum in that year, we achieved positive cash flow earlier than promised. But momentum kept building. Even in a year of many unexpected challenges, we kept our eye on the plan and steadfastly delivered on our goals, building new products, new partnerships and enabling new potential revenue streams. I believe our progress in 2020 has earned us a path to the next level of growth. So as you enter -- as we enter 2021, we will work hard to unlock higher growth. As with any technology, it takes time to build new revenue streams. But the recent design wins and announcements that we have made provide a perspective about how we are feeling about 2021 and beyond. We will provide a perspective about 2021 when we present our guidance, and we will offer our 3-year aspirations when we hold our Capital Markets Day event in March. Regarding our financial results for 2020, I'm happy to report Napatech delivered another year of solid performance. Our annual revenues grew 16% year-over-year. We delivered best-ever EBITDAC of DKK 21.9 million, way better than the DKK 1.4 million in 2019. And we delivered record free cash flow of DKK 33.6 million, a 174% improvement over 2019. We maintained great gross margins at more than 71%, which allowed us to turn in solid earnings of DKK 9.6 million, the best-ever profit for Napatech as a public company. As we have been demonstrating all year long, during a year of uncertainty and challenges due to the global pandemic, Napatech's products have resonated well with our target markets. Even when our customer lab visits were restricted due to COVID, we continue to find ways to add new business within this environment on top of the solid foundation built on both existing and new customers. In total and in summary, our results against our guidance in 2020 were notable. We solidly achieved revenues against our increased guidance that we raised during the second quarter IMS. We overachieved on margins. We delivered efficient operating costs, which is where we get our nice operating leverage that you've seen. We knocked the ball out of the park on EBITDAC and EBIT results against our guided goals. Overall, as we communicated in Q3, we were confident we would finish the year strong. We hope that our realistic results, combined with our transparency and communications, have resulted in even better trust that we are expecting as well as we can and executing. Now I'd like to walk you through Napatech's business highlights, quickly summarizing on what we do, how we target our market, the key customers we won in Q4 and an update on several of the key press releases we made since the last presentation. Napatech builds SmartNICs, which are the devices displayed in the middle of this slide. They are made to easily plug into any standard server, which are now the fundamental building blocks for all networks, clouds and data centers. These SmartNICs are built with a super powerful microprocessor called an FPGA, which, when combined with our software, accelerates applications across multiple segments such as cybersecurity, monitoring, infrastructure, cloud and edge and mobile. These application areas require more and more compute power to operate and perform faster and securely. The demand for higher performance compute for these applications creates demand for SmartNICs. But the real secret to our success is Napatech's software that runs on these SmartNICs, that delivers the real value to our customers. Napatech sits strategically at the intersection of the server and the application markets. Our position is to play in the high-end performance part of the market, where the FPGA-based SmartNIC technology is needed to run mission-critical, compute-intensive applications faster, more efficiently and more securely with unmatched performance. That is where Napatech has focused our expertise to catch and grow revenues. There is a growing problem in the market. And we are focused on solving that problem with our expertise. On one hand, CPU-hungry applications are demanding more and more CPU power from the servers that they run on. On the other hand, servers aren't getting any more powerful. Server CPUs are reaching their threshold with performance gains, while the economics are driving down the cost of servers over time. So the servers just can't keep up with the application demand. The solution is an FPGA-based SmartNIC to solve the application performance gap. But these FPGAs don't do their job unless you have software to make them optimize the specific applications that need to be accelerated. That is exactly what Napatech does. We build the FPGA software along with the SmartNIC to power the SmartNIC to deliver greater performance for our customers. The FPGA SmartNIC is in the right place at the right time to solve this problem. And Napatech's expertise to make the FPGA work to accelerate applications puts our SmartNIC technology into a very interesting market opportunity right where the action is. As we have reported before, the total NIC market is expected to approach $2.3 billion this year, growing at about 30% year-over-year. And this overall NIC market is divided into 3 major segments. The basic NIC segment, in light blue, is the low-cost, low-margin part of the market that offers a basic fixed function NIC with no programmability. Napatech does not participate in this segment. The offload NIC segment, in green, is dominated by non-programmable ASIC processors which are designed for a specific application and a specific system, offering little in the way of flexibility or application acceleration. Napatech is not focused here per se, but we do try to convince some of this market to come our way for the right use cases. And then there is the programmable NIC segment, in orange, often called the SmartNIC segment, which is where the highest-performing solutions reside. The SmartNICs deliver ultra-high speed networking functionality with the ability to be reprogrammed and enhanced with new software to meet the ever-changing customer requirements for higher-performing, mission-critical applications. Napatech is keenly focused on addressing this programmable market segment. As reported by Omdia, the programmable NIC market is the fastest-growing segment of all of the NIC market. In the recently released report from January 2020, Napatech continues to rank #3 amongst the vendors in this segment and is the largest vendor making commercial SmartNIC technology with FPGAs, listed behind Marvell and Broadcom, who happen to use a system-on-chip solution. But FPGAs make up the vast majority of solutions in this segment alone. We will have the author of the Omdia report speaking at our upcoming Capital Markets Day. Let's move on to the top brands that we closed in Q4. Here is a summary of some but not all of the logos of the customers that we brought Napatech -- who bought Napatech products in Q4. For additional color, I've categorized their logos into the key market segments like networking and security, telecom and cloud, government and defense and financial technology, where we often target our SmartNIC solution sales. We had brisk sales in all of these segments with solid recurring business customers in the networking and security and telecom/cloud categories, including key customers like IBM, NEOX, Polystar, Mobileum, MTS in Russia and LiveAction, just to highlight a few. In these domains, higher speeds and the need for better performance is certainly driven by 5G, is increasing security threats, the need for greater visibility and packet processing speeds, and the transition to software-defined networking are all having an impact in this section. The Napatech solution offers the advantages in all of these areas. We also had good progress in the government and defense segment with OEM and end user customers, like NASA, Rheinmetall, the U.S. Army, Harris, Axellio and Northrop Grumman, as well as customers like Sealing Tech, new customer Sealing Tech and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the European Organization of Astronomic Research, Southern Observatory in Germany. In these use cases, mission-critical apps need higher performance with 0 packet loss but with greater network visibility and control. Lastly, the fintech segment for us was quite active in 2020. Let me talk a bit more about this on the next slide. We published a press release in the middle of the year to highlight our growing presence in the financial segment servicing banks, insurance companies and trading firms. As we completed the year we just closed, we closed a growing number of deals, making 2020 one of the best years ever selling our solutions to this part of the market. We recently published an important press release about a significant new design win in Q4 with a global financial services trading firm specializing in proprietary, high-frequency and algorithmic trading with data centers in major financial hubs in the United States, Europe and Asia. In this new design win, the customer selected Napatech's 40 and 100 gigabit per second SmartNICs for their trading network to perform market data analytics to improve trading behavior that maximizes revenue and derisks transactions, all while strengthening the security of the data in flight across the trading network. We expect this new design win over the life of this project rollout to add up to about $2 million or $3 million in revenue for Napatech. We know how speed, accuracy and performance matters to trading firms, trying to squeeze every nanosecond of time from the trading process, which, done right, adds huge value to these kinds of customers. These design wins are a great example of others that we're targeting in the coming quarters. As pointed out in the press release, industry analysts see an uptick in SmartNIC demand in this segment, and we will work to capitalize on that growth. Now on to the next slide. In early February, we were very excited to formally announce a strategic partnership we have developed with Lenovo, 1 of the top 3 global server manufacturers. This is an ongoing joint product and technology development effort between our 2 companies. We will be developing Lenovo-branded SmartNICs based on Napatech's 25 and 100 gigabit per second solutions, running our newest link virtualization SmartNIC software designed to accelerate virtual networking solutions, meeting the most demanding requirements of 5G mobile telecom operators and cloud service providers. Our production-grade FPGA software delivers line rate throughput, ultra-low latency and is packed with networking, security and virtualization features including Open V Switch offload, sometimes known as OVS offload, live migration, hardware and quality service, telemetry, service chaining and openstack orchestration. It dramatically improves the networking performance and CPU utilization of servers deployed in virtualized environments. Starting with the 5G telecom and cloud data center operators in the Greater China market, Lenovo, together with Napatech, plans to extend the SmartNIC solutions globally to the world's top operators. Napatech estimates the revenue potential of this new design win using our newest link virtualization software to exceed $10 million over the life of the product, with customer orders starting in the second half of 2021 and ramping into 2022. Let's finally get into the financials. I'd like to turn the call over to Heine Thorsgaard to review more details about our Q4 and full year 2020 results. Heine?

