Kenton Alder
Analyst · Longbow Research
Okay. Thanks, Diane. Good afternoon, and thanks for joining us for our first quarter 2012 conference call. I will begin with a review of our business, and Steve will follow up with a discussion of our financial performance, and then we'll open the call to your questions.
Let's start with a review of highlights from the first quarter. Net sales were $300.5 million. GAAP net income attributable to stockholders was $12.6 million or $0.15 per diluted share. Non-GAAP net income was $18.8 million or $0.23 per diluted share. Gross margin was 18.8%. We achieved gross margin and net income in line with our guidance despite lower-than-expected revenue. Ordinarily, the associated lower operating leverage would have dampened margins. However, the more favorable product mix and consistent execution resulted in solid margins for the first quarter.
Although demand for conventional printed circuit boards in Asia Pacific remained soft, advanced HDI products continued to represent an expanding part of our overall mix, comprising approximately 26% of our Asia Pacific's revenue in the first quarter, an increase from 23% in the fourth quarter.
I'd now like to quickly comment on the results of our operating segments for the first quarter, and Steve will add more details later on in the call. The Asia Pacific segment had sales of $171.8 million in the first quarter, down from $218.4 million in the fourth quarter. Gross margin for the Asia Pacific segment was 17.4% in the first quarter compared to 18.5% in the fourth quarter. The decline in gross margin was primarily due to the lower absorption and lower production in our facilities that manufacture conventional printed circuit boards. While we had lower utilization rates in our conventional printed circuit board facilities, we ran at near full capacity in our advanced HDI facilities during the first quarter.
North American segment recorded first quarter sales of $130 million, down from $144.1 million in the fourth quarter. Gross margin for this segment was 20.4% compared to 21.6% in the fourth quarter. Gross margin decline primarily reflects lower facility utilization. Our capacity utilization percentage in North America was approximately 80% in the first quarter compared to about 83% in the fourth quarter. On a year-over-year basis, first quarter sales in Asia Pacific declined 15.2% from $202.5 million in 2011. In North America, sales decreased 8.6% to $142.3 million in 2011.
Now moving on to our end markets. Networking/communications is our largest end market. Sales in this end market were 32% of first quarter sales compared to 33% in the fourth quarter. We continue to experience solid demand for advanced technology routers, with some softness in unit price [ph] networking equipment, and then sales to our telecom infrastructure customers remained weak. However, we expect some modest improvement in this end market in the second quarter. On a longer-term basis, we anticipate that we will benefit from our diverse participation across the enterprise service provider and Internet and telecom infrastructure markets.
Computing, storage and peripherals is our second largest end market. Sales in this end market represented 24% of first quarter sales, an increase from 20% in the fourth quarter due to strong sales from a key customer. We expect sales to this end market to be down slightly in the second quarter.
Aerospace and defense end market represented 17% of first quarter sales compared with 15% in the fourth quarter. We experienced continued solid sales to commercial aerospace customers during the quarter. Our sales to defense customers were mixed and declined slightly overall. Going forward, we expect sales in this end market to remain steady in the second quarter.
In the cellphone end market, sales declined to 10% of total sales from 14% in the fourth quarter. Sales seasonally declined in this end market, following strong sales in the fourth quarter in advance of Chinese New Year. We expect sales in this end market to increase in the second quarter.
The medical/industrial instrumentation end market represented 10% of sales in the first quarter, up from 8% in the fourth quarter. We expect this end market to be relatively stable as a percent of sales in the second quarter.
Sales in the other end market decreased to 7% of sales in the first quarter from 10% in the fourth quarter. The decrease in sales was due to minimal e-reader production following strong holiday demand from a key customer during the fourth quarter. We expect this end market to increase in the second quarter.
Our top 5 customers accounted for 34% of sales in the first quarter. In alphabetical order, our top 5 OEM customers are Apple, Cisco, Huawei, Juniper and ZTE. We had one customer who accounted for more than 10% of sales during the quarter. Lead times for both our segments were unchanged at 4 to 6 weeks, which reflects normal lead times in Asia Pacific and North America. Our mix shift toward more advanced technology products resulted in ASPs increasing approximately 7% in Asia Pacific and 3% in North America during the first quarter.
Now before I wrap up my discussion, I would like to talk about some of the changes on how we will be managing our labor force in China. In addition to the annual government mandated pay increase, we are increasing wages to improve retention of our production staff as we reduce employees' opportunities to work overtime hours in order to satisfy overtime reduction mandates from some global customers. In conjunction with these changes, we anticipate hiring approximately 800 additional employees. For the second quarter, we expect these changes to reduce gross margins in our Asia Pacific segment by approximately 150 to 200 basis points, which we expect to partially offset through greater absorption and higher revenue levels.
To improve our operations and margins longer term, we will focus on improving our productivity and driving efficiencies with best practices throughout the company, as well as continuing to increase our high-margin, advanced HDI, flex and rigid-flex production. We will also continue to move towards increasing automation in our facilities. We have been successful in the past in improving our efficiency and fully expect to be successful in the future.
I'd like to provide an update on the maintenance work we are performing on our SYE plant located in Dongguan, China. The refurbishment of this facility is underway and progressing well. We expect to spend approximately $5 million on this project, most of which should be capitalized. We expect production at the SYE facility to resume during the third quarter of 2012.
In summary, we expect demand for advanced HDI work to continue to increase over the long term. And although the softness in demand for conventional printed circuit boards in Asia Pacific is continuing into the second quarter as expected, we are seeing some modest signs of improvement. As this year progresses, we expect increased revenue contributions from our advanced HDI, flex and rigid-flex business, the touchpad tablets, smartphones and e-readers. Additionally, in the second half of the year, we should begin to see demand improving from the telecom infrastructure customers as they work through their inventory and as the need for greater bandwidth continues to increase.
Monthly bookings increased in the month of March in North America, in large part driven by improving commercial aerospace business and selected large U.S. defense programs. This also increases our confidence in our outlook for 2012. Based on our qualification work that we are doing for customers in Asia Pacific, we continue to believe our prospects for the second half of 2012 are strong.
As previously noted, our CapEx program focuses on technology enhancements, bottleneck areas and maintenance. We plan to invest $120 million to $135 million in 2012 as we expand our manufacturing capabilities, primarily in advanced HDI, both of them the fastest-growing and highest-margin portion of our business.
Now Steve will review our financial performance for the first quarter.