Greg Klaben - Vice President of Investor Relations S. Kenneth Kannappan - Chief Executive Officer, President and Executive Director Pamela J. Strayer - Chief Financial Officer, Principal Accounting Officer and Senior Vice President.

David M. King - Roth Capital Partners, LLC, Research Division John F. Bright - Avondale Partners, LLC, Research Division Ryan MacDonald - Northland Capital Markets, Research Division Tavis C. McCourt - Raymond James & Associates, Inc., Research Division Yi-Dan Wang - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division.

Good afternoon. My name is Delinah, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Plantronics' First Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. Mr. Greg Klaben, you may begin your conference..

Thanks, very much, Delinah, and welcome, everyone, to Plantronics' First Quarter Fiscal Year 2015 Conference Call. Joining me today are Ken Kannappan, Plantronics' President and CEO; and Pam Strayer, Plantronics' Senior Vice President and CFO.

The information presented and discussed today includes forward-looking statements, which are made under the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. The risks and uncertainties related to such statements are detailed in our most recent 10-K, 10-Q and today's press release.

For the remainder of today's call, we will be providing only non-GAAP metrics related to gross margin, operating expenses, operating income, net income and earnings per share.

We have reconciled these measures in our earnings press release and in our quarterly analyst metric sheet, both of which are available on the Investor Relations page of our website. Additionally, after the conclusion of today's call, a recording of the call will be available with information on our website.

Unless stated otherwise, all comparisons of the first quarter are to the same quarter and the prior fiscal year. Plantronics' first quarter net revenues were $216.7 million. Our GAAP diluted earnings per share was $0.68 compared with $0.62 in fiscal 2014. Non-GAAP diluted earnings per share for the first quarter was $0.78 compared with $0.70.

The difference between GAAP and non-GAAP EPS for the first quarter consists of charges for stock-based compensation and purchase accounting amortization, both net of the associated tax impact and tax benefits from the release of tax reserves. Please refer to the full reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP in our earnings press release.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Ken..

first, the fundamentals of the Unified Communications or UC market remains solid. We remain confident of market growth over the next few years as more large enterprises move to deploy voice as part of their UC implementation.

Our UC revenue grew by 17% and enterprise revenue overall grew by 1% in a challenging comparison to a strong prior year quarter.

We continued to receive indications that more and more customers are planning to move forward with their UC deployment and received further indications of this at the recent Microsoft Developer Conference, Cisco Live Conference and Microsoft World Partner Conference.

Our position in UC continues to be strong and we continue to receive feedback from the customers and partners that we have the best offering in the market.

In addition, our excellence in partnering with the channel and customers to deliver support above and beyond their expectations in our own obligations has helped us establish leadership and excellent customer satisfaction.

One example of our partnering was with a Fortune 100 company which began their initial Microsoft Lync rollout with instant messaging and presence in late 2011. They turned on Enterprise voice functionality and Lync in late 2012.

During their headset selection process, they undertook a series of product tests and ultimately decided on Plantronics as the only headset solution for their UC deployment.

At that point, there was no competitive battle for us, but to ensure their usage goals for Lync were met, our field sales team participated in a series of roadshows with the IT department in all of their major locations. We shared with their employees how we use Lync and the IT department distributed the headsets to their employees for immediate use.

Lync usage went up dramatically as a result of the roadshows and their Lync deployment is continuing across Europe and Asia Pacific and the Americas. Our value proposition in UC is clear to our customers, as well as broad.

One key proposition is we provide a lower burden on the IT department versus competitive offerings, such as through our Spokes 3.0 platform, which I'll cover later. Additionally, our products work better, employees have a much better user experience, and our aftersales support continues to be rated the best in the industry.

Second, we believe that our business model has leveraged in 2 to 3 years. In Q1, we experienced double-digit growth in earnings per share due to healthy top line growth combined with a continued return of cash to stockholders via share repurchases.

We believe our business model is leveraged into -- leverage-able in 2 to 3 years as UC growth overtakes our rate of investment for the UC opportunity. It's not something we can plan perfectly, but we aim to grow profits with revenue this fiscal year, and in the long term, we expect to see margin expansion.

Third, our consumer business demonstrated very good growth of 25%, due principally to market share gains in mono and stereo Bluetooth. Our Bluetooth sales grew in all major geographies. In the U.S., our calendar year-to-date market share and U.S. model Bluetooth retail is above 45%.