Thank you. Revenue in USD in Q4 was up 4% compared to last year. Due to the weakening dollar, revenue in DKK fell 3% in the quarter compared to Q4 2019. For the full year of 2020, revenue was up 16% in USD compared to last year. And in DKK, revenue was up 14% and amounted to DKK 194.2 million. Gross margins in Q4 ended at 71.9%; and for the full year, at 71.5%, down 3 basis points compared to last year. Staff costs and other external costs amounted to DKK 30.8 million in Q4 compared to DKK 34.4 million in Q4 '19. For the full year of 2020, staff costs and other external costs amounted to DKK 117.1 million compared to DKK 125.8 million last year. EBITDAC in Q4 amounted to DKK 7 million compared to DKK 5.8 million in Q4 last year. And EBITDAC for full year 2020 amounted to DKK 21.9 million compared to DKK 1.4 million in 2019. Staff costs transferred to capitalized development costs in Q4 amounted to DKK 4.8 million compared to DKK 4.4 million in Q4 '19. For the full year, the amount was DKK 13.5 million compared to DKK 13.9 million last year. EBITDA in Q4 amounted to DKK 11.7 million, and EBIT amounted to DKK 3.7 million compared to EBITDA of DKK 10.2 million and EBIT of DKK 3.6 million in Q4 '19. EBITDA for the full year of 2020 amounted to DKK 35.4 million, up DKK 10.1 million compared to 2019. And EBIT for the full year amounted to DKK 10.1 million, up DKK 20.2 million compared to last year. The result for 2020 amounted to DKK 9.6 million compared to negative DKK 13.6 million in 2019. Net cash flows from operating activities in Q4 amounted to DKK 14.8 million compared to DKK 15.1 million last year. For the full year of 2020, net cash flows from operating activities amounted to DKK 47.6 million, up DKK 21.2 million compared to 2019. End of 2020, net working capital was DKK 3.4 million compared to DKK 17.4 million end of 2019. Net cash used in investing activities in Q4 amounted to DKK 4.9 million compared to DKK 3.4 million in Q4 '19. For the full year of 2020, net cash used in investing activities amounted to DKK 14 million compared to DKK 13.9 million last year. Free cash flow in Q4 amounted to DKK 10 million compared to DKK 11.7 million in Q4 '19. For the full year, free cash flow was DKK 33.6 million, up DKK 21 million compared to last year. With free cash flow of DKK 33.6 million, the free cash flow to sales ratio was 17.3% compared to 7.4% in 2019. Our strong and growing free cash flow-to-sales ratio demonstrates the strength of our business model and clearly illustrates the progress we've made over the last couple of years. Cash and cash equivalents end of 2020 amounted to DKK 62.7 million compared to DKK 64.3 million end of 2019. Back to you, Ray.

