[Prepared remarks provided by the company].:.

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. At this time, I'd like to welcome everyone to QuickLogic Corporation's Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2019 Earnings Results Conference Call. As a reminder, today's call is being recorded for replay purposes through February 19, 2020. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr.

Jim Fanucchi of Darrow Associates. Mr. Fanucchi, please go ahead..

Thank you, operator and thanks to all of you for joining us. Our speakers today are Brian Faith, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Dr. Sue Cheung, Chief Financial Officer.

As a reminder, some of the comments QuickLogic makes today are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including but not limited to stated expectations relating to revenue from new and mature products; statements pertaining to QuickLogic's future stock performance, design activity and its ability to convert new design opportunities into production shipments; timing and market acceptance of its customers' products; risks associated with potential disruption caused by the Coronavirus; schedule changes and projected production start dates that could impact the timing of shipments; the company’s future evaluation systems; broadening the number of our ecosystem partners; and expected results and financial expectations for revenue, gross margin, operating expenses, profitability and cash.

These statements should be considered in conjunction with the cautionary warnings that appear in QuickLogic's SEC filings. For additional information, please refer to the company's SEC filings posted on its website and the SEC’s website.

Investors are cautioned that all forward-looking statements in this call involve risks and uncertainties and that future events may differ materially from the statements made.

For more details of the risks, uncertainties and assumptions, please refer to those discussed under the heading “Risk Factors” in the most recent annual report on Form 10-K, the most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q, recent Forms 8-K and other documents we periodically file with the SEC.

These forward-looking statements are made as of today, and management undertakes no obligation to revise or publicly release any revisions of the forward-looking statements in light of any new information or future events. In today’s call we will be reporting non-GAAP financial measures.

These non-GAAP measures should not be considered as a substitute for or superior to financials prepared in accordance with GAAP. You may refer to the earnings release we issued today for a detailed reconciliation of our GAAP to non-GAAP results and other financial statements.

We have also posted an updated financial table on our IR web page that provides current and historical non-GAAP data.

Please note, QuickLogic uses its website, the company blog, corporate Twitter account, Facebook page, and LinkedIn page as channels of distribution of information about its products, its planned financial and other announcements, its attendance at upcoming investor and industry conferences, and other matters.

Such information may be deemed material information, and QuickLogic may use these channels to comply with its disclosure obligations under Regulation FD. A copy of the prepared remarks made on today’s call will be posted at QuickLogic’s IR web page shortly after the conclusion of today’s earnings call. I would now like to turn the call over to Brian..

through the combination of restructuring activities, expected higher revenue, and improved gross margin, we expect cash usage to decline significantly throughout the year. As such, I am very confident we will not need to raise capital to achieve profitability.

In summary, we have streamlined our operations, enhanced product development and refined our go-to-market strategy. When tying all of these items together, I am confident the foundation is in place to drive QuickLogic to profitability and improved overall financial performance in 2020.

I would now like to turn the call over to Sue for a discussion of our recent financial performance and full Q1 Outlook. Sue:.

Our revenue guidance for the first quarter is $2.3 million, plus or minus 10 percent. As Brian already discussed, we are taking a conservative outlook based on the potential impact from the Coronavirus. We believe total revenue will be comprised of approximately $600 thousand of new product revenue and $1.7 million of mature product revenue.

With a sales mix that includes increasing SaaS sales, and the cost savings from the restructuring, we expect our non-GAAP gross margin to be approximately 64 percent, plus or minus 3 percent.

We are forecasting that total non-GAAP operating expenses, excluding the one-time restructuring costs, will drop to approximately $3.9 million, plus or minus $300 thousand. Within operating expenses, we expect our R&D to be approximately $2.2 million and SG&A to be approximately $1.7 million.

As a reminder, the full benefit of the savings from the restructuring will be realized in Q2, at which time R&D and SG&A will decline to $1.9 million and $1.6 million respectively.

After interest expense, other income and taxes, at the midpoint, we currently forecast our non-GAAP net loss will be approximately $2.4 million, or $0.29 per share based on approximately 8.5 million shares outstanding.

Most of the difference between our GAAP and non-GAAP results is our stock-based compensation expense, which we expect to be approximately $850 thousand. We expect this expense will remain in the mid $800 thousand range for the foreseeable future. Finally, in Q1, we expect cash usage to decline, and be in the range of $2.3 to $2.7 million.

This includes both the approximately $500 thousand restructuring costs, and cash used for operations. With that, let me now turn the call back over to Brian for his closing remarks..

Thank you, Sue. With 2019 behind us, our focus is squarely on the future. We know revenue growth will be the key to delivering on our profitability goals. 2019 was a year when we made great strides in building the foundation for improved financial performance.

I am confident 2020 will be the year we begin to see the benefits from the heavy lifting we did last year as we execute on our plans for creating a sustainably profitable business. Before opening the call for Q&A, I want to let everyone know we are scheduled to participate in the ROTH Conference in March in Newport Beach.

We look forward to seeing some of you at that event. That completes our prepared remarks. Operator, I would now like to open the call for questions..

Thank you. [Operator Instructions] We will now take our first question from Sujeeva. Your line is open..

So on the new product -- well, let's start with the mature products first.

What's the run rate you think about for the matured products as they recover here from your 1Q guidance of $1.7 million?.

So Suji, as of model it's 1.7 million plus or minus 10% each quarter..

That's a good run rate. Okay. And then, if that's the case, then your kind of teens guidance, high teens guidance would indicate that new products would tripled roughly year-over-year at that rate.

So, just talk about the three areas and which one do you think will help it grow from 700k per quarter seeing now across eFPGA, SensiML and then core EOS S3 opportunity?.

Yeah. So, the biggest growth area is going to be from the EOC S3 because that is a higher ASP, we have been designing that in for some time. And again, this outlook for 2020, we've taken a more conservative approach and we're looking primarily at multinational OEMs.

So one from Kyocera, from the streaming TV provider -- from what we're getting out of the Flex and Infineon deals that they've been pushing the modules and systems to the market, so we're really benefiting from their channel. That's the primary driver for new product.

Secondarily, we do see a lot of opportunity coming to fruition with SensiML now starting with their partners, so that will be the second area. And then the third area will be the eFPGA. We didn’t give a lot of airtime to those just because the script was long today, but there’s opportunities that we talked about last time continue to move forward.

I think one of them is going to take out in March, on one of their test chips. So we're thinking that those will also have a material contribution to revenue in this year from new products..

Okay.

And then, can you specifically size the Kyocera opportunity best you can for us to understand the TAM and the contribution opportunity in 2020?.

From a TAM point of view, I think they probably be somewhere between 10 million and 20 million phones per year. We're focusing on the domestic market with them. If we are successful in doubling the number of phones that we’re in with them, that would put us somewhere between 6 and 8 tons this year.

Typical phones for them are few hundred thousand units up to 1 million units each. So, I think we're modeling Kyocera for us this year somewhere between -- around $2 million worth of business, depending on when phones are launched throughout the year, could be higher..

Understood.

2 million?.

Right..

Okay. Great. And then last question, the gross margin very high here, nice mix, can you talk about how sustainable this 64 level your guide is and what the puts and takes might be there? Thanks..

So, we think we estimate at the mid 60% for 2020. So, I want to model at that range. So, 64 is right on the mid-point..

Okay. Alright guys. Thanks..

We will now take our question from Richard Shannon, Craig-Hallum..

Brian and Sue, thanks for taking my question as well. Maybe I’ll follow up on the topic of -- kind of looking at the view in 2020 here, just following on Suji's question. I think you talked about EOS being the kind of biggest driver for the year. Obviously, Kyocera would fit in that well.

Maybe if you could help us understand the contribution you’re expecting from hearables and how much did the kind consumer view from China and the buyer stuff impact that outlook? And how would you compare that versus what you thought about two or three quarters ago, when we started hearing about the Amazon compliance testing dynamics? how would you compare that versus what you thought about maybe.

Lot of questions in one question. So if I forget to answer one of them, just hit me on it. So in general, so for the hearables. Actually let me step back. So for the voice recognition, that’s the dominant use case driving a lot of these outside of the [indiscernible] this year.