Our industry-leading Voyager Legend headset, combined with the success for our new Voyager Edge headset are largely responsible for this strength. Our new BackBeat FIT stereo Bluetooth product started shipping midway through the June quarter and is already one of our top 5 Bluetooth headsets in terms of revenue.

It's been picked up broadly throughout our channels. To receiving exceptional product reviews from both editorial reviewers such as CNN and PC Magazine, as well as consumers, and has proven to be an incredible competitive offering for its price point.

Demand for the products is very strong, and we are likely be supply constrained for an extended period. Fourth, we continue to make great strategic progress. Besides our market share gains and profitability growth, we have made solid progress on our product pipeline and has some exciting product announcements planned for the fall.

Today, we announced an evolution of our Plantronics Spokes software platform by introducing Plantronics Manager Pro version 3.0, a cloud service that customers and partners can use to deploy and manage Plantronics communication devices, as well as a consistent user experience.

Also part of this portfolio, the new Plantronics Hub application, helps IT managers rapidly diagnose and resolve client-side Unified Communications deployment issues.

We have a good track record of increasing long-term stockholder value and believe we are very well positioned to continue doing so by investing in excellent growth opportunities, leveraging our business model as we grow, and continuously returning cash to shareholders. With that, let me turn the call over to Pam to discuss our Q1 results..

Enterprise net revenue of $152.4 million were up roughly $1.2 million and 1%; UC was a driver for that growth with core Enterprise being down year-to-year, due to an unusually strong quarter in the prior year; UC revenues of $49.2 million were up $7.1 million and approximately 17% over Q1 of the prior year; consumer net revenue of $64.3 million were up roughly $12.7 million and 25%, driven primarily by growth in our stereo products, including the introduction of our new BackBeat FIT product.

Mobile Bluetooth products also experienced strong growth, aided by the launch of our new Voyager Edge product; growth in revenue from our consumer products was strong across all regions of the world. Non-GAAP gross margin was better-than-expected at 53.2%, that's up 60 basis points compared with last year's margin of 52.6%.

Our shift in product mix toward mobile and UC products brought down average product margins by approximately 220 basis points compared to the prior year's gross margin. However, this decrease was more than offset by cost reductions mentioned above, which reduced component costs and overhead rates.

In addition, excess and obsolete inventory charges were down by over $1 million compared to the prior year. Non-GAAP operating expenses were $71.1 million, up $6.9 million, due primarily to increases in headcount, annual salary increases and increases in variable pay associated with our strong results.

In addition, we have higher IT-related spend, primarily associated with our Oracle Go-Live activities and higher legal expenses associated with an ongoing litigation. Offsetting these increases is a benefit of $2 million we recorded in the quarter from a litigation settlement.

As a percentage of revenue, operating expenses were 32.8%, that's up 110 basis points from the prior year of 31.7%. Our non-GAAP operating margin was 20.4%, down slightly from 20.9% in the prior year. Our effective non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter was 27%.

As a result of all these items, our Q1 non-GAAP net income of $33 million was 7.8% higher than a year ago, yielding non-GAAP EPS of $0.78, up $0.08 and approximately 11% from last year. Now for some balance sheet and cash flow highlights.

We finished the quarter with $437 million in cash and investments on our balance sheet, and generated over $29 million in cash flow from operations during the period. Of the $437 million in cash and investments at quarter end, approximately $11 million was domestic. We used $12.4 million to repurchase shares during the quarter.

Our DSO was 63 days, up from 54 days at the end of Q1 of the prior year. The increase was due in part to less time and focus spent during the quarter on customer collection activities as a result of our ERP implementation in the quarter. We estimate that our ERP focus increased DSO by approximately 7 days.

In addition, the timing of billings within the quarter added approximately 3 days to our DSO compared to the same quarter in the prior year. It should be noted that we are a book-and-ship model with 48-hour delivery targets.

As a result, billings linearity trends are driven by relatively short-term fluctuations in demand and seasonality in our business. Backlog numbers and billings linearity should not be used as an indicator, nor are they reflective of any long-term business trends or significant fluctuations in business demand. Turning to our capital expenditures.

Our Q1 investment was approximately $7 million, and slightly over 3% of net revenues. Expenditures include a large deposit on the construction of a new smart working facility in our European headquarters in the Netherlands, Santa Cruz facility improvements and equipment and tooling for our operations.

Depreciation expense on a GAAP basis for Q1 was $4.6 million, up $0.6 million from the prior year. Now turning to the outlook. We believe that total net revenues for our second fiscal year -- second fiscal quarter ending in September, will be in the range of $210 million to $220 million.

