Ennostar Inc

TWSE:3714

Earnings Call Analysis

Double-digit Growth Anticipated in Automotive Segment

ENNOSTAR anticipates its automotive segment will achieve double-digit revenue growth from 2024 to 2028. Despite a decrease in revenue from chip packages, the contribution from backlight modules is expected to grow significantly. The company's expertise in high-quality, mass-produced mini-LED products and unique optical electronics designs has positioned it competitively. The demand for automotive applications, including DMS, OMS and headlights, is increasing, and ENNOSTAR is leveraging its comprehensive experience to meet this growth. The firm has prioritized larger volume headlight business over niche markets like micro LEDs.

Strong Revenue Growth Amid Strategic Shifts

In the second quarter of 2024, ENNOSTAR experienced a notable revenue increase of 18.3% quarter-over-quarter, reaching TWD 6.606 billion, which was up 13% year-over-year. This surge was largely driven by increased restocking from customers and a shift towards higher-margin products, particularly in advanced applications such as automotive displays, professional lighting, and smart sensing. The combined revenue from these strategic sectors now accounts for 45% of their total revenue, underscoring a decisive pivot towards more profitable areas.

Improving Margins and Operational Resilience

Despite facing a net loss of TWD 302 million in the second quarter, ENNOSTAR reported a significant improvement in operating margins, which increased by 5.3% compared to the previous quarter. The operating profit (OP) margin stood at -4%. The company highlighted that their focus on higher-margin products, such as the sensing and professional lighting applications, is expected to lead to stronger profitability in the coming quarters.

Financial Stability with Healthy Cash Flow

As of the end of Q2 2024, ENNOSTAR maintained a solid financial position with TWD 14.7 billion in cash and equivalents and a net cash position of TWD 11.7 billion after accounting for borrowings. Even while recording an operational loss, the company generated positive cash flow from operations, demonstrating resilience and the potential for continued investment in strategic initiatives.

Future Outlook: Quarterly Guidance and Strategic Adjustments

Looking ahead, the company anticipates Q3 revenue to surpass Q2 figures. Specifically, ENNOSTAR expects to see an increase, albeit with caution due to less robust end market demand compared to previous years. The Q3 performance is projected to benefit from ongoing improvements in product mix and increased contributions from more profitable segments, mitigating the effects of previous non-operating losses.

Growth Projections in Key Segments

ENNOSTAR's automotive and professional lighting sectors are seen as key growth drivers. Automotive applications are projected for double-digit revenue growth from 2024 to 2028, underpinned by expanding trends such as local dimming technologies and increasing LED integration within vehicles. Notably, professional lighting revenue is expected to grow by over 30% year-over-year, while sensing products are forecasted to maintain a double-digit growth trajectory full-year.

Continued Focus on Core Optoelectronic Technologies

The company is strategically discontinuing its microelectronics foundry service, while enhancing its core focus on optoelectronic products. This structural adjustment aims to streamline efforts and is expected to reduce losses from non-performing assets, aligning ENNOSTAR's operational performance with its financial outcomes as it moves forward.

Conclusion: A Forward-Looking Perspective

ENNOSTAR is navigating a transitional phase, leveraging its robust cash position and operational improvements to drive future growth. With promising developments in high-value product areas, alongside appropriate strategic adjustments, investors may find the company's outlook compelling as it continues to adapt to changing market demands and capitalize on emerging opportunities.

Earnings Call Transcript 2024-Q2

[Operator]

Welcome to ENNOSTAR's 2024 Second Quarter Financial Results Conference. [Operator Instructions]

Now I hand over to Damon Tzeng, ENNOSTAR's IR Officer.

[Damon Tzeng, executive]

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'm Damon Tzeng, ENNOSTAR's IR Officer. On behalf of the company, I would like to welcome you to participate in our second quarter financial results conference. I'm joined by 4 executives: Paul Peng, Chairman of ENNOSTAR; Terry Tang, Chairman of EPISTAR; Patrick Fan, Chairman of Lextar; and Jerry Liu, ENNOSTAR's CFO.

The agenda is this. First of all, our CFO will go over 2024 Q2 results; and Chairman, Paul Peng, will have an opening remark. Then Patrick and Terry will talk about the group's Q3 outlook. After that, we will take questions submitted online.

In this, I would like to remind you that all forward-looking statements contain risks and uncertainties. Please spend some time to read the safe harbor notice on Slide #2.

Jerry, please.

[Hsing-Chia Liu, executive]

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'm Jerry. I would like to first go over our 2024 second quarter financial results. In the second quarter, thanks to the increased revenue contribution from the sensing, professional lighting and display businesses, ENNOSTAR's net revenue jumped by 18.3% Q-o-Q to TWD 6.606 billion, up by 13% Y-o-Y. This marks a relatively high quarterly revenue for us for the past 6 quarters. OP margin was minus 4%, up by 5.3% from the previous quarter. The smaller margin loss was mainly attributable to the contribution of higher-margin sensing products such as lighting and automotive products, which posted bigger revenue share gains in Q2.

The nonoperating loss was bigger than the previous quarter, which was mainly because of the equity disposal of a subsidiary in Mainland China and the disposal of partial asset in NanoCOM Semiconductor, which was microelectronic business. As a result, net loss attributable to the parent company in Q2 reached TWD 302 