PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

PDF Solutions, Inc. (NASDAQ:PDFS) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript February 13, 2025

PDF Solutions, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $0.25, expectations were $0.23.

Operator: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the PDF Solutions, Inc. Conference call to discuss its financial results for the fourth quarter and year-end 2024, ending Tuesday, December 31, 2024. At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. If you have not yet received a copy of the corresponding press release, it has been posted to PDF Solutions, Inc.’s website at www.pdf.com. Some of the statements that will be made in the course of this conference are forward-looking, including statements regarding PDF Solutions, Inc.’s future financial results and performance, growth rates, and demand for its solutions. PDF Solutions, Inc.’s actual results could differ materially.

Operator: You should refer to the section entitled risk factors on page seventeen through thirty of PDF Solutions, Inc.’s annual report on form ten k for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2023, and similar disclosures in subsequent SEC filings. The forward-looking statements and risks stated in this conference call are based on information available to PDF Solutions, Inc. today. PDF Solutions, Inc. assumes no obligation to update them. Now I’d like to introduce John Kibarian, PDF Solutions, Inc.’s president and chief executive officer, and Adnan Raza, PDF Solutions, Inc.’s chief financial officer. Mister Kibarian?

John Kibarian: Please go ahead. Thank you for joining us on today’s call. If you’ve not already seen our earnings press release and management report for the fourth quarter and the full year, please go to the Investors section of our website where each has been posted. Today, I will start by reviewing 2024 with a particular focus on Q4. I will then provide our perspective on the semiconductor market and conclude with our outlook on PDF Solutions, Inc.’s prospects for the year and beyond. Adnan will then provide an overview of our financial results and his perspective on the business before we turn the call over for questions. A year ago, when we talked about 2024, we anticipated revenue for the first half of the year being roughly comparable to the previous year, and then in the second half of the year, our revenue growth would approach our target growth rate of 20%.

Revenue for the second half of the year was up about 16% and up 22% for the fourth quarter, each when compared to the same period during the previous year. The return to growth in the second half of the year was due to leading-edge advanced packaging companies making investments in process control and yield improvement. This was reflected in our sales of Exensio Process Control and the eProbe in the second half of the year. For Q4, we are happy to announce that the manufacturing evaluation of the eProbe converted to revenue in the quarter. The customer elected to purchase the machine early due to achievement of the evaluation criteria sooner than they had anticipated. Similar to this customer, we believe other customers will elect to purchase the hardware.

As we discuss our outlook for 2025 and beyond, we will discuss the implications of the eProbe purchases via sale model for the machine to our business. Beyond the eProbe purchase, in the fourth quarter, the majority of other bookings in the quarter were for Exensio and runtime licenses for Symetrix control and communication software. Also in the fourth quarter, we sponsored an AI executive workshop. We had 140 external attendees from more than 75 organizations who listened to presentations from executives and engineers from Analog Devices, Cerebus, Intel, Qualcomm, Tokyo Electron, as well as partner presentations from Adventist, SAP, Siemens, and Teradyne. There were a few clear messages. First, it is necessary to organize semiconductor data using a semantic model to align data across the manufacturing flow.

Second, direct connections to the tools and other enterprise systems are necessary to take actions based on AI. And third, collaboration across the supply chain is necessary. Feedback from the attendees was fantastic. They told us that there was a good focus on tangible applications. They liked the range of speakers and breadth of topics, and the panels provided key insights. Across the semiconductor community, there’s an excitement about the impact AI and ML can have on business.

John Kibarian: We are proud that our event was a nexus for key members of the industry to discuss this important topic. Overall, we were very excited to see growth return in the second half of the year and to experience the customer interest in the products and solutions we are delivering. Turning to our view of 2025, as we go into this year, we see an industry that is very much in a similar position as 2024. Customers in advanced logic, high bandwidth memory, and advanced packaging are investing while other sectors of our customer base have a more cautious outlook. From a product perspective, we will build upon our accomplishments in 2024. For the eProbe, we’ll expand the applications for advanced logic, including gate all around, backside power, contact, and via yield loss mechanisms, while also expanding applications for advanced DRAM.