And I think that's probably on the order of few million dollars of revenue that we think would be voice enabled. Previously, to your question, we do think the hearables is a component of that and a lot of that were Chinese OEM hearables. That was probably just in China alone was going to be more than $5 million to $6 million this year in revenue.

As we said on this call, we've tempered that view back because of the uncertainty created by the coronavirus. I mean, there's still customers of ours that are not going back to the office for work yet. And so there's going to be some impact, we just haven't sized that yet.

That being said, we do see some of the other hearables for export out of China into U.S. and other markets are moving forward. And we're expecting that would be a couple of million dollars of revenue contribution to the new products this year. I know you mentioned to me with respect to Amazon.

So our solution now is certified and qualified to match the specs for Amazon. We shared in our CES suite. One of the headsets from customer of ours called 1MORE. I clearly showed it connecting to my phone and accessing Alexa. And our solution has passed all the requirements that AVS dictates. That product is still not yet on the ODM page for Amazon.

I think this is actually one of the challenges with the Coronavirus is that, 1MORE is located in China, that's pushed out some other development for that. So we're still fully expecting that will land on that page and that will drive revenue for us.

Just from a solution point of view that we put into the market, we are now certified and qualified to match the specs of Amazon..

That’s helpful. Thanks for that feedback. Maybe a question on SensiML. You talked about ending year with 44 customers if I remember currently. Mostly still on the [indiscernible] platform.

Maybe if you can kind of give us a sense of what you're expecting from the certain terms of the customer funnel, you think you can double or triple or even more of that customer base? And then I guess more importantly, how do you see that converting some of these existing and new customers into the full SaaS platform?.

Yes, so I’m going to give you a near-term answer and then an answer that I think will be reflective of what you’ll see later in the year.

So in the near-term, we're putting a lot more emphasis on our current funnel, assigning a little bit of our data sciences to these customers, because we're seeing some of them are getting lost in how to collect data correctly, which seems to be a common problem in the AI space right now. We are seeing, when we do that, we have a higher hit rate.

In fact, we just got a sign [indiscernible] agreement earlier this week from a customer, it’s really big one, in fact, in India doing the wearable, and they needed to be gesture recognition for the wearable. So when we get our guys involved a little bit, we see it come smoother. We're going to keep doing that in the near-term.

That helps close things to fruition in the forecast in the near-term. What we want to do is build out a more scalable model from a SaaS business point-of-view.

So we're actually going to be in the process of bringing in some web specialists to do work around SaaS to make sure that we're getting better hit rates coming through the region, from the web, and hopefully some of that results coming in later in the year.

The other thing I mentioned is that, it's very different when we can get on other people's platforms, the other microcontrollers and have their sales force selling.

So part of our thesis and plan for this year's revenue growth in SensiML is to make sure that these partners are trained very well in the solution, like St Micro and Nordic, that’s getting this word after their sales force, and leveraging them to be selling it. So that we’re not having to do a lot ourself.

I think all those efforts are going to result in pretty significant revenue growth for that line this year..

Okay. That's helpful. So Brian, maybe one fundamental question and I'll jump over to Sue for quick financial one. So, this mega cap company, you called service provider company you talked about for quarter and talked about at CES as well.

I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks that you moved that over an open-source development platform which has helped you to be able to send some internal resources and cut cost here. I guess I want to make sure that I understand kind of the full strategic nature of this move.

And ultimately, what do you expect from this customer, this year, especially in context with all the other customers and dynamics you talked about before on the call?.

So, let me start with the strategic value. Firstly, I think in IoT space, it’s a very fragmented market, and not everybody is a developer in that market. It's hardware savvy to the extent that they can actually go make hardware changes to things like FPGAs. They want to start with a very easy to use development kit and design primarily in software.

And what we're doing in the open-source tooling side, with the help of this mega-cap company is going to be to put open-source tooling in place that is more – its what these engineers are more accustomed to, this new generation of engineers.

The result is that we should see a significant increase, a couple of order a magnitude increase in the people that can design in our product, they couldn't have done that otherwise. And so, we feel as a TAM expansion, the benefit of working with a company like this mega-cap company is that, they can help to fund the development of all.

So that's happening. And then the last thing I would say is that, at some point in the near future, they're going to be putting us out through their channels.

