Yahoo Finance InterDigital, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDCC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript
InterDigital, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDCC) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 2, 2024
InterDigital, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $2.88, expectations were $2.75. InterDigital, Inc. isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).
Operator: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the InterDigital First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Raiford Garrabrant, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.
Raiford Garrabrant: Good morning to everyone and welcome to InterDigital’s first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. I am Raiford Garrabrant, Head of Investor Relations for InterDigital. With me on today’s call are Liren Chen, our President and CEO; and Rich Brezski, our CFO. Consistent with prior calls, we will offer some highlights about the quarter and the company and then open up the call for questions. For additional details, you can access our earnings release and a slide presentation that accompany this call on our Investor Relations website. Before we begin our remarks, I need to remind you that in this call, we will make forward-looking statements regarding our current beliefs, plans and expectations, which are not guarantees of future performance and are made only as of the date hereof.
Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results and events to differ materially from results and events contemplated by such forward-looking statements. These risks and uncertainties include those described in the Risk Factors section of our 2023 annual report on Form 10-K and in our other SEC filings. In addition, today’s presentation may contain references to non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are included in the supplemental materials posted to the Investor Relations section of our website. With that taken care of, I will turn the call over to Liren.
Liren Chen: Thank you, Raiford. Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. On our last call, we provided annual guidance for 2024 revenue of between $620 million and $670 million. This guidance highlights the increasing momentum of our business and the multiple growth opportunity that we have identified and expect to achieve through the rest of the year. Today, I am pleased to share that we have made significant headwinds in achieving our goal and reconfirm our 2024 annual guidance. Revenue for the first quarter were $264 million, up by 30% year-over-year and above the high-end of our guidance. Our Q1 revenue was one of the highest in our history and an all-time high for our CE and our IT licensing program. Through the quarter, we have made great progress on multiple fronts of our business.
We signed 7 new license agreements. We enhanced our position as a leader in the application of AI in both wireless and video and we received several positive core decisions, which we believe will help us to advance negotiations with certain unlicensed smartphone OEMs. We began the quarter with a new landmark license with Samsung TV business. The agreement covers patents and our joint licensing program with Sony and introduced our own pattern across a range of video and Wi-Fi technologies. Samsung is a market leader in TV and this agreement highlights both the value of video and Wi-Fi innovation and the growth we continue to build in licensing the consumer electronics sector. I would emphasize that this new agreement is separate to the Samsung smartphone license.
We announced at the start of 2023 that Samsung and InterDigital has agreed to renew the license for their smart TV to our portfolio. The final term of the smartphone license includes how much spent on mass payouts are still the subject of arbitration hearing, which is on track to be held this summer with the final resolution expected by end of this year. The 7 new agreements that we signed in the first quarter reflect the momentum we continue to see across all our licensing programs and our strength in consumer electronics and our IT in particular. The revenue and recurring revenue in Q1 from our CE and our IT program were both record highs. With Samsung and other agreements that we closed in the quarter, we have increased the cumulative value of contracts that we have signed over the last 3 years to almost $2.7 billion, giving us an incredible strong base from which to drive new long-term agreements and pursue additional growth opportunities.
Staying on license, we are making significant progress in our effort to ensure that we received further compensation for our innovation from unlicensed smartphone OEMs. Earlier today, a German court issued a very positive decision for us in our dispute with Lenovo. The court ruled that Lenovo infringed one of our 4G and 5G standard essential patents that InterDigital has acted in a friend manner that Lenovo is an on-leading licensee who engaged in hold out and should therefore be enjoined in the German market. The injunction means that Lenovo will be prohibited from selling 4G and 5G contract devices in Germany. Also, as part of our dispute with OPPO, a German court also wrote that OPPO infringed Interdigital’s 4G and 5G standard issuance of patent in sued.
The Interdigital has acted in a friend manner that OPPO is an on-leading licensee, the court also awarded injunction against OPPO. In India, in another trial against OPPO, we received yet another positive decision, but OPPO was ordered to pay royalties in the form of a security deposit to the court. The Indian court also heavily criticized and fined OPPO for delaying tactics during our negotiations and ordered as the trial be concluded before end of the year. We are encouraged by this recent development in our cases and we believe we have built significant momentum in our negotiations with both companies. As I have said many times before, we always prefer to sign long-term license through amicable negotiations, but we are ready to enforce our patent rights, if necessary.