We anticipate being able to ship over four machines. From a business perspective, not all the shipments will convert to revenue in the year, and the timing of the machine purchases could drive some additional lumpiness quarter to quarter. Like the eProbes sold in Q4, customers expressed to us a desire to buy the machines and then optionally subscribe to application services and software. Exensio modules, including process control, ML ops, test, manufacturing analytics, as well as Symetrix Connectivity and SAPIIS manufacturing hub, are anticipated to drive most of the bookings this year. While IYR revenue has declined the past few years, this year we anticipate it recovering as manufacturing volumes from new factories, particularly in Asia, are expected to drive improvements in gain share.

Years ago, our business was most dependent on advanced process development at foundries. Today, our business is much more balanced, spread across equipment makers, foundries, IDMs, fabless, and system companies. It spans advanced logic to high voltage semiconductors. From customers using our systems for analytics of the most advanced packaging to discrete devices. So while the industry growth is projected to be mixed, we anticipate year-over-year total revenues to grow at a rate approaching 15%, albeit with some potential lumpiness quarter to quarter associated with eProbe sales. I want to thank the customers, employees, contractors, and shareholders that helped the company achieve its success in 2024 and look forward to working with you all in 2025.

I will now turn the call over to Adnan for more detailed comments on our results.

Adnan Raza: Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to speak with you again today. We are pleased to review the financial results for the full year and the fourth quarter of 2024. As John said, we posted our earnings release and a management report in the investor relations section of our website. We expect to file our annual report on form ten k with the SEC by the end of February after our 2024 audit is complete. As a result, all financial results described in this call should be considered preliminary and are subject to change to reflect any necessary adjustments or changes in accounting estimates that are identified prior to the time we file our ten k. Please note that all the financial results discussed in today’s call will be on a non-GAAP basis, and a reconciliation to GAAP financials is provided in the materials on our website.

We are pleased to again report record quarterly and annual total revenues. We finished the year strong with Q4 total revenues of $50.1 million. We are pleased that our total revenue for the quarter grew 22% year over year, ahead of our long-term growth rate target model. For the full year 2024, we generated record total revenues of $179.5 million versus $165.8 million in 2023, an 8% year-over-year increase where we saw nearly all of the growth during the second half of 2024, which increased 16% over the comparable period of the prior year. Our analytics revenue grew 22% in Q4 over the comparable period of the prior year and 11% on a year-over-year basis for the full year 2024. During the fourth quarter, we booked multiple extensive renewals and experienced strong growth in Symetrix licenses, driven by increased runtime orders from customers.

We were particularly pleased with the momentum of our DFI eProbe systems in the fourth quarter, including, importantly, the successful conversion of an evaluation to a completed sale for a leading-edge customer base in Asia. This marks three of the major leading-edge global semiconductor companies now on the eProbe platform and validates the success we believed we would see for the investments we made. We’re also pleased with the improvement we saw in our annual yield ramp rate for the fourth quarter compared to the prior quarter and the same quarter of the previous year. Overall, for the full year, we are pleased with our revenue growth, in spite of the IYR revenue decline, which was more than offset by the analytics revenue growth. Our analytics revenue accounted for 96% of the total revenue for the quarter and 94% of the total revenue for the full year.

Percentage may vary quarter to quarter, depending on the anticipated increases in Gainsight and IYR and product portfolio mix and timing of machine sales as John mentioned within analytics. Just as we highlighted for the last few years on our earnings calls, regarding full year 2022 and 2023 results, it is worth noting for this year 2024 as well that our full year analytics revenue for 2024 was more than the total company revenue of the prior year 2023. A noteworthy achievement we felt to repeat for another year in a row. For the fourth quarter, our gross margin was 72% and we reported EPS of 25 cents per share. On a full-year basis, our gross margin was 74% and we reported EPS of 84 cents. The full-year gross profit of 74% moves us towards our target model gross margin of 75% compared to 73% in the previous year.

Despite the fact that Gainshare, which was very high gross margin, decreased on a year-over-year basis, we were able to grow gross margin in part due to overall growth but also driven by better control of our spending. Turning to operating expenses, we invested in R&D to advance the product roadmap and our analytics platform, increasing our R&D spend by 4% on a full-year over year basis. Our combined sales and marketing and G&A expenses or SG&A expenses were higher by 16% on a year-over-year basis, predominantly driven by increased sales and marketing spending to meet increased customer presales activity. On the G&A side, we incurred expenses related to ongoing litigation against the vendor, which we expect to decrease over time. For the full year 2024, we reported EPS of 84 cents this year and EPS growth of 15% versus the prior year.

During the year, we generated positive operating cash flow of approximately $10 million and spent approximately $18 million on CapEx related to primarily our DFI ecosystem and approximately $7 million on share buybacks. We are pleased with another year of positive operating cash flow generation consistent with our history with cash and short-term investments of approximately $115 million compared to approximately $136 million at the end of 2023, where the decrease was due primarily to the spending that we just discussed. We are proud of our performance in 2024 against the macro environment, and over the long term, we remain committed to our target model we set at our analyst day in October 2023 of 20% year-over-year total company revenue growth rate, 75% gross margin, and 20% operating margin.

Now turning to our financial outlook for 2025, we look forward to another year of growth. Our outlook for the year reflects both the short-term weakness in the semiconductor industry and the strength of our pipeline, bolstered by the macro trends of distributed manufacturing, energy electrification, and AI, which we expect to drive growth. We are also pleased with the success of the DFI eProbe system, including in particular the sale of the system to another leading-edge customer during Q4 2024. Given the customer engagement and activity we are seeing for DFI in the overall market, we expect to ship multiple machines during 2025. As we see increased customer interest in DFI eProbe systems, we look at our total business that’s composed of one, a strong base business driven by a diverse and growing product portfolio mix of extensive software, leading yet software systems, and symmetric connectivity software, and two, as we’re just starting to grow the book of business on the eProbe, as an equipment sale, we can expect lumpiness quarter over quarter.

But on an annual basis, we expect this business to grow as we’re entering the adoption phase. To reiterate John’s comments and our press release, for the full year 2025, we expect a growth rate of our total revenue to approach 15% on a year-over-year basis. With that, I’ll turn the call over to the operator to commence the question and answer session. Operator?

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you, Mister Raza. Ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question at this time, please press star one one on your telephone. Please wait one moment for our first question.

Operator: And our first question comes from Blair Abernethy with Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is open.

Blair Abernethy: Thanks. Good evening, gentlemen.

John Kibarian: Hi.

Blair Abernethy: John, I wonder if you could just maybe provide us with a little more color on the eProbe, just in particular on the pipeline. So you talked about maybe several deals potentially this year. Yeah. You know, are you looking to add additional new customers this year, or are these follow-on sales? And the other question I had was just around the backlog. It came in around $221 million. It was $239 million in Q3. Just you know, maybe some sense of what’s happening in the backlog as well.

John Kibarian: Sure. As far as the eProbes, yes. It will be a combination of repeat sales and existing customers, as well as new sales and new customers. From an application space, as I said in my prepared remarks, it will be a combination of advanced logic, as well as advanced DRAM. We did some pilot in Q3 and Q4 on DRAM with a couple of customers, one in particular, and we anticipate very positive results for DRAM for the eProbe. And we’re able to show some things I think that were quite impressive to their customer base. Again, the unique capability of the machine understanding of the design as it looks for yield issues. So you know, as I said in my prepared remarks, we do believe we will ship greater than four machines. How many we convert to revenue this year is a little bit questionable to us.

Right? So we’re being a little conservative on how we do that in part because as we learn this first sale, right, when you turn over the title of the machine as opposed to subscribing it, there was a lot of other paperwork and things needed to do and requirements that they have when they take title of the machine. So this change, I think, is something where we are learning. We learned it for one just been learning it for others. That gets to your question on backlog. Right? Had these been subscription machines, you would have seen or, you know, with the way that we would have done it, you would have probably changed the backlog characteristics a little bit. This will create a little bit higher terms percentage of revenue in the year than we’ve had in the past.

This is kind of the nature of the change. Initially, I think, you know, we’re not seeing that much difference in revenue as we build a book of business there. We will have a higher revenue and a higher terms rate likely as we look out beyond 2025 with this model shift. Okay.

Blair Abernethy: Okay. Great. And in terms of what does the what’s the I guess, the pipeline of new customers looking at I mean, is it broadening out? Do you have the capacity to keep, you know, starting the sales process with new customers?

John Kibarian: Yes. We you know, like the machine that we shipped actually, it was, you know, installed in the first quarter of last year that we converted to revenue this year. We have machines that we will ship on a demo basis to customers in this first half of the year. That we anticipate ship converting in subsequent quarters. Potentially in this year and into early next year. And we’re basically making sure that as we look across the application space, we’re getting enough machines and enough different people’s hands. Right? Because if you just kinda think through the business, when you make a transition like that, you want enough customers going on so that it’s not when you have a you know, you’re not dependent on anyone.

So we are probably going more forward in the first half of the year, starting a number of new and selling, you know, effectively a small number of machines. That’s why we said we said the lumpiness quarter over quarter to set up the second half of this year and into next year a higher number of customers ongoing with the eProbe than we’ve had. Right? We’ve learned a lot about this on the c dot this manufacturing eval, the positives that that got us. That got us a customer really seeing what it could do in manufacturing facility, not in an R&D facility. Which then they came back to us in Q4. It was and early Q1 was a whole bunch of additional applications for a number of different process technologies. That they thought the machine would be suited for.

And we thought, okay, we need to figure out how we get evals into a lot of people’s hands right now. That could be very valuable to us.

John Kibarian: And so that’s what we’re doing in this year.

Blair Abernethy: Got it. So it sounds like the activity levels have certainly picked up from, you know, earlier a year ago. Absolutely.

John Kibarian: Yeah. Okay. Great. Thank you. I’ll get back in the queue.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from William Jellison with D. A. Davidson and Company. Your line is open.

William Jellison: Hey. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. John, the first one is for you. You know, over the last few months, I saw PDF Solutions, Inc., and sometimes yourself specifically be very active on the publication circuit talking about model ops. So I’m curious as you sit here today, what has been the receptivity to that product so far, and how important is customer adoption of that product to the growth outlook this year? Yeah. That’s a great question. Well, yeah, it’s been quite high. We converted customers in 2024 onto model ops. We expect we have a number of pilots ongoing on model ops increase in sales and marketing expenses in part due to model ops and part due to other capabilities like guided analytics, which also uses, you know, AI.

One of the things I like pointing out to customers, you know, because we measure data, we can see what percentage of the data an engineer actually looks like. And so when a customer may store 500 terabytes of data, the engineer may only look at yeah. Your engineers may only look at 25 or 28 or 30 terabytes. In other words, 5 to 8% of their data. So you really want AI can look at all the data and then make sure the engineer is looking at the 5 or 8% that has the real signal. So, you know, model options for online applications, the offline application guide analytics. Both of those things, we have a number of pilots ongoing. They will be important to our business in 2025. Also, in my as I said in my prepared remarks, what customers are learning as we gone and put this in place and done pilots, they need to have all their data properly aligned.

So now they’re going back and realizing, okay. I wasn’t doing a very good job. At getting all the meta fields correctly in my systems. One of the speakers at our AI conference talked about that. And you really can’t apply AI until you do that. And they’re also learning. I need to be able to talk to the other systems, whether that’s equipment, and, you know, admin test and Teradyne talked about that at our user con at the AI conference. Or just the ERP system. I need to know where that wafer is gonna go, the test at WaferSorter final test. So you know, AI will have direct impact on our business for things like model ops and guide analytics. But it’ll also have an indirect impact on, you know, the extensive cloud deployments, the scale of those also the scale of the test deployments.

And the scale or the deployment of, you know, our Safiance manufacturing hub and the connection to ERP and MES systems. So the you know, there’ll be the direct impact on the AI-related products and then the indirect impact on the things that customers need to get done in order to apply AI, whether it’s ours, you know, or anybody else’s. And stay tuned. I think you’ll see more announcements in the in these next couple of quarters on this stuff.

William Jellison: Great. Thank you, John. And then, Adnan, for you, I wanted to ask, it looks like the accounts receivable balance was quite elevated at the end of the quarter, which would have impacted cash flow. Is there anything in particular that is hurting collections on that front? I will. Thanks for the question. No. Absolutely. That’s a fair question.

Adnan Raza: Actually quite pleased. You know, that was obviously our first stop when we saw that too, and it’s a matter of timing and billing and, you know, of course, the new conversion of the Brooksell that John talked about as well. And we’ve actually looked at how far we are into the collections already. At the point of this earnings call, and we feel pretty good about the progress we’ve made. So nothing concerning there. And, actually, you know, look forward to collecting that cash and then reporting good numbers with those cash collections.

William Jellison: Great. Thanks, Adnan. Take care.

Operator: Thank you. As a reminder, if you’d like to ask a question, please press star one one. Our next question comes from Gus Richard with Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Gus Richard: Yes. Thanks for letting me ask a few questions. Hey. I just wanna understand a little bit better the terms of the contract sale. There’s two elements. There’s the applications and software license, which is a recurring revenue, and then there’s the tools itself. And kinda look at the ARs popping up, and I’m just trying to make sure I understand how this deal works and is this going to be the model for DFI sales going forward?

John Kibarian: Yeah. So we will still subscribe the entire systems including the machines for customers that want that. We do have customers that prefer that. But there are customers that wanna take title machine. And so what we’ve moved to is the machine title transfers. That’s why you said the AR and they owe that money up front. That’s the AR balance increase that you saw. And then they subscribed for software and application services even support services on the machine, thereafter. And that is optional to them. They can do that or not. You know, when you look at the machine, compared to a regular EB machine, it does some things very well. But if you want to scan, you know, if you look went to our user conference and stuff where you can take designs and know exactly where to go look in the designs with the combination with Siemens, the way of being very design aware in the way you inspect, that’s stuff that you would see on as a subsequent software sales, sometimes at the same time as the equipment, sometimes it’s stuff that comes at a quarter or two later.

Gus Richard: Yeah. And I just kinda wanna understand the revenue recognition here. You transfer title, but, you know, is it factory accepted? Is it you know, is there you know, any you know, it’s it’s a done deal, but or is there part of the acceptance still to go?

John Kibarian: Acceptance was complete. So the revenue recognized for the machine itself has been done. There’s some support portions that are not recognized. That will be recognized out over the next year. Some services on.

Gus Richard: Got it. And then the next question I have is, you know, there’s been management changes at a couple of your key customers. And I’m and you also talk about, you know, shooting out evals rather than, revenue and machines in the first half. And I’m just wondering if the management changed at these couple of companies, is sort of having an impact on your ability to close business.

John Kibarian: You know, yeah. Of course, we’re always very careful about commenting on any specific customer. I don’t know that there’s any real impact on leadership changes in the customers. As I said in my prepared remarks though, you know, this is definitely a Dickens period of the best of time and worst of times when we look across our customer base. So we have some customers we’ve seen pull in and accelerate. We’ve seen other customers being more cautious. You know, if we’ve been betting people at the beginning of the year where we thought we were gonna see Q4 come in, we probably would have guessed a different set of customers. Then, you know, we looked at Q3 and Q4. You know, Q3 and Q4, we saw a stronger participation from our Asian customers.

As I said in my prepared remarks, on software and control systems for advanced packaging and logic in the eProbe, we probably had thought that would go a little bit different than it did if we kind of if you had asked me to be, you know, the embedding person in February, and it of 2024 versus, you know, with hindsight in 2025. But I think it kinda gets to the point I put in my prepared remarks. Right? We have a business now is very diverse. The percentage of any single customers come down tremendously. The percentage of different parts of the market have come down. Right? You know, a year ago, I was very excited about the silicon carbide market. Most of our customers in silicon carbide are not doing great. Right? But it really hasn’t impacted much our Exensio business because our customers in advanced packaging picked a lot of that up.

