Jerald Fishman
Analyst · JPMorgan
Well, with regard to our market performance in the second quarter, in the second quarter, our revenues from the broad and diversified industrial market, which includes industrial automation, instrumentation, energy, defense and healthcare, grew 14% sequentially, reaching a record level of $384 million. Our strong results were primarily driven by growth in the process control and instrumentation markets, with most other application areas within the industrial category showing sequential improvement as well. In addition, we saw strong sales both at our large OEM industrial accounts, as well as within our work base of smaller industrial accounts. In aggregate, industrial revenues represented 49% of our total revenues in Q2. Overall, we continue to believe that the industrial market offers significant long-term growth opportunities in line with ADI's overall corporate growth rate, driven by our customers' need for energy efficiency and higher performance in industrial automation and advanced instrumentation equipment, as well as an increasing trend to substitute capital for labor in modern factory build outs around the world. For the balance of 2011, we expect industrial sales to remain strong, a prediction that is supported by leading industrial customers who've reported that they believe underlying conditions in this market are very solid. For example, Siemens and ABB, which are 2 of ADI's major industrial customers, in their most earnings announcements reported double-digit increases in new orders, underscoring the strength in their respective businesses. We believe that ADI is very well positioned to benefit from the momentum that these and many other industrial customers continue to see. Revenues from our automotive customers were $106 million in the quarter, an increase of 12% sequentially from the first quarter. That would get another record for our Automotive business, which in Q2 represented approximately 13% of our total revenues. Leveraging our strengths along the signal chain and sensors and signal conditioning and data converters and in DSPs, ADI has developed a very compelling portfolio of solutions in the area of safety, entertainment and also power train electronics. In this portfolio, along with a more robust market in automotive worldwide, continues to drive our success. During Q2, safety systems represented a large portion of our business in automotive, with particularly strong sales in the area of stability control, which is a new large market opportunity for ADI technology. In addition, infotainment remained strong in the areas of hedge units and audio amplifier and in powertrain products, we experienced continuing success with our battery management products, achieving record revenue levels in Q2 with sales of key products such as our intelligent battery management solution which is used in lower emission vehicles. Looking ahead, we expect automotive to continue to be an important growth driver for ADI, and we believe that we'll continue to benefit from favorable macro trends within the automotive space in the areas of active and passive safety, entertainment and fuel efficiency, all of which together should continue to drive higher dollar content for ADI. Communications revenues at $176 million for the quarter were up 7% versus Q1 level. Sales to communications customers accounted for about 22% of our total sales in the quarter. During the second quarter, escalating the adoption of smartphones and the accompanying data growth, continued to drive cellular market expansion in Europe, in North America and also in China. For ADI, wireless infrastructure sales surged in Q2, driven by a strong base station demand as competing operators remain focused on aggressively expanding their capacity and their footprint. We believe that ADI will continue to benefit from this expansion as a result of the need for broadband high performance mixed signal radios and base stations and a point-to-point system. Less than 10% of our communications infrastructure revenues in Q2 were derived from TD-SCDMA equipment in China, which given the large sequential communications revenue increase we saw in Q2, really clearly demonstrates the underlying strength and most importantly, the breadth of ADI's position in the wireless infrastructure market worldwide. Our current estimates are that TD-SCDMA revenues will begin to increase in the second half of the year as TD-SCDMA deployments we hope resume in China. Wired communications, although down slightly quarter-over-quarter, were up year-over-year in Q2 and continued to trend upward on an annual basis. Though moderated to some degree by constraints on capital spending in the short term, we expect that the fundamental demand for higher wire traffic will continue to drive growth in this business for ADI over the longer term. Going forward, we expect that communications infrastructure will remain a key area of opportunity for ADI, driven by the explosion in mobile broadband data usage and continued mobile subscriber growth, pushing infrastructure capital spending to new high levels. In the second quarter, our consumer revenues were down 7% sequentially, primarily due to events in Japan as well as weaker consumer spending environments worldwide. Our Q2 revenues from consumer customers were $111 million and accounting for 14% of ADI's revenues. During the second quarter, increased revenues from portable consumer products partially offset weaker revenues in digital camera products, while home entertainment revenues were essentially flat, sequentially. And finally, our computer revenues were flat sequentially, but represented now just 2% of ADI's total revenue. As most of you are aware, the computing market is not a space where ADI is supplying almost any R&D resource. So let me now turn it to the outlook for Q3. Overall, business was very strong for ADI in Q2. As I mentioned earlier, during the second quarter, industry-wide uncertainty about supply related to the Japan disaster likely accelerated some demand, which is not expected to repeat in the third quarter. At the same time, our order trends were strong throughout Q2. And we're entering Q3 with a book-to-bill ratio above one and higher where we have opening backlog, which together indicates continuing growth in the demand for ADI's products. In addition, our customer forecast indicate continued strong demand for industrial, automotive and communications infrastructure products and also some recovery in consumer products, particularly in Japan. In aggregate, as a result of strength in our end markets coupled with our continuing ability to supply upside demand, we're now more optimistic about what we can achieve in 2011 than we were when the year began. As such, we're planning for our third quarter revenues to be in the range of $765 million to $795 million with a midpoint of about $780 million, which is above our original plan for Q3. We expect continuing strong gross margins in the range of 67% to 68%. We expect operating expenses to be flat-to-down slightly sequentially. We believe that this should result in earnings from continuing operations in a range of $0.70 to $0.75, which were also above our original plan for the third quarter. In summary, I'm very pleased with where ADI is today and also where we're headed. Our heightened focus, coupled with secular strength in the markets that are strategic for ADI, is producing above market growth rates and makes such that the margin more optimistic about achieving the long-term growth rates that we've projected. Clearly the benefits of strategically focusing our R&D on higher margin and sustainable markets is beginning to pay off for ADI. And our fundamentally lower and more variable cost structure is resulting in one of the most profitable business models in the semiconductor industry to date with upside opportunity and some downside projection. Most importantly, our employees understand and support where we're headed and are enthusiastic about ADI's future and the role that they continue to play in our success. In a recently completed survey of our 8,500 employees around the world, we noted very significant improvements in virtually every category of employee understanding and employee satisfaction, which together are generally a very good leading indicator of our future success. By design, we're in the right places at the right times with a highly capable and energized workforce. And our growth in financial returns, which we believe will continue to drive superior returns for our shareholders, are indicative of the strength of this position.