PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Christian Schwab: Right. Thank you for that. I think a lot of people agree you’ll just take the wafer starts and move it to where they can access the front-end equipment. They’re not going to stop making biconductors. Great. All right. No other questions. Thank you.

John Kibarian: Thank you, Christian.

Operator: And we’ll now hear from Blair Abernethy of Rosenblatt.

Blair Abernethy: Thanks very much and nice quarter, guys. Adnan, I just wondered if you could just go back for a moment just before you were cut off in your prepared remarks, you started talking about the shadow backlog versus your, I guess your RPO was $185.4 this quarter. Can you just give us a little more insight into how you’re looking at that? And just any way you could size it for us.

Adnan Raza: Yes. Look, I mean, I’ll tell you explain a little bit more about what we think that goes into the shadow backlog and what it is. In terms of sizing, what we’re doing today is frankly just starting to talk to you all about this. Hopefully, the future analyst there or something like that, we can talk a little bit more about the sizing that would be our desire. But in terms of how we measure backlog, it is and reported in our filings, it is the contracted number that we have from customers, right? But what is not included are the pieces that we alluded to, which is what we call shadow backlog, which is really the Gainshare that would come in the future periods, which could also be the second piece of run-time licenses for Cimetrixs where we just get a customer order and fulfill it within the quarter.

And then the third piece, of course, is the overages from Exensio. Even this, we started to get some of those pieces in. And if you look at each one of those, let’s strike at each one of those. And on the Gainshare side, there are customers with whom we have contracts all the way to the end of the decade. On the run-time licenses side, even if the world was to fall apart, there’s an argument we said, okay, there are a certain number of customer shipments that would happen. It sounds like they would be zero. So some estimates would be fair to think about. And similarly, on Exensio usage as that platform is becoming more relevant, more present and broadly adopted within the organization, we have seen the usage go up, so we expect that we’ll be able to touch more.

John Kibarian: Maybe I can provide a little bit of like market depth to that answer. So if you just look at Gainshare, we put in our backlog estimate zero. Yes, as we said, the customer surprised us in Q3 with a substantial number. We know it’s not going to zero in Q4. And as Adnan said, those contracts run out through some of them run up through the end of the decade. So in our own model, we started to just go through and say, okay, what would be a likely value per quarter over the next seven years for that contract and that contract and then many other contracts. We used to do better in the old days. We had it for a while because we’ve just gotten so disappointed with the uptake on Gainshare in China that we stopped looking at it similarly with the runtime licenses.