Thanks, Heine. Let's move on to the next section about our 2021 outlook. So let's jump right in. Next slide, please. 2020 was a pivotal year for Napatech, fulfilling our promise to drive our business further and earning our path to the next level of growth. We created momentum with solid execution, building best-in-class FPGA-based SmartNICs and software, solving real-world problems, accelerating applications and growing market segments like network and security, 5G mobile, cloud and edge and financial services. We help make networks faster, and we are making servers more powerful while reducing customers' data center costs at the same time. All of this is real value for customers solving problems today. And with this momentum, the future looks bright for us. Our solid core product momentum that we have demonstrated creates a stable foundation for growth, driving healthy cash flow to keep our business and investments and product innovation healthy. This, in turn, is demonstrating our success of creating new revenues from our new product initiatives that increases our potential to win new, important and key design wins and gaining traction with new partnerships, as we've revealed over the last few months. That will truly move the needle in significant ways when we get to that market. We have earned a path to the next level, but the work has really just begun. We have a lot of work to do, and it won't come easy, but we remain committed to keep up the good efforts and bring Napatech into the center of the spotlight where we can make a big impact. Stay tuned as we review more of this information at the upcoming Capital Markets Day event. Let's talk about our guidance for 2021. We expect 2021 will be another year building momentum and growth. And as we've been doing already, we remain transparent and pragmatic about our goals and our strategy that has served us well. So we are communicating what we believe is the right positive outlook for 2021 based on what we can see now. Revenue. We expect revenue in U.S. dollars to be in the range of $35 million to $38.3 million, reflecting growth rates of 17.8% to 29.1%. And in DKK, we expect revenue to be in the range of DKK 210 million to DKK 230 million. We expect timing of revenue to be stronger in the second half of 2021 compared to the first half of 2021. Our pipeline is good, and demand remains positive from our customers in the first half of 2021. However, due to timing of the pipeline, we expect that the first half revenue will be relatively slow. We expect revenue from our new partnerships and design wins to be back ended in the second half of 2021 as a result of normal time needed to build expected momentum. We expect gross margins to be between 70% and 72% for the full year of 2021. We'll continue to focus on product cost optimization and maintaining our product value in the market with ongoing investments in the competitiveness of our products. We expect our staff and other external costs in 2021 to be in the range of DKK 125 million to DKK 135 million, an increase over 2020 and consistent with our aspirational guidance from our Capital Markets Day presentation last year. To be clear, the revenue we hope to achieve over the next few years will require solid investment in engineering, product development and sales. We are very clear about our strategy here, and we have shown we can do this efficiently. This investment creates an ability for us to unlock the value of our future revenue streams. We expect transferred capitalized development costs to be in the range of DKK 20 million to DKK 25 million as well as we expect depreciation and amortization also to be in the range of DKK 20 million to DKK 25 million. We expect EBITDAC and EBIT to be in the range of DKK 22 million to DKK 30.6 million. With performance in the middle of the guided ranges, EBITDAC and EBIT will be DKK 26.2 million. For sure, we will remain vigilant about the impacts being felt across many of the markets today due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But we feel good about our ability to execute, and we believe we are managing our business impacts well related to the pandemic. On to the next slide, please. In conclusion, we know our investors are looking for growth companies that will deliver results for years to come. We strive every day to be that kind of company, deeply rooted in what we do best, building FPGA-based SmartNIC solutions that solve real-world problems today, accelerating applications and improving the economics of the data center. We are also looking to unlock opportunities with the expanding 5G networks. We have delivered a combination of stability, growth and positive earnings. Our increased investments show the promise of expanding our potential into new parts of the market with new and meaningful strategic partnerships. We have worked hard to put these partnerships in place and expect that they will get us access to more customers. You can be assured that we're a team of technology professionals who really do strive to improve our spot in the business world. We solve real-world problems that just won't go away. And we solve them with the technology and the expertise that we bring to the market. And in doing so, we build a good prospect for investment for our customers and our investors. And we will always strive to give you a realistic view of what we can achieve, and then we are committed to find a way to beat it. Next slide, please. And now I would like to invite Heine Thorsgaard to join me to take your questions. If you would like to ask a question, you can submit it now on the live webcast page using the button below or you may dial-in to one of our phone numbers on the screen, where an operator will answer your call and place you in to the queue. Please keep your questions to 1 or 2 per caller. We'll do our best to respond to as many text questions we receive. Operator, do we have anybody in the queue?