So, you know, today, you know, we are rapidly moving to a place where our advanced logic business is, you know, gonna be in that 40% range, and there I put the characterization in eProbe DFI business about, you know, 40 plus percent on fabulous IDMs and system companies using, you know, analytics for test product engineering, yield engineering. And then a growing percentage in the equipment category as well. As they get more and more, you know, software aware, you probably saw that at our conference, you know, what we demonstrated on digital twin and analytics AI for equipment and the equipment vendors that spoke at the conference on their excitement there. That will be a growing piece of our business. But I mean, I don’t think we focus too much on leadership change.

And if you go back to 2014, 2015 when, you know, 85% of our revenue was three accounts. Yes. I was very concerned about CEO changes at all of our customers. Today, it’s just, you know, regular course of business?

Gus Richard: Okay. Got it. And then you know, there’s clearly a shortage of Cohasska capacity. A lot of the OSATs are bringing up what I call COAS light, and at the same time, I’m seeing the complexity of these triplets assemblies getting more so. And I’m just wondering is that are those the things that are driving the advanced packaging? Are you sort of seeing a flurry of activity over the last couple of quarters because of this?

John Kibarian: Yeah. So far, our business on the dense packaging has been with the most advanced parts of the market. You know, foundries and IDMs that are really kind of leading the forefront of the most sophisticated. But the point you bring up is exactly what we think is gonna be impacting our business as we get out in these next years because when I meet with those leaders, particularly at some of the companies, they really don’t wanna build out all the capacity. They want to rely more and more on their OSAT partners for doing a lot of the parts of that manufacturing flow and test flow that they only very well skilled at doing dye attach, testing, etcetera. So the manufacturing flow when it gets to its scale right now, I think it’s bespoke and very targeted to a small number of customers.

Very important and very high volume products, but it’s not an easy to use technology so far for a lot of companies. So as that happens, you’re gonna see pieces of that flow move out to those companies. We think that’s gonna have a profound change on how you know, if you just look at that manufacturing flow, it’s a very complex process. It relies on amazing performance and precision out of the equipment. And it’s very specific and bespoke to the products, the die sizes, the mechanical stress, the amount of thinning on the materials, etcetera. So really, the collaboration across those three parts of the market are gonna more and more be required. And, you know, we think that will impact our business in 2025 and 2026 as we bring up more DEX nodes into that part of the market and the dialogue that we’ve been having with our equipment customers right now.

But so far, the second half of the year, it’s been the leaders where they’ve got tremendous systems, you know, and capability process expertise internally. Rely less on the equipment vendors, don’t need as much help from their customers. We think going forward, you’re gonna see more and more equipment company participation in that work as it goes to the OSATs and more and more of the customers engaged in the qualification.

Gus Richard: Got it. And then just last one for me. I apologize for so many questions. On HBM DRAM and the complexity there, you know, are you starting to penetrate those accounts for with Exensio and back-end applications?

John Kibarian: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great question because we have historically not made a lot of effort on the software side in that in the memory area. What was really surprised at a positive for me. You know, in August, an executive asked their team to quickly send out wafers for the eProbe. And within a month, no changes to the system. The team was able to show them what you could do with the eProbe on the process technologies that go into HBM. Right? Particularly on the silicon busine, the very advanced front-end processing wafer processing. And that kicked off a whole flurry of work in the fourth quarter. Which is why, you know, in my prepared remarks, I talked about DRAM. It is very much related to the HBM work, but it’s primarily on the silicon process on the eProbe.

It’s reintroducing us to those that part of the market that we had, you know, neglected for many years. So now we’re starting to see, you know, opportunities beyond the eProbe into Exensio and other things that probably we were a little bit tone-deaf to. You know, to be candid with you because a lot of our Exensio business is really with fabless and system companies and IDMs that are basically asset-like manufacturers really. Even for them, most of the silicon and analyzing Exensio coming out of foundries. So this is kind of a you know, the eProbe work has kind of introduced us to that part of the market. We will explore that as we get into 2025. But right now, in our anticipation of our outlook for 2025 and 2026 when it comes to memory, it’s primarily because of the eProbe.

Gus Richard: Got it. Got it. Very very helpful. Appreciate it. Let me pass it on.

John Kibarian: Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Again, if you’d like to ask a question, please press star one one. At this time, there are no more questions. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes the program. Thank you for joining us on today’s call. Good day.