This focus assumes growth -- this forecast assumes gross margins to be approximately flat to slightly up from the current quarter. Depending on revenue mix and other factors, we believe our GAAP operating income will be approximately $35 million to $40 million, and non-GAAP operating income of approximately $42 million to $47 million.

The GAAP reconciling items we expect in the second quarter include approximately $7 million in stock-based comp expense and purchase accounting amortization before tax.

Although the low end of this non-GAAP operating margin range is just below our long-term targeted range, we do expect to make up for this with a higher profitability in the second half of the year. Our guidance includes an expected spend of approximately $1.9 million on GN litigation in Q2.

As a reminder, we are including GN litigation costs as part of our non-GAAP results based in our policy for non-GAAP reporting. The GN lawsuit is in the discovery phase and the impact to operating income from the associated legal expenses is particularly difficult to forecast. Actual expenses can vary significantly from our forecast.

Similar to last quarter, included in our non-GAAP guidance is a $2 million benefit to operating expenses, which we will receive as part of a binding agreement with one of our competitors to dismiss litigation. In addition, we've recently settled a second separate lawsuit in our favor.

As a result, our non-GAAP guidance also includes this benefit that is expected to be $2.2 million and will be recorded as a reduction to our operating expenses in the second quarter. Our non-GAAP tax rate for the quarter is expected to be 27%, and we are anticipating a full year tax rate of 27%.

Based on all of the above, in the second quarter, we expect GAAP EPS of $0.60 to $0.68 per share and non-GAAP EPS to be $0.72 to $0.80 per share, on average diluted shares outstanding of approximately $42.5 million. With that, I'll open the call for questions..

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is from Dave King..

I guess, first off, in terms of the guidance -- the revenue guidance, it looks pretty healthy and pretty strong with 11% kind of -- using the midpoint, 11% revenue growth implied. I guess, understanding that you're not breaking it out in the same way going forward in terms of the 4 different segments.

But just kind of trying to look for some color, I guess, how should we be thinking about that in terms of Enterprise versus consumer? Particularly amidst what you're seeing on the mobile side and not enough supply necessarily even to meet demand but then, maybe along those lines can, some of your prior comments about expecting a reacceleration in UC, hopefully, as we head into year end, et cetera.

Any color would be greatly appreciated..

Sure. I'm going to handle that question. So first, if you take a look at our Enterprise numbers, we expect that they're going to be relatively flat quarter-over-quarter. But if you look at the UC portion of that, that is a pretty growth rate from UC numbers in Q1 of the prior year.

On consumer side, Q3 is typically our high watermark for consumer revenues because of the holidays. So that is also baked in to our guidance numbers..

Let me just kind of address part of your question, I think, may have been about kind of the long-cycle build. And we're still believing that. I think that the total ecosystem deployments out there, a significant quantity, are still on IM and presence, with Voice yet to be deployed.

In addition to which we have a significant number of companies that are moving forward with pilots proof of concepts, other stages in the process, that we think are going to come on stream, not in the current quarter, and most of it, starting in, even in the next calendar year.

So we continue to believe that we're looking at a very significant growth opportunity going forward..

That's very helpful, Ken and Pam. And then, I guess, in terms of thinking about the earnings guidance, it sounds like, call it, so that's about 18% growth using the midpoint versus the 11% on the top line, so it seems like some of that's lower share count. It sounds like a little bit of that might be gross margin.

But then also, I guess, just some benefit on the expense side.

Pam, can you kind of walk us through what the different expense things were again, just real quick? So it sounds like there might be a few things -- still might be a couple of things that are outsized in the second quarter as well, but then also, it may be coming down, too? So any color there would be helpful..

Yes, so to break it out, I mean, as we've disclosed in the past, we've got $2 million benefits that we're recording in Q2, really, every quarter this year. So there's a $2 million benefit there. There's a new lawsuit that was settled, which adds another $2 million to that. So we've got roughly $4 million, $4.2 million in benefits.

If you take those out, our base level of operating expenditures, we're expecting to be up about $2 million from Q1. So we're expecting about $73 million before GN expenses and before the litigation benefit. That increase, quarter-to-quarter, is going to be due primarily to merit increases that kick in, in the second quarter for the full quarter..

Your next question comes from John Bright..