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Anders Knudsen from SEB.

I'll try if I can sneak in 3, if I may, Ray. So in one, the Lenovo deal, how big a part is that in your guidance? And then when you say relative to slow H1, could you perhaps elaborate a bit further on that? Then probably final for you, Heine, the free cash flow margin, as you mentioned, of 17% in 2020 is very strong. How do you see that for 2021 and the coming years? Can you remain at this level?

Thank you, Anders. Thanks for dialing in, and thanks for your questions. I'll try to cover the first 2, and then I'll hand the third one off over to Heine. So we're very happy about the Lenovo announcement. I hope you guys saw that as an important announcement as well. Obviously, it's one we've been working on for quite some time. The partnership is really just getting kicked off. A product announcement like this takes time to get done. And once you actually get a product to market, it takes time for it to be consumed in the marketplace. So we endeavor to give you a sense of the size of the opportunity between $10 million and $20 million to Napatech over a multiyear period of time. And we do expect that the revenue will begin -- we hope that the revenue will begin in the second half of the year. Some of the initial opportunities that we would expect to see from Lenovo will be based in Asia, and the kind of buying cycles that we would expect in that kind of opportunity will be typically back ended in the year. So we're giving you a broader expectation of size for Lenovo. And we've got some work to do to actually create first customer wins there. But we're very excited, and we have obviously some high expectations for that as we get further into the second half of the year of 2021. Just a short comment on the commentary around first half versus second half. The partnerships do take time to develop. Our pipeline is solid. We have good visibility to what our customers are planning to purchase. We tend to have a larger second half than first half, and that combined with what we hope to see is good solid execution with some of the new partnerships and design win announcements we've made. We would see that the revenue would be most likely pushed into the second half of the year. So I hope that covers your question there. And Heine, would you like to cover the third for Anders?

Yes, I will. Thank you. Anders, you're right, the free cash flow was strong, as we mentioned in 2020. As we communicated before, we basically believe that the business model we have is very leverageable, and that -- as we grow, cash flow would follow along. So if we look a couple of years down the road, we do believe that we'll be able to increase the free cash flow margin a bit further. But of course, we would see variances to that in the short term. But long term, yes, we believe we would be able to grow even stronger.

Perfect. So -- but just to understand you, Ray, in terms of Lenovo, I guess, because it is a multiyear contract and I mean, as you say, it's going to exceed $10 million. So in essence, for 2021, it's very limited, what's been in your guidance. Is that fair to say, not depending on the ramp-up of Lenovo, essentially?

Yes. The -- we do expect revenue from the Lenovo engagement in 2021, and we do expect some of that revenue to occur late in the year. It's just in terms of normal timing associated with design wins of this sort, it just takes time to get the momentum developed. They have to take their product to market, then their customers have to test those products. And eventually, we would fully expect Lenovo will be successful with selling our joint solution to those end-user customers. So we do need to be -- we're obviously quite engaged, but we also have to be patient that this just normally takes time. This is not unusual for us. So yes, we do anticipate some revenue from Lenovo in the second half of the year. Thank you, Anders. Thank you very much. Operator, do we have any other callers on hold?

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Sergey Master, for who is a Private Investor.

Congratulations on an outstanding year. My first question is about the 5G market. So are you targeting the 5G O-RAN telco space, like BU and UPS units? Because the renewable design win, say something about the 5G market, but it is not clear, in my opinion, if it is about O-RAN space or what.

Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sergey, for your question. Yes, we're excited about the opportunity in the 5G market. In fact, a couple of years ago when we began to invest into enhancing our product line especially in the area of virtualization, so we wanted to attach our product opportunities for the growing market opportunity around network virtualization. And 5G, obviously, is one of the large investment areas that we anticipate seeing in the telco space. It's already happening, of course. It's happening from the radio into the core. The next major wave for 5G investment is going to be on the network virtualization side. And essentially, the space that we operate in is accelerating applications on servers. And the 5G architecture is essentially a bunch of applications running on servers. So we selected a part of the architecture. One particular part that's very hard to do is the OVS acceleration or Open V Switch acceleration. And we would like to find a spot within that market where Napatech adds value and obviously win some market share. So yes, 5G is a relevant market for us. We will be looking at the opportunity, generally speaking. And in terms of our partnership with Lenovo, the kinds of customers that they would endeavor to sell their solution to using our product and our software is focused on the telco market space, obviously, with 5G in mind, but also other data center operations and hyperscale. So 5G is definitely within our crosshairs and we're aggressively pursuing. Thank you for your question.

And for example, do you consider networks to be one of your Tier 1 competitors? And maybe could you speak about the competitive firm, please?

Yes. So I'm happy to talk about the competitive front. We provided kind of a broad view of the marketplace. We tend to remind our investors during our quarterly call what the market is looking like, what it's doing. We tend to publish the information from Omdia, which we think is a very reputable source. There's multiple sources, but it is a good store. And the way that they've structured the data is we're ranked as the #3 vendor within the programmable NIC space, as I had commented on in the presentation. And from a competitive perspective, that means we're one of the larger FPGA providers. But we do compete against other suppliers in the programmable NIC space that also have a different kind of solutions with a system on chip. So the competitive marketplace in the space that we operate within is quite broad. We have several large players like Marvell and Broadcom. We are chasing some opportunities in the programmable NIC space with the SOC. We also compete with some smaller players like Ethernity, but there are plenty of others. But we feel very confident about our position and our ability to develop a solution with our FPGA-based SmartNIC and the software we provide to be competitive.

Great. I have a few questions, if you don't mind.

Sure. We'll take one more.