Our strength as the fundamental innovator in critical technology, continue to underpin our progress. Our research team has long been recognized by the world leaders in the development of wireless and video technology. And increasingly, our leadership in AI is coming to the forefront. In Q1, one of our senior engineers was appointed to hedge the AI and machine learning standing committee of IEEE, the standard development automation, which leads the evolution of Wi-Fi. At this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, we showcased two demonstrations, which has AI at their heart. One was in partnership with Keysight, which use a newer network developed by our genres to demonstrate the application of AI in our 6G network. And a second combined advanced video compression and AI to significantly reduce energy consumption of streaming video while preserving picture quality.
Also at MWC, we demonstrated cutting-edge immersive video and haptic technology in a specific use case of eSports and showed our increasing leadership in integrated sensing and communications and emerging technology, which will be a pillar of 6G. Our research success continue to be reflected in the development of our global patent portfolio. Recently, we were confirmed among the top 25 companies globally that filed the most new pattern applications with European patent office last year. Our number of new applications filed with the EPO increased by 40% year-over-year in a clear indication of our success in translating our foundational innovation into patent assets. The strength of innovation and patent footprint give us an excellent platform to drive further growth in our existing licensing program and in green field opportunities such as cloud-based video services.
And with our track record for delivering new license agreements with leading manufacturers such as Samsung, we believe we are in an excellent position to reach our financial target for the year. With that, I’ll hand it over to Rich to talk you through the numbers in more details.
Rich Brezski: Thanks, Liren. Q1 was another outstanding quarter for InterDigital as our strong revenue growth drove both non-GAAP EPS and adjusted EBITDA to the high end of our guidance range. This growth was powered by new licensing agreements, most notably Samsung TV. These results support our long-term objective of delivering consistent revenue growth combined with strong margins. Total revenue increased 30% year-over-year with CE and IoT leading the way. Based on new licensing agreements reached in Q1, recurring revenue for CE and IoT reached an annualized run rate of almost $90 million, an increase of 57% year-over-year and has roughly doubled over the last 2 years. When combined with catch-up revenue of $160 million, CE and IoT total revenue for the quarter reached an all-time high at $183 million.
This performance highlights our ability to deliver significant growth beyond the smartphone market. Our adjusted EBITDA for the quarter of $130 million equates to an adjusted EBITDA margin close to 50%, consistent with our guidance. These results demonstrate the power of our business model. Our investments in fundamental technologies drive top line growth while the reuse of those technologies across multiple verticals delivers high margins and drives cash flow. Our strong performance in Q1 produced cash from operations of $51 million and free cash flow of $41 million. This strong cash flow, combined with a cash balance of nearly $1 billion, supports our continued return of capital to shareholders. In Q1, we repurchased approximately 300,000 shares for $29 million.
We repurchased another 200,000 shares in April for a year-to-date total of roughly 0.5 million shares. Since we first paid our dividend in 2011, we have now returned approximately $1.8 billion to shareholders through share buybacks and dividends. In that time, we reduced our outstanding share count by almost 45% from more than 45 million shares to just over 25 million shares. And with $246 million left on the current buyback authorization, we’re not done yet. Looking forward to Q2, we expect recurring revenue will include $93 million to $97 million of revenue from existing contracts plus any amounts we recognize from any new agreements we may sign over the balance of the quarter. Based only on existing contracts, we expect an adjusted EBITDA margin of about 38% and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.70 to $0.80.
Any additional agreements would be additive to those totals. Our strong first quarter results have us on track to meet our full year 2024 targets, and we are reaffirming our prior guidance of revenue in the range of $620 million to $670 million. We continue to expect an adjusted EBITDA margin of roughly 50% for the full year of 2024 and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $7.45 to $8.76. Before I conclude, I’d like to mention that we’ll be attending four conferences over the remainder of the second quarter, the Bank of America Global Tech Conference in San Francisco on June 4. And the William Blair Growth Stock Conference in Chicago on June 4, the IDEAS Investor Conference in New York on June 12 and the Roth 10th Annual London Conference on June 26 and 27.
Please check with your representatives at those firms if you’d like to schedule a meeting. With that, I’ll turn it back to Raiford.
Raiford Garrabrant: Thanks, Rich. At this point, operator, we are ready to take questions.
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