So I'll stay with the question, the same amount of question you started with. The OpEx during this quarter was higher than the revenue growth, but it looks like, Pam, that next quarter, that's where we're going be within either at or below revenue growth.

Is that a fair statement?.

Yes, that's a fair statement..

Okay. Ken, this is more of the philosophical question that you and I had before.

Are we at an inflection point, do you think, yet? And you see adoption?.

Let's put it this way. If we're saying that, is the growth going to suddenly accelerate at this point, my answer would be not yet. I think that we are going to see growth, but I don't think we've yet hit the point that there's a real change in that growth rate in a positive way..

Where do you think we are if you were to call that a baseball game?.

Well, honestly, I still think that we are roundabout the first couple of batters in the game. I mean, the fact of the matter is, that most organizations are not using voice UC at this point in time. And I think this is evolving towards heavy soft client voice usage overall.

So we've got, my guess is, around 5% or so of knowledge workers' tops using voice UC at this point in time. So there's a tremendous 20x relative to where we are growth. Now again, that's -- some of that's going to take quite some time to adopt. But I think we're going to see the beginning of more substantive [ph] growth over the next 2, 3 years.

And I expect to see some of that beginning next year. And then, in the meantime, I think we'll still grow..

In the prepared text of Ken, I think it was Ken, might've been Pam, regarding the BackBeat, the new rollout, you mentioned supply constrained for an extended period.

Why is the supply constrained? What components may be defined? What would you say an extended period is? And what maybe the expected impacts might be?.

So that was my comment, and to be clear, we do have a component in that product. It's an advanced product in a number of ways. And I don't want to identify the component at this point in time, but suffice to say that there is a, unfortunately, a very, very long lead time for that supplier to add capacity.

We don't, at this point in time, see an effective alternative to supplement that capacity. And so, we rather quickly ramped beyond their expectations and a little bit beyond our expectations on the product. And so, unfortunately, that is where we'll be for some period..

Your next question comes from Mike Latimore..

This is Ryan MacDonald on for Michael Latimore. Ken, I believe you talked about, in your opening comments, about -- with UC, there's that -- you sounded pretty hopeful following some of the Microsoft developer conferences and also the Cisco developer partner conferences.

Can you talk about how -- the dynamic in that UC business? And is it still predominantly Lync-driven or has Cisco started to become a bigger driver of UC than it was a year ago?.

Well, I'm a little reluctant to comment on their businesses. I think that, that's something I should let them do and third-party analysts primarily do. Suffice to say that they are both very important partners for us, and we're continuing to see good business and good partnership with both of them..

Okay.

And for UC revenue, in general, for Plantronics, I mean, was the backlog higher now versus the March quarter?.

So -- I'm sorry, that was on UC?.

Yes..

So the trick is we really don't think about backlog the way you do, and let me just kind of explain what I mean by that.

At any moment in time, we will have a tiny amount of backlog because customers, typically they don't order from us, they order from typically an SI who's ordering from a distributor who's placing orders on us, and it's all turning very, very quickly. We don't deal with a lot of formal backlog.

Now we do have project pipelines that we track for our customers, where they are indicating what the size of their rollout is, what their planned deployment timelines are. Sometimes, we know roughly how much we all get. Often, we don't.

Often, they have our products and competitive products on internal websites and people will just select what they want, and we don't necessarily know what's coming to us or the exact timing of it. But even with all of that, I mean, frankly, it's not necessarily accurate. Now, that's definitely not formal backlog.

Although, over time, it does turn into business..

Okay.

And in terms of, to the extent that you're tracking say, those project pipelines, are you seeing more in terms of like UC deployments, or UC headset deployments, are you seeing -- is there a shift on the way that corporations are deploying those? I mean, are you seeing more corporate-wide deployments? Or is it still mostly on, maybe like a division-by-division basis with large companies?.

Well, so -- I mean, companies don't deploy this without an intention to go corporate wide. Having said that, if it's a large company, the ordinary path on that is it does tend to be business unit by business unit. Now it's -- and even within the business units, it's kind of geography by geography. You can understand how that works.

If you're in a particular location, it always turns out the surprising amount of communication is with the other people that you work with in a very local manner and the IM tool, and of course, the peer-to-peer voice tools, work very well and people gravitate to them very quickly, the click to call, the conferencing, all that type of stuff.

So for a large company, you will always see that pattern go division by division. It's just too monstrous for a huge organization with, say, several hundred thousand people to do a cold turkey, full corporate changeover, it does not ever going to happen that way..

Your next question comes from Tavis McCourt..