And I wouldn’t say distributors because they’re not a semiconductor company but they're going to be getting these web kits out into channels, in fact, they’ve committed to take 2,000 of these systems and put them on in the hands of customers. And so, we're planning on that increasing our sales funnel by virtue of their muscle and their reach.

Hopefully that answers your question..

Yes. That was helpful. Thanks Brian. Last question, Sue, maybe just the detail of the breakeven model looks like. You’ve given us some numbers of OpEx after the restructuring is completed. Just want to get your -- just kind of put the math together here, just to make sure I understand what breakeven point looks..

So, our breakeven now at the revenue level up about 6 million per quarter, with the gross margin at above 60 level or mid-60 level. And with OpEx at mid 3 million. So, we said I think on call today, it's 3.5 million at that OpEx. So, it should be at breakeven. And, we can see that in our model. It's a revenue achievable..

[Operator Instructions]. We will take our next question from Rick Neaton from Rivershore Investment Research. The line is open now. Please go ahead..

Thank you. Hello, Brian and Sue.

In Q4 did you burn any cash paying back for fractional shared and the reverse split?.

Rick, yes, we did. But it was like so minimal amount, not even arrived to mature level, I can tell you it's about 2,000 or 3000..

Okay. In the restructuring that you announced at the end of last month.

Does it include, already the cuts you announced to the QuickAI program back in August?.

I don't remember what cuts we had at QuickAI program back in August..

You said, you were going to [mass ball] the program? The module..

That was a module that we were going to do, that was already factored in earlier. So everything that we just talked about in the last month and the reductions was in addition to what we had taken back in the middle of last year with QuickAI module..

In Q4, what percentage of the new product revenue was SaaS?.

I will say close to 10%. Yes. Close to..

Do you know if the Board is going to be appoint a replacements for Tom Hart?.

We don't currently have a plan to do that. As I said on the prepared remarks. Mike Farese was elected to be Chairman of the Board. And I think we were appropriately sized and with the right experience levels for the Board to operate as company that we need to have..

Okay. I want to ask you some questions about the general outlook -- revenue outlook you gave for 2020, where you the targeted revenue in the mid to high-teens.

In that outlook, are you assuming any revenue from Flextronics or Infineon for actual sales of S3s?.

Yes, we are..

Are you assuming any revenue from the mega-cap cloud service provider?.

Yes, not a huge amount. But yes, we are..

So you will get some revenue from the development kits..

Not for sure, but I'm counting on more than that for the year..

Does the upper end of your revenue target for 2020 assume the revenue from the Chinese ODMs and OEMs that you said you’re conservatively not counting on?.

The upper end of that range, that has been a little bit, but not nearly as much as what we had forecasted last time when we spoke..

Okay.

What percentage of new product revenue in your 2020 target are you assuming to come from SensiML?.

If we get them to be at the 10%. After this year, I think that would be a good target for that..

When you talk about the product from the streaming service customer.

Is that the voice remote control product that you talked about in the past?.

Yes, it is. It is the remote controller voice enabled. That's correct..

And in your outlook for 2020, in the general range that you set as target.

Are you assuming any license revenue from your eFPGA initiative?.

Not for the year. Yes we are. On the same order of magnitude as SensiML..

Okay..

[Indiscernible]..

Is that coronavirus having an effects on your relationship with [indiscernible] or however you would properly pronounce is semiconductor effort?.

It doesn't impact the relationship with them. We're certainly, we're in contact with folks. It does reduce any of our face to face time that we spend with them.

And I think they have had extended time off and the fact I think the Hangzhou province in fact was even more strict about when people should be going back to the office to work, which is where Cisco and Alibaba are located.

So, I'm sure from the schedule point of view it’s impacting that, but as far as the relationship goes, no, I don't think so at all..

Okay. Hey, thanks a lot Brian and Sue. I appreciate it..

Operator, are there any more questions?.

It appears there’s no further questions at this time. Mr. Brian, I'd like to turn the conference back to you for any additional or closing remarks. Thank you..

So, thank you for you participation in today's call and continued support. We look forward to speaking with you again when we report our first fiscal quarter results in May. Thank you and good bye..

This concludes today’s call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect..