Ambarella, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMBA) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Suji Desilva: I’ll add my congratulations on the Continental win. Quick question perhaps for Fermi. I think you hinted at this in the last — in Tore’s question there. But the software development that’s involved to get CV3 into production, how much of that is the Continental on its customers versus Ambarella? It sounds like it’s almost — maybe almost all Continental. And if so, is there an incremental effort that needs to be happening for every customer that adopts CV3 thereafter, or is there any leverage from the fist win?

Dr. Fermi Wang: Right. So first of all, I think our role in this relationship is we are a strategic tier 2 to Conti, and we are providing support to the — one of the support we need to provide is porting their software onto our CV3, which we have been talking about this strategy for many years, and we believe we are the one that really focused on this business model versus our competitors. And I think this is — it’s really about setting up a group of people helping our customers porting software. And that had plugging — we have factored that into our headcount planning as well as our engineering development. So I think that’s not a concern for us. And in fact, we expect that we need to continue to do this kind of service for all of the potential customers.

Suji Desilva: Okay. That helps, Fermi. And then a question for Brian perhaps. Brian, you guided the first quarter next year as well as this year. Are there lingering supply chain post constraint issues factored into your below seasonal guidance for 1Q, or are those kind of behind us at that point? Is that purely a statement about softening demand?

Brian White: So, we think that those supply chain issues are, for the most part, behind us, and that’s something that we don’t anticipate to impact our Q1 revenue significantly. What we do see is continued shortening lead times and desire on the part of customers to reduce inventory levels. So, that’s really the impact that we’re contemplating as we think about Q1 at this point.

Operator: The next question that I have here is coming from David O’Connor of BNP.

David O’Connor: Great. One from my side on the CV penetration. Fermi, you mentioned or reiterated 45% for this year. Just wondering, can you give us any update on what the exit run rate of this year would be so at to kind of baseline for next year? And I have a follow-up.

Dr. Fermi Wang: Yes. David, we haven’t disclosed the run rate as well as the next year’s forecast. But I can say that we expect the CV continue to become a bigger portion of our total revenue for many reasons. One is that they are enabling new markets; the other one is their new ASPs. Of course, that portion of our CV growth comes from replacing our existing video processor business. But I think that I’m very excited about the new application that we talk about that our previous video processor chip cannot address. And particularly CV3 and CV5 opportunity we’re talking about today is really new opportunity we can address.

David O’Connor: Okay. Got it. Thanks for that. And maybe as a follow-up, one for Brian on the sub-seasonal Q1. Brian, you talked about inventory and reduced the customers. Can we expect by — or do you expect an exit in Q1 that inventory that you’re seeing there, customers should be cleared?

Brian White: That’s a great question. I think it’s one that we don’t have great visibility to. So I’m not going to speculate on that. We certainly, in the near term, anticipate that there will be impacts within that time period, and that’s why we want to provide some visibility. But in terms of when things bottom and so on and when those issues go away, I don’t think we have a good feel for that at this point.

Operator: And the next question I have here is coming from Richard Shannon of Craig-Hallum.