I just want to make sure I understand the OpEx. So this quarter, there was a $2 million gain related to a litigation settlement.

And in the next quarter, you expect that to be roughly $4.2 million gain, is that the right way?.

Yes, that's correct..

And any potential for further gains throughout the year, or is that -- it should be -- that should be the 2 quarters?.

No, that's all we're aware of at this point..

We have mentioned that there would be some gains in Q3 and Q4, right?.

Right. So yes, okay, to clarify, we did mention earlier, we've got gains of $2 million in Q1, $2 million in Q2, and then roughly, $1.6 million in each quarter, Q3 and Q4, related to the settlement that was announced earlier this year. So those are still coming..

Okay, so for the September quarter guide, it's just a $2 million gain and [indiscernible]..

A total of, well, $4.2 million..

Plus another $1.6 million in December?.

That's right..

Yes..

Okay. Okay, and then on the BackBeat Pro, I was wondering if you could give us a sense of, obviously, it's a great product. I'm just trying to get a sense of the size of that stereo Bluetooth market. You guys have obviously come to become the market leader in Mono Bluetooth.

What are the relative sizes of those markets, just so we can kind of, I guess, size the opportunity for that product line?.

Sure. I mean, first of all, the markets are only so discrete, by which I mean that the Bluetooth stereo market has a very adjacent market of corded solutions that people often do use with those products. A little less so on the mono side, where the category of corded products has largely evaporated. So it's just worth having that as context.

So relative to the Bluetooth-only portion of the stereo market, it is clearly smaller than the Mono market today, but it is growing much more rapidly. And it will become, at some point in time, most likely, larger than the Mono category, if these current trends continue.

We also expect over time, that it will pick up a larger portion of that corded stereo market..

Got you. So as of today, a smaller market but growing quite rapidly..

Right..

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Yi-Dan Wang..

I have a few questions. First of all, on the traditional Enterprise sales that you reported, I can see that the comparison is a bit tougher, but the size of the decline seems to be bigger than specially what we had anticipated, and it would be great, Ken, if you could put some additional color around that? And then, let's start with that..

Sure. I really would tell you that I think that it is primarily a function of the year-ago period having been strong, relative to some kind of pent-up upgrade cycles coming out of the recession, as well as some timing issues that just happened to fall that quarter, relative to both deployments and distributors' activities.

So that, in my mind, is the primary explanation..

Okay. I mean, if -- I was kind of looking at the quarterly numbers you've seen in that business, and this is the third quarter that we've seen a fairly sizable decline over the last, I suppose, 6 quarters.

Were there anything -- there weren't anything unusual with the currency that would have shifted your reported numbers versus what you would see operationally?.

Not really. There weren't big currency swings during that particular period..

Okay. And then, I guess, Europe seems to be quite a bit stronger as well.

Were there any reasons for that, that we should be aware of?.

I think that it's -- at least in my mind, it's -- portions of Europe were, such as the U.K., were experiencing some rebound in economic conditions that allowed for a little bit more replacement of cycle activity. And in some portions where we had a little bit of pickup, I think there is, again, this little bit of pent-up demands are there..

Okay.

And then, lastly, on the gross margin improvements that you guys have achieved, how much scope is there for further improvements over and beyond what we have seen this quarter? And how long would that last for?.

Yes. So I'd say, in the short to mid term, probably not a lot. We did have lower than what we expect is normal E&O charge, so I would expect that to go back up a little bit next quarter. We'll continue to see some benefit from the lower component cost. But I wouldn't expect any -- another step up from that.

So in modeling our gross margin for next quarter, I would call it roughly flat to what we're doing this quarter..

Okay.

So but your gross margin is a decent size above your long-term model, should we expect the current level of gross margin to be sustainable, given that over time, you should see higher Enterprise revenues, which are more profitable than mobile?.

Well, I think....

You know, I mean, we, frankly, are a little bit high, particularly given the higher mix of consumer that we have expected. Having said that, we have continually found opportunities to reduce cost, and those models are based upon our belief of what is long-term structural sustainable.

But they're not slavish things that we are necessarily going to operate on, and we're always trying in every area of the company to do better. So that's what we think is long-term sustainable. But it's not that it's necessarily there's anything that's going to change the dynamic immediately..

I'm showing no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Mr. Greg Klaben for his closing comments..

Thank you very much, Delinah. If anyone has any additional questions, we'll be available after the call. Thanks, again, for joining us..

That concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect..