Alphawave IP Group PLC

LSE:AWE

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q4

[Jose Cano, executive]

Okay. Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining Alphawave Earnings Full year 2022 Preliminary Results Webcast. First of all, I must remind everyone that today's briefing and some of the answers to your questions may contain forward-looking statements. These statements reflect management's kind of reviews and there are risks associated with them.

You can find full explanation of these risks on Slide 2 of the results presentation. You can find all the 3 announcements we put out today on our website and a recording of this call will also be available soon as we finish. With that, I'll hand over to John. John, over to you.

[John Holt, executive]

Thanks, Jose. Good morning, everybody. This is John Lofton Holt, Co-Founder and Executive Chair of the company. I'm joined today by other members of management: Tony Pialis, my Co-Founder, our CEO and President; Daniel Aharoni, our Chief Financial Officer; and importantly our Independent Director and Chair of the Audit Committee. We felt it was important to have him on the call today because of the announcements that we made this morning in relation to our audit process.

And so I'd really like to start the call off addressing that point and then get into the exciting results that we have for the full year 2022 as well as an exciting Q1 trading update. First of all, on the audit process, you've seen the third announcement that we put out today related to the additional time requested by our external auditors to complete its internal oversight and assurance processes before issuing the formal audit opinion.

I'd like to address this point before we get into anything else. First of all, we're not expecting any changes to the numbers, which is why management and the Board decided to publish our preliminary results today as planned. We have also published the long form of the report, the same thing that we would have published if these were audited results. The goal here is to provide complete transparency and as much information to investors as possible on today's reporting day.

The additional time requested by external auditors is the result of really the increased scale of the audit work that's required due to the 3 acquisitions that we've done, one of which was a carve-out. It's a very difficult thing to model. Also the debt financing and a significant increase in the overall scale and geographic footprint of our business. As we told you at the Capital Markets Day in January, we're not planning through any more acquisitions anytime soon. So we really view this audit process as a once in a lifetime event for the company. And unfortunately, it just requires more time than expected to finalize the internal procedures.

As a result of going over the maximum time allowed to publish audited results, we have been talking to the FCA this week, and our shares will be suspended on Tuesday, May 2, which is the first trading day after the legal deadline the 30th of April. We anticipate this will be a short suspension and they will be suspended until the audited results are published on the 12th of May or sooner.

With that, let's get into the results. Next slide, please, Jose. First of all, I'd like to talk a bit about what we've accomplished up to 2022 as an overall team. Going back to 2017, we have very small bookings. We have about $5 million in bookings. We've scaled that now to north of $580 million of fewer bookings by the end of 2022. This growth has really been sustained through a significant macroeconomic downturn and an overall difficult time for our industry.

I think you saw the Q1 trading update this morning. We achieved a record quarter, surpassing $100 million in bookings. We're very proud of the whole team for achieving this great milestone, and we anticipate keeping increased results in the future. Because of our high-end blue-chip customer base in our business model, bookings convert to revenue in a smooth and predictable way. Therefore, as bookings of scale, revenue is also scaled very well.

In 2021, the year before our IPO, we hit $33 million in revenue. In 2022, we're more than 6x that. And based on the low end of our guidance for 2023, we are at more than 10x at revenue. It's a great trajectory, and Dan and Tony will provide you additional color on both 2022 and our 2023 guidance. In 2022, we also significantly increased the number of revenue-generating customers from 20 to 80, quadrupling customer base, which represents a step function in this key metric.

We've also scaled our team up significantly, both organically and inorganically. We've grown from about 70 employees a year we IPO-ed. It's almost 10x that now with 700 employees by the end of 2022. As a result, and as expected, adjusted EBITDA was $54 million for 2022, about $2 million above 2021 levels, while adjusted EBITDA margin was 28% below 2021 as expected and as we continue to invest in the business.

Finally, operating cash flow before tax in 2022 was approximately $8 million, which included $28 million in deferred compensation payments related to the acquisition of Precise-ITC and Banias Labs. Dan and Tony will share some additional color on these items. On the next slide, I want to go back to that 1 slide that I shared at the Capital Markets Day, which I think tells a compelling story about our motivation as our company and the execution that we've accomplished since the IPO.

In 2022, we deployed capital. We invested in the business quickly, efficiently. We acquired 3 businesses, Precise-ITC, OpenFive and Banias Labs. And together, these 3 businesses allowed us to enable our vision and our aspiration to become Alphawave Semi, and we rolled out our new brand Alphawave Semi, reflecting this execution against our IPO vision.

In 2023, we're really digesting these businesses. We call this our digestion year at the Capital Markets Day as we consolidate these acquisitions. And this is setting the foundations from which we will enter the scaling phase. As we get into 2024 and beyond, it continue to deliver on growth in all 3 areas of our business: IP licensing, custom silicon and our exciting new range of connectivity products, which will start generating meaningful revenue in 2024.

With that, I'd let me hand over to my partner, our CEO, President and Co-Founder, Tony Pialis.

[Tony Pialis, executive]

Thanks, John. As we transition to first, our Q1 2023 bookings update. Look, I am extremely proud to share that this is the first quarter of the year, and it has been our most successful quarter in the history of the company. With over $103 million of new bookings, spread across 8 new design wins and 9 customers, we secured $67 million of new IP licenses as well as NRE bookings. This represents over 246% growth year-on-year relative to Q1 of the last year.

I'm also proud to share that Alphawave is now working with more than half of the top 20 semiconductor companies in the world. Our goal of focusing on technologies that service North American hyperscalers is already yielding results. We achieved several exciting new wins during the quarter, such as the 3-nanometer IP license with a top North American hyperscaler and a PCI-Express Gen6 license for a storage product with a top-tier Asia Pacific customer.

These 2 design wins reflect the strength of our industry-leading technology and the opportunities we have to further increase our market lead. On the next slide, I will run you through our key performance highlights of last year. As John mentioned, the progress we've made over the last few years is remarkable and 2022 is no exception. Our backlog, revenue and number of design wins more than doubled year-on-year as a result of the synergies of our IT business and our new custom silicon business.

Combined with Q1, our revenue backlog is now over $469 million, with the vast majority of this converting to revenue in 2023. Quite an amazing result considering where we were just 2 years ago. Our pipeline continues to grow even in the face of the current economic climate, and we're seeing an increasing number of opportunities from top North American customers for their leading edge data center products.

Through organic growth and the 3 acquisitions we made last year via Precise, OpenFive and Banias Labs, the number of customers and employees has significantly increased. As of the end of last year, we had 80 active customers and 695 employees, mainly based in North America, India, Israel and the U.K. In 2022, we continue to invest in growth, both organically and through acquisitions, to meet the guidance we have set of $1 billion run rate by 2026 and to support our growing pipeline of opportunities across all 3 business groups.

As a result, we have invested into new IPs and new silicon products to deliver this growth over the next several years. OpEx has increased year-on-year, primarily via R&D investments, and we still delivered adjusted EBITDA of $54 million, $2 million above 2021, in spite of our accelerated investment into new products.

Our revenue in 2022 was delivered by a combination of IP and custom silicon. EBITDA margin lowered as a percentage, but was in line with the vertically integrated semiconductor company we discussed in our Capital Markets Day. EBITDA margin will increase over the next few years as we transition from our new custom silicon business to one focused on high-end data center products like leading edge AI that requires the world's best connectivity and chiplets in the world's most advanced semiconductor processes.

2022 was a launching point for our ultimate ambition to become a leading vertically integrated semiconductor company, offering customers best-in-class silicon IP and silicon products. And on that topic, let's cover some additional details on the next slide. In 2022, we deployed a significant amount of capital into acquisitions and continue to invest in R&D to support our pipeline with a rapidly growing portfolio of IP and semiconductor products.

We also formed a central R&D organization with the objective to develop reusable and configurable IP platforms that are used across all of our product lines. Our R&D organization builds the connectivity engines such as the DSPs, analog circuitry and controllers that power all of our IP, custom silicon and also electronics products. We build our connectivity engines in such a way that our customers can pick and choose from a menu of pre-engineered customizations for our engines to tailor the specific IT. Whether it is for our internal products or for our custom silicon customers or for our data center product customers, we tailor the technology to their specific needs.

Since 2017, the company has remained at the forefront of connectivity technology. And in 2022, we extended our leadership with 2 design wins in 3-nanometer. Our customers and potential customers continue to invest in seeking differentiation and enhanced performance by transitioning faster to lower and smaller design nodes.

On Wednesday of this week, we also announced the world's first 112 gigabit per second silicon IP and TSMC 3 nanometer, yet another milestone for the industry and yet another leading design announcement for Alphawave Semi. In Q4 of last year, we announced silicon tape-outs for next-generation 224 gigabits per second. I/O as well as PCI-Express Gen 6 as well as HBM3 and UCIe-Interface IP in 5- and 4-nanometer design nodes. This is an important milestone in our technology leadership.

Our new range of connectivity products and our strong expertise on chiplet design reinforce the strong technological foundation required to service our customers' connectivity needs. As I mentioned in the highlights, in 2022, we recognized revenue from 80 customers and announced 28 design wins, a testimony of the strength of our technology and leadership in the industry. At the end of this quarter, Q1 2023, we had more than half of the top 20 semiconductor companies as our active customers.

Next, our land and expand strategy is paramount as we transition to a vertically integrated semiconductor company. So let's discuss that. With our 3 companion product lines, we can win a customer either as a silicon IP customer or is a custom silicon customer or through our connectivity products. Once we land a customer through one of these product types, we can then expand within that product offering and also offer them products from our companion business groups.

At Capital Markets Day, I used the example of a hyperscaler. We landed a hyperscaler customer with our portfolio of optoelectronics products, and we are now expanding them into both custom silicon and also licensing them silicon IP for some silicon that they're designing themselves. This is one of the core benefits of our aggressive strategy to achieve scale and to vertically integrate these companion product lines.

Our customers continue to invest in leading technology to deliver next-generation AI to the world, like ChatGPT, and we continue to deliver a unique set of connectivity in silicon technologies to enable their next generation of products and services. Building on our high-performance technology and expanded product portfolio, we have expanded our addressable market by a factor of 10x since 2021. All of our market segments are growing at a very healthy double-digit rate.

Fast forward to 2026. The total addressable market for the company will be close to $18 billion. To achieve our guidance of $1 billion of revenue in this time frame, we only need to win 5% of that addressable market. Our ambition is to win much more than that. In these markets, we bring our leading technology built upon the 4 technical pillars that we've developed in Alphawave over the last 6 years. It's these technical pillars that drive the business strategy and the new product developments that we deploy to the market.

First and foremost, high-speed connectivity. This is the core DNA of the business. We've been recognized by the world's largest foundries as the premier leader in high-speed connectivity. Alphawave has been awarded Supplier of the Year for 3 years in a row by TSMC, but we don't just develop great connectivity. We do it in the world's most advanced mills, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, and now this year, 2 nanometers and below.

You can no longer manufacture these large pieces of silicon, integrating hundreds of billions of transistors. So the industry has also developed a chiplet-based approach, which is very similar to a legal block approach for building semiconductors. There are less than 5 companies in the world that are able to design, manufacture and ship chiplet-based devices today.

But it's the future of our industry. We are one of these few companies having already developed and shipped over a dozen chiplet-based devices throughout our custom silicon group. And our mission now with custom silicon is to deploy chiplet-based designs across the rest of the industry.

Finally, Optoelectronics, which is the type of silicon that drives all the cabling within our data centers that connects all of the servers and AI together. We've been focused on this space. We've been working very quietly over the last 4 years, building leading-edge PAM4 and coherent technology for optoelectronics. To manage our go-to-market and our expanded portfolio, we have organized our businesses into 3 business groups: silicon IP, custom silicon and connectivity products.

At the Capital Markets Day in January, you heard from Jonathan Rogers, Mohit Gupta and Babak Samimi, the team leading these business groups. I'd like to recap the key opportunities and objectives of each of these business groups, starting with IP. Connectivity IP is the DNA of our business. In our IP group, we have a world-leading portfolio of all the high-performance connectivity IP using data center products today. We have the core connectivity needed for servers and storage, whether that's for AI, CPUs, graphics, GPUs or FPGAs.

Our networking product types not only have the original 112 gigabit per second PAM4 but we also offer the next-generation 224 gigabit per second and coherent interfaces. We also have optical-specific short-reach networking interfaces to drive all the applications and products needed for our data center networks. The objective is to build scale, efficiency and leverage IP across the business. The IP business is the DNA of our company. And this DNA has brought new and exciting opportunities for our custom silicon business, allowing it to go after Tier 1 silicon design wins.

It also provides customized IP platforms to our connectivity products group, including coherent optical interfaces. We have highly differentiated features that we can add on with fairly low effort to support additional business for our own connectivity products. We have the best R&D team in the industry, and that continues to be the engine that drives our success.

For our custom silicon group, we worked extremely collaboratively with our customers. For this product line, we start by taking a specification from our customers in terms of what they need for their next generation of products. We then look into our portfolio of now over 220 silicon IP and pull from it the ingredients that we can bring to the table in order to deliver to the customers' needs.

In 2022, $ 54million of our revenue was driven by the existing custom silicon business that we acquired. This revenue came from lower-margin semiconductor designs focused on IoT as well as China. Following the successful integration of the OpenFive, we are now focused on delivering high-value opportunities in our target end markets. This will not only scale the business but also significantly increase the margin for this business.

We are undergoing a similar integration and transformation that one of our peers, Marvell after its acquisition of the Avera Custom silicon team, leveraging our IP portfolio to differentiate ourselves and putting in place the building blocks of the successful chiplet strategy with a plug-and-play approach that enables our customers to accelerate time to market for their next-generation silicon products.

Last but not least, our connectivity products group. These are the products driving all of the cabling within data centers, and there's a lot of cabling in data centers. Applications like ChatGPT require a huge amount of compute and connectivity. All of this connectivity uses both copper and optical cable. Furthermore, as the demand for computing power, data storage and AI-driven applications continue to grow, data centers are becoming more and more complex to keep up with this demand.

To help our customers meet these evolving requirements, we offer them a full range of connectivity products, including both electrical copper as well as optical cables. We have all of the products and expertise needed to win. Babak Samimi, our Senior Vice President of Connectivity Products, has been laser focused on the development of a product road map for our leading North American hyperscaler customers.

We are also now engaged with numerous system integrators, who have put together the full solution for our customers. Buyback and the team continue to work hard to ensure that we remain on track to start production within the next 12 months. Before I hand it over to Dan to review our financial performance, let me leave you with some key takeaways from this last year.

In 2022, we delivered another year of strong bookings and revenue growth. We continue to invest in R&D to support our pipeline and future revenue scaling. We made great strategic progress towards our vision for Alphawave Semi by investing approximately $440 million in the acquisition of 3 businesses. These 3 businesses allowed us to vertically integrate our business model and expand our high-growth addressable market to approximately $18 billion by 2026.

In addition, we now have over $460 million of committed bookings that will translate to revenue over the next 12 months. This puts us in a very strong position to achieve our 2023 financial target of $340 million to $360 million of revenue. We also bring our customers a complete portfolio of leading connectivity silicon IP, custom silicon and optoelectronics products. This, combined with our strong execution from our team, gives me tremendous confidence in the future prospects for the business. And it's for all these reasons that we expect 2023 to be another year of strong growth. Both our outlook for 2023 and 2025 remain unchanged. And with that, I'll hand it over to Dan to review our 2022 financial performance. Dan?

[Daniel Aharoni, executive]

Thank you very much, Tony. We ended 2022 with a backlog of $366 million and bookings of $228 million. Revenue in the year was $192 million, well above 2021, due to both organic growth as well as the revenue contribution from the acquisitions of OpenFive and Precise. Adjusted EBITDA was $54 million, 4% above the prior year, but resulting in a lower margin of 28%, reflecting the shift away from a pure IP licensing business into silicon products.

Cash flow from operating activities was $7.8 million compared to $26.5 million in 2021. Importantly, 2022 includes around $28 million of deferred compensation payments related to acquisitions of Precise and Banias. Excluding this item, the business generated approximately $36 million of pretax operating cash flow higher than 2021. Finally, cash and cash equivalents was $186 million, well below the prior year due to the M&A activity and some FX impact, and I'll cover these key items on the cash flow slide.

So let's start with a quick summary of the 2022 bookings. As mentioned, bookings totaled $228 million. If we compare this with bookings in 2021 of $97 million, not including the onetime multiyear subscription contracts, bookings grew 135% year-on-year. License and NRE deals are sizable, typically $5 million to $10 million for IP and potentially significantly larger for custom silicon deals. So the mix of license and NRE bookings can be lumpy depending on timing and you can see that on the chart on the bottom left.

Q4 also demonstrate strong performance in silicon revenues. Within license and NRE, this reflects the development phase of the chip that was 58% of our bookings. The remaining 42% reflects custom silicon orders, namely chips and production, and this is mostly from Chinese customers, around 3/4. These are orders for existing custom silicon designs that are in volume production.

By region, as you can see on the right-hand side, North America was the largest contributor to bookings in 2022 at 46% and represented almost 3/4 of our license and NRE bookings in the year. This is significantly higher than 2021 at 21%. Please note that this does not include any orders from the purchasing agreement with the major North American hyperscaler that we announced in October 2022.

China is the second largest geography, and this is mostly due to the custom silicon orders we talked about earlier. And as against the $228 million of bookings for 2022, as we announced in our Q1 trading update, we've already exceeded $100 million of bookings just in the first quarter of 2023.

On the next slide, I'll now cover revenue. Total revenue doubled year-on-year, and that includes approximately $72 million of revenue from the acquisitions of Precise and OpenFive. Excluding this, organic revenue growth was 33%. It's also important to note that our revenue outside of China was up 74% year-on-year at $81 million. The split of revenues was 28% or $54 million in royalties in silicon and 72% or GBP 138 million in license and NRE.

Within license and NRE, revenue from WiseWave and VeriSilicon of $61 million is included. And in addition to this, we had a significant increase in revenues coming from APAC customers as well as first-time revenues from EMEA customers. Revenues from royalties in silicon was $54 million, of which over 3/4 relates to custom silicon for Chinese customers. These are existing custom silicon wins that are in high-volume production. Revenues are stronger than we expected here.

As you can see in both Q4 and recent Q1 bookings, this part of the business will contribute significantly to royalties in silicon business in the first half of 2023. So whilst these are legacy customers we've acquired with OpenFive, it does demonstrate the potential for silicon revenues to reach scale very quickly. And over the medium term, we'll expect to see our new custom silicon design wins take out and move from the design phase to become high-volume silicon products.

Before I run through the key items in the P&L, let me come briefly back to our backlog. At the end of 2022, our backlog, which excludes royalty estimates, was $366 million, significantly above the prior year and now including a contribution from the acquired backlog from OpenFive and Precise. At the end of the year, approximately $116 million or just under 1/3 of our total backlog was from Precise and OpenFive.

And as a reminder, and as Tony mentioned, backlog represents committed legally binding orders, which have yet to be recognized as revenue. Our backlog from customer silicon orders converts into revenue over a 6-month period on average. This is much faster than the average of 18 to 24 months. It takes the license and NRE backlog to convert into revenue. So this does give us a healthy level of visibility into revenue and cash flows over the next 18 months.

I'll cover operating expenses now on the next slide. More surprisingly, following 3 acquisitions we made in 2022 and the resulting increase in head count, operating expenses for the year have significantly increased over 2021. Our total operating expenses were $86.6 million compared to $48.7 million in the prior period. Those figures include other expenses, which are M&A, stock-based compensation and exchange gains.

The primary driver with the increase in headcount and associated expenses that go with our headcount. Headcount costs specifically over 60% of our OpEx where the next largest spend item software tools that scale with that headcount. Our closing headcount increased from 149 to 695, of which 376 employees came from the acquired businesses. R&D headcount has gone from 129 to 621 over the period.

R&D also includes $5.1 million of amortization of inquired intangibles and excludes $7.5 million of capitalized R&D expenses relating to development of our own products. This capitalization relates to our own silicon products. It is a combination of the coherent-based products that the value team is working on, along with some of our other product developments. The increase in sales and marketing and G&A is mostly driven by the increased total headcount with an additional $2.2 million of expected credit losses included within G&A.

We've expanded our locations to include India, Israel, Taiwan and China and also expanded our finance, HR and legal teams, quadrupling heads in G&A. Other expenses represented a net credit of approximately $4 million in 2022. The key item here is a $37 million exchange gain from the U.S. dollar-denominated cash balance that we hold at plc and GBP-denominated entity.

The strengthening of the U.S. dollar against sterling resulted in approximately $19 million exchange gain in the first half, and we saw a similar movement in the second half. As a result of the expansion of our business in 2022, we have seen significant movements in both revenue and operating expenses and therefore, in profitability.

So let me run through a few metrics on the next slide. Firstly, on gross margins. In 2021, as a pure IP business, we had gross margins in the 90s. Our gross margins this year are at 68%, which reflects the evolution of the business as a silicon provider. EBITDA for the year was $56 million, which included the $36 million exchange gain I mentioned as well as the stock-based compensation expense and significant expenses related to our M&A and debt raise.

Adjusted EBITDA was approximately $54 million, 4% above the prior year. Margin was significantly lower at 28%, driven by the change in business mix, which now includes silicon revenue as well as those increased operating expenses. Despite the fact we quadrupled our headcount during the year and significantly expanded our operations, we increased our EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA in absolute terms.

I'd like to make, the custom silicon revenue we're now seeing through the P&L is mostly carrying business from OpenFive and have a lower margin than our group target. As we focus on higher value opportunities incorporating our own IP, we will gradually replace this lower-margin business with revenue at a higher margin.

Secondly, as you may have seen in Note 5 of the accounts, in addition to the other operating expenses, we've also adjusted EBITDA with $1.7 billion of retention payments related to our Banias acquisition. Finally, we've adjusted profit after tax with $5.1 million of amortization of acquired intangibles, which makes our performance metrics more comparable with how our U.S. peers report.

As a result, adjusted diluted EPS in 2022 was $1.21 below the $3.14 in 2021. There have been quite a few puts and takes in the cash flow movement for the year, so I will run through these in the next slide. We started the year with $0.5 billion of cash. And during the year, we took on new debt to finance the acquisition of Banias Labs.

Working capital in the year was an outflow of approximately $22 million. Please note that in the cash flow statement, the working capital movement includes $28 million of deferred compensation payments for employees relating to the acquisition of Precise and Banias. This is classified as operating cash flow, but we've shown it separately here, and you can see that on the bar that fall from the end.

Tax paid was significantly higher in 2022 at almost $20 million, and we spent approximately $15 million in CapEx, of which half is capitalized R&D. The acquisitions of Precise, OpenFive and Banias resulted in an outflow of approximately $439 million net of cash required. Finally, we made another investment of $9 million in the year in the WiseWave JV, and we saw a large FX impact of approximately $75 million, given the strength of the U.S. dollar against sterling.

Finally, before we go into Q&A, let me briefly run through the outlook. As Tony mentioned, our outlook for 2023 remains unchanged. We expect revenue between $340 million to $360 million and adjusted EBITDA of approximately $87 million or 25% of revenue. An additional remark that might be relevant as you think about cash flow generation. CapEx as a percentage of revenue was 8% in 2022, half of that was capitalized R&D. Despite the timing challenge around the audit process, 2022 has been an extraordinary year for the company, and we are very well positioned to deliver on our plans for the years ahead. With that, let me hand over to John to start with the Q&A.

[John Holt, executive]

Thank you, Dan. Thank you, Tony. And Jose, if you can moderate the questions, I would appreciate that since you have the We're happy to take questions from the audience now.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] You got Sandeep.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

My question is regarding the deals you have with the -- your ASIC customers. Anywhere you are making these chips and your building chips for other customers. Are you saying that the lead time to be able to ship that and what is in the backlog is shorter than it is, and that is why you can recognize that in 2023 itself?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

So Sandeep, let me jump in on this one. Once a custom silicon customer enters production, they issue to us noncancelable POs. And so the translation from receiving that noncancelable PO to shipping them silicon and ultimately receiving payment, as Dan mentioned, is typically no greater than 2 quarters.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

Understood. Then my second question is regarding these what you've done, the deal you've done with the hyperscaler and Banias Labs, how -- when will the product be operationalized or whether there will be some kind of net list or that is at the fab from that deal and that you can say that the -- customer can tell that the technology actually works and that they would like to use it.

[Tony Pialis, executive]

Great question. First off, I'd like to say look that hyperscaler deal is not just Banias Labs. It's Banias Labs for but it's also Alphawave for PAM4. So it's a combination of multiple different technologies that they see value in it. Right now, silicon for all of those products are in hand, okay? Customer is deploying it in small quantities in order to provide the final feedback for the final manufacturing of these devices.

We expect revenue for these devices to come in starting next year. And I'm very bullish that we can even pull that in to receive a little bit this year. And we'll start to scale thereafter.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

Understood. I mean one last question for me before -- I mean, I have more, but I'll let some others ask $366 million was your backlog at the end of last year. You've done orders of $103 million. So your backlog at the end of Q1 is over -- I mean we don't know what the revenue was, but over $400 million potentially your backlog at the end of. So the -- whereas your full year guidance is $340 million to $360 million. So is there upside potential on the full year guidance? Or is it that the backlog has a lot of items, which are actually recognizable only in '25 -- '24 is actually?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

So Sandeep, is there upside? Not just looking at the backlog. But even as I into our pipeline, absolutely, there's a significant amount of potential upside. But I'm also cautious of the current economic climate, all right? And so that's why we're reaffirming our guidance to date. Obviously, as we continue to proceed through Q2, if we continue to see the same resounding strength, we will update the market, right? We'll update our guidance.

But for now, look, the business is firing on all cylinders. I've never seen demand from our customers and especially top-tier customers, as I'm seeing today, which is why I'm so proud to be here today, not only to provide our full year reporting on 2022, but even to talk about the current outlook for 2023.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

I mean one last thing, Dan, on the audit. Is there something you can do internally in terms of being able to provide data to KPMG earlier to prevent this sort of situation which is a reasonable this year?

[Daniel Aharoni, executive]

Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean to clarify that, this year was the equivalent of 3 audits because it was not only the existing Alphawave business, it was OpenFive and Banias. OpenFive is an amazing business, but it spent 15 years as a private company. And the quality of information and controls that you need in a public company is very different to that. So we hired new finance leads in Asia, in India and in the U.S. for that business.

And so we're also in 2023 implementing an integrated ERP system. And we think that is going to significantly accelerate the -- our ability to ask and provide information. So yes.

[John Holt, executive]

Yes, Sandeep, I'll jump in on that one point also. Just to reiterate a very key point about the results we've decided to announce today, and this is a Board of Director decision, management decision and decision supported by our internal auditors. The numbers are not going to change. And we really wanted to provide the market full visibility and transparency into our performance for '22, including the full disclosure notes, everything that you would typically see if we were reporting auditing results today.

And so I think that really demonstrates the confidence and having gone through the audit process. But you're right, we are late, and that's due to some delays in our external auditor. We'll get through it, but we hope to never go through this again. Last year, we had a different situation this year. It's a once-in-a-lifetime moment for the company.

[Unknown Analyst]

from can you hear me?

[John Holt, executive]

Yes.

[Unknown Analyst]

Congratulation on results. I think the bookings first quarter are quite well. I've got 3 questions, and most of them are for Daniel. So first question, just maybe you can tell us a little bit how should we think about your gross margins going forward because they're kind of an important for analysts? Obviously, there's a bit of a mix that's happening in the last 6 months. But what sort of the level that you think comfortable next year and the year after that?

My second question is regarding the net working capital movement. There was quite a significant outflow. You talked about sort of prepayments to foundries. Should we think about this outflow as a one-off? Is it sort of some freak accident that it sort of just happened to happen at the end of the year and it's going to reverse very soon? Or how should we think about going forward?

And the last question I have with regards to sort of book-to-bill that you have. I mean if you look -- you take revenue as approximate book billings. And you've sort of annualized your bookings for the year and you get $400 million and then your revenue guidance is about $350 million. It should give you about a 1, 1.2 book-to-bill ratio. Is this something that we should be sort of thinking about going forward as well?

[Daniel Aharoni, executive]

Great. So let me take those. On gross margin outlook, we're not giving near-term gross margin guidance. We can work with you as you think through your model. But in short, it is very mix dependent. And so it really depends on the mix of the silicon silicon versus the licensing and NRE. So it's something we can work -- Jose can work with you in terms of modeling.

Working capital, if you take out the $28 million of deferred compensation, which is effectively treated as a prepayment of employee cost that is actually related to the acquisitions, we didn't see a particularly significant increase in our working capital relative to the revenue growth. The puts and takes here are primarily related to the sorts of customers.

In a number of instances for silicon customers, we do get prepayments. And those can be very significant prepayments before we have to pay the foundry. So those working capital movements are really very dependent on the mix of that business. Beyond that within our -- within IP licensing, it's the same dynamics as before. It's sort of lag or acceleration in recognition against invoicing.

On book-to-bill, I might need to come back to you. It's not something that we typically analyze because we look at the overall size of our order book and we look at the phasing as we expect it to see coming in. But we can take a look at that data with you.

[Tony Pialis, executive]

And Patrick, on the book-to-bill, I'd say it's -- my personal view is, I think coming out of 2023, we'll have a good amount of history that you should be able to extrapolate a reasonable ratio there.

[Jose Cano, executive]

[Operator Instructions] We have 3 more questions on the Q&A chart. So I'm just going to read the first one at loud. In any context with Broadcom, Marvell, et cetera, what are the main reasons that custom -- silicon customer will choose Alphawave? And what are the areas where they see competitors as stronger?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

All right. Great question. So why would they choose us? World-leading technology, eager to work with our customers and deliver customized solutions for our customers, creating a winning scenario for our customers and ourselves. Not all of our competitors do that. And finally, look, we're hungry, okay? We move faster than everyone else, not just with our technology, but even in terms of our ability to get products to the market.

Why would a customer continue to work with others? Look, they have a longer track record than us in this space. However, what I can tell you is based on the momentum that I'm seeing in the pipeline, this vertically integrated semiconductor company that we talked about at Capital Markets Day that we repeated here again is picking up tremendous momentum and its momentum with the top players in the semiconductor industry and primarily focused in North America.

So look, I recognize the greatness of our competitors. But this industry is growing rapidly, and there's more than enough space for Broadcom, Marvell to continue to be successful and for Alphawave to achieve our near- and midterm objectives.

[Jose Cano, executive]

Perfect. Another question on custom silicon. What are the main drivers of customers demanding custom silicon today? Is that driven by inference use cases in AI, mainly as customers look to reduce costs there?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

Great question. Yes. Look, there is no one AI that works optimally everywhere. Every hyperscaler has a different set of data running through its networks, whether it's Meta for its social media, whether it's Google for its searches, whether it's Amazon for its purchasing and it's hosting on AWS. It's different data traffic. And so in order for these hyperscalers to deliver the performance that they need, they must deliver customization, all right?

So yes, absolutely data center, AI and the networking that goes with AI must be custom. But in addition to that, look, where electronics is being used today, it's everywhere. It's not only in our phones, not only in our TVs, but more and more, it's in our cars. And so these are other areas where automotive manufacturers also require data center quality compute, whether it's processors, whether it's AI.

And so across the traditional infrastructure that is data centers and the telecom space and this new emerging mobile data centers in our cars, they all need custom silicon. And these are the trends that we are exploiting because they all need tremendous connectivity and these silicons are all in the world's most advanced nodes.

[Jose Cano, executive]

Perfect. Just a specific question on the audit. I'm sure we're going to be able to share any feedback on What are the main outstanding areas of KPMG needs to sign off and exactly?

[John Holt, executive]

Yes, I'm happy to take that one. So look, we obviously can't get into the inner workings of our that we can legally do. But I will say, as we said in the announcement this morning, the audit work is substantially complete. The numbers are not expected to change, and that's why we're very confident getting the numbers out today and providing full transparency into the report.

[Jose Cano, executive]

Perfect. Tony, another question on acquisitions. You've done a lot of acquisitions in the last 12 months. Are these run stand-alone or being integrated and how quickly? And should we expect more?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

So that is a great question. Look, these teams are -- have been integrated and will continue to be integrated. So look, there are pieces from these acquisitions that are now spread across the 3 business groups, right? The only way I can deliver the synergies that I've spoken up is to not only have the products span the teams but also the people span the teams.

So yes, look, the acquisitions of Banias, OpenFive and Precise, no longer look today like they did before we brought them into the company. However, they're now delivering value, not just for their original products, but across the portfolio of products of IP, custom silicon and our optoelectronics products.

[Jose Cano, executive]

Perfect. [Operator Instructions] In the meantime, one final question on the Q&A chat. Are you seeing players like NVIDIA tweaking designs to better suit individuals -- individual hyperscale usage? Could that be a competition to Alphawave custom silicon eventually?

[John Holt, executive]

Sorry, I intentionally.

[Tony Pialis, executive]

Look, NVIDIA is remarkable in terms of how it's been able to bring leading edge AI to the market as well as the software ecosystem that has emerged around their AI silicon. But there's one trend that's clear. Hyperscalers are arming themselves with their own in-house AI, all right? And so there's clearly going to be in the ecosystem where there will be a combination of NVIDIA products and in-house hyperscaler products, and they will coexist. There's no doubt about that.

And so is there going to be competition from NVIDIA? Of course what Jensen has done is amazing. But so just equally as impressive as what the hyperscalers have done today and what their plans are? So yes, as I look forward into my crystal ball, I see a combination of both, and we can deliver value to both of them, including the because their solutions will need leading-edge con activity.

And we can help, again, if it's not through custom silicon with them, it can be through IT and through the optoelectronics products that we deliver that will help expand their silicon to the rest of the network.

[Jose Cano, executive]

Sandeep, I think you raised your hand again.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

One question I have is, in your guidance of $340 million to $360 million for this year, how much of that is organic? And how much -- because like you've just given for last year, where you've given your growth organically was 33%, how much of this growth that is guided to is organic?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

Yes. So Sandeep, I'd say as I look forward in 2023, all the businesses are organic, okay? Because that's how I'm operating the business. There's seamless transition between IP and custom silicon these days. So look, I think you're probably referring to the original core IT business. At this point in time, it will be very difficult for me to decompose that relative to all the deals in our pipeline right now. .

[John Holt, executive]

Yes. As a reminder, Sandeep, and this is a good reminder for everyone else on the call. As we talked about at Capital Markets Day, we're moving forward reporting our business the same way we run the business. And we don't run this as 3 separate businesses. So we're going to be reporting 2 categories of things, we talk about bookings and revenue. We report license fee and NRE as one bucket. And then silicon sales and royalty as the other bucket.

One is project related, that's still license fee and NRE. The other one is directly scalable with customer shipments. And that's how we run the business every day, as Tony mentioned.

