Adeia Inc. (NASDAQ:ADEA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Adeia Inc. (NASDAQ:ADEA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript November 11, 2023

Operator: Good day, everyone. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Adeia’s Third Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would like to now turn the call over to Chris Chaney, Vice President of Investor Relations for Adeia. Chris, please go ahead.

Chris Chaney: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us as we share with you details of our third quarter 2023 financial results. With me on the call today are Paul Davis, our President and CEO; and Keith Jones, our CFO. Paul will share with you some general observations regarding our third quarter. And then Keith will give further details on our financial results and guidance. We will then conclude with a question-and-answer period. In addition to today’s earnings release, there is an earnings presentation, which you can access along with the webcast in the IR portion of our website. Before I turn the call over to Paul, I would like to provide a few reminders. First, 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 therefore, 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 discuss today, please refer to the Risk Factors section in our SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly report on 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. To enhance investors’ understanding of our ongoing economic performance, we will discuss non-GAAP information during this call. We use non-GAAP financial measures internally to evaluate and manage our operations. We have, therefore, chosen to provide this information to enable you to perform comparisons of our operating results as we do internally.

We have provided reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in the earnings release, the earnings presentation and on the Investor Relations section of our website. A recording of this conference call will be available on the Investor Relations website at adeia.com. Now I’d like to turn the call over to our CEO, Paul Davis.

Paul Davis: Thank you, Chris, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. During the third quarter, our strong deal momentum continued as we signed 7 agreements with customers in consumer electronics, pay TV, OTT and semiconductor. We delivered strong financial results with $101.4 million in revenue and a non-GAAP operating margin of 69%. In addition, we continue to deleverage our balance sheet as we paid down $15.1 million on our term loan. We are happy to announce we also strengthened our executive team, with Jarl Berntzen joining as our Chief Corporate Development Officer. And we announced today, we appointed Phyllis Turner Brem as an independent director to expand the depth and breadth of the IP experience on our Board.

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Q&A Session

Our deal momentum continued in the third quarter with a significant long-term renewal with Samsung, the largest smartphone producer globally for access to our media portfolio for use in their mobile devices. This agreement is especially meaningful because Samsung is collectively a top 10 customer and has been a licensee of ours for approximately 25 years. Over this period, Samsung has renewed agreements with us multiple times. And our relationship touches every aspect of both our media and semiconductor businesses from mobile devices to connected TVs to semiconductors. Our long history of renewals with Samsung illustrates our strong relationships with our customers and the value they place on our evolving and expanding IP portfolio. We also signed an important renewal with Starz, the second OTT deal in as many quarters.

Starz is a leading media and entertainment provider, offering a premium OTT service. Our recent success with DEZn and now Starz are further proof points of our media portfolio’s value to OTT providers. Our expanding media portfolio includes fundamental patents, which we believe are relevant to the leading OTT providers. I am encouraged with the progress we are making in OTT and believe the recent momentum should serve as a springboard for our further success. During the third quarter, we were pleased to have signed a settlement agreement with NVIDIA, which resolved an outstanding litigation related to certain legacy IP. Importantly, this agreement did not cover either our hybrid bonding or advanced processing node portfolios. We believe with this litigation now behind us, we can begin discussions on these newer and valuable aspects of our semiconductor portfolio.

As demonstrated by the many semiconductor memory customers we have today, market leaders have recognized the value of our IP. Similarly, we believe there is a significant opportunity in the logic market, where our semiconductor portfolio is increasingly relevant as logic companies try to address the slowing of Moore’s Law. I’m excited with the progress we have made in almost all aspects of our business, including the continued execution of renewals and new deals. As evidenced by the 24 deals we have signed in the first 9 months of the year, the relationships with our customers remains very strong. However, occasionally, a dispute can arise between us and the customer. Our preference is always to work with our customers and we can do just that.

In the rare instance we are unable to do so, we believe it’s important to defend our contractual rights. Accordingly, we filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Shaw in the southern of New York per the terms of the agreement. We believe Shaw’s stated positions for ceasing payments under the agreement are entirely baseless. After a repeat attempts to resolve the matter, we were met with resistance and roadblocks, and we’re left with no choice but to file this case. It is important to recognize that this is a unique situation with Shaw, and only began after or management took over the combined company following their merger. Our long-term strategic objectives for the Canadian pay TV market remains unchanged, and we will continue to pursue all opportunities to license the Canadian pay-TV operators and get Shaw back as a paying customer.

Shaw’s breach of contract was not contemplated when we gave our guidance earlier this year. And accordingly, we have narrowed our revenue guidance to the lower end of our original outlook. Importantly, and as a result of our expense management, our non-GAAP net income and operating margins are now forecasted to be at or above the original midpoint of the outlook we provided in February. Keith will provide more details on our updated guidance shortly. Before I turn the call over to Keith, I’d like to provide an update on our measures of success. We measure our success by several factors, including revenue growth, expanding our IP portfolio, executing renewals and new licenses and entering adjacent markets. The significant renewals we signed year-to-date with Cox, Verizon, Altice, Samsung and Starz further solidify our long-term revenue outlook.

We are very pleased with the new license agreements we have signed this year with Western Digital, Kioxia and [indiscernible] as new deals are the basis for our revenue growth. Growing our patent portfolios is key to successfully renewing licensees and signing new deals. We continue to track to our goal of growing our portfolio 10% annually. One year has now passed since becoming an independent IP licensing company, and I am extremely proud of what we have accomplished. We have signed over 30 deals in the last 12 months, while strengthening and expanding our deal pipeline with numerous new engagements. We have also delivered strong financial results, enabling us to pay down $129 million of our debt. Operationally, we expanded our world-class team of engineers and licensing professionals, including the addition of 2 key members of our executive team, and I’m happy to announce we have added another new independent director to our Board.

Phyllis Turner Brim brings to us 3 decades of IP experience and executive experience with Fortune 500 and IP development and licensing companies. Her experience and guidance will be of great value to us as we grow our business. With that, let me turn the call over to Keith to review our third quarter financial results and our guidance.