[Sandeep Deshpande, analyst]

One -- stepping back two steps, Tony, I mean, you are working with a bunch of hyperscalers and other customers developing chips. On other side, you're developing IP. I mean do you -- I mean -- and you as a CEO are managing multiple teams doing multiple things. I mean, is there a point at which you say that we are running too many projects at this time, we need -- as a small company, we need to focus on these, which are likely to be more successful, these are less likely to be successful, so we reduce our attention on them?

So just trying to understand your management process, given how many new things have come into the business over the past year?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

And look, that's an insightful question, Sandeep. So do we manage and prioritize? Of course, we do. But I'm proud to say the leadership bench that I have around me, frankly, makes this a challenging but straightforward matter. Our leaders like Jonathan Rogers and Mohit Gupta have been running these types of businesses for more than 15 to 20 years. They are seasoned probes.

And so really, it's my job to make sure that we continue to work together as a team to balance the priorities across our IT business and our custom silicon business and our optoelectronics. But everyone is fully aligned in the vision and the mission. And that is always the anchor by which we make our decisions.

[Jose Cano, executive]

We have time for 3 more questions, and then I'll make sure that any other questions depending on the Q&A chat will come up to you on those. So let me start with the 3 final ones. Can you talk a little bit about the WiseWave joint venture? Specifically, what was the $9 million cash infusion as well as how we should think about the loss of the JV in 2023, 2024 as well as the state of the business? And this was based on what significant given the kind of tax you pay.

[John Holt, executive]

Sure. That's do you get cut out there. Yes. Okay. Yes, I'm happy to take that one. So look, we've talked about this quite a bit at the Capital Markets Day. And like in the reflection of the geopolitics, things have changed quite a bit in our industry. And that's not specific, that's the entire semiconductor industry and arguably, the entire tech industry. The way the West and the way the East are interacting is producing, producing every single day, every quarter.

And so unfortunately, that's changed our view of the WiseWave relationship. So the way we initially envisioned that working and the way probably be working in a couple of years will be very, very different. I was very clear about this at the Capital Markets Day. We believe we will ultimately exit our stage in that at the right time. And WiseWave is doing very well as a business. They've taken our IP, they're building advanced products. Those products to be entering the silicon market likely this year and generating revenue, which means royalties for us, as we said at the Capital Markets Day, and we're excited to support them.

But over time, we will not be able to keep our same equity and we will likely exit that likely at a significant gain actually. So that's how we view the wider relationship. Now the question of them making losses, we do expect them not to be profitable for the short term, for sure. If you look at most semiconductor companies, from the time you found the semiconductor company, the time you get first revenue is usually several years and the time to profitability can be a decade.

I'll say that WiseWave is doing way better than that. But we have to be realistic about what it takes to get a fabless semiconductor company up and running into profitability.

[Jose Cano, executive]

I have a number one for you. Does the audit delay prevents the Board expect to buy shares in the business?

[John Holt, executive]

Yes, it does. Essentially, the close period is being extended as a result of the delay by our external auditors. And so the moment they report -- and look, very much in line with the suspension. So there's 2 components here. One, that the stocks suspended, they can't -- no one can buy or sell anything. But we're also in a close period with the directors until that's listed. And as we've said and as KPMG is reinforced, we will latest date for that May 12, we're shooting for an earlier date.

[Jose Cano, executive]

And 1 final question. for you, Tony. With the recent design rain in APAC for Genesis PCIe, what potential do you see from this region of the world?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

Look, excluding China, there's a tremendous amount of investment happening in Asia Pacific. Let's look at Korea, in particular. The Korean government has committed itself to invest more than $200 billion to continue to grow and expand its semiconductor footprint. That is massive, especially when you contrast it with the U.S. has just done at $50 billion for the chips for America, so there's a tremendous opportunity there, right? There's strength that Asia Pacific has Korea in particular, with great companies like Samsung and

And so yes, we are -- we have been successful there and we are laser-focused to continue to expand our footprint in Asia Pacific and to help them as they create their own products.

[Jose Cano, executive]

Thank you, Tony. I think just running our time let just squeeze just one more, but this is the final one, and this is for you as well, Tony. How is the standardization of protocols on the chiplet side progressing? And how important is this for customer demand?

[Tony Pialis, executive]

So UCIe, which is a protocol that allows those legal chiplets -- legal like chiplets to each other has been absolutely crucial for evolving how computer chips are built. Look, clearly, UCIe is the winner, all right? Take no doubt, it is the winner. And so now I am seeing customers spanning all market segments, all end applications as they transition to 3-nanometer and below everyone is planning around building their next-generation products using chiplets.

So as a result, they're struggling to understand how to do that. And this is a key part of our strategy rather than they have to figure it out on their own, spending hundreds of millions of dollars and for years to how to deploy these products, we are helping accelerate that for them by bringing our experience that we've earned over the last several years as a product type to help them bring their next-generation products to the market.

[Jose Cano, executive]

Perfect. Thank you, Tony. We just run out of time. I'll take note of the questions pending on the chart, and I'll make sure we come back to you on those. I just wanted to thank everyone again for joining our webcast today. And as usual, if you have any follow-up questions, please don't hesitate to send an e-mail, and we'll come back to you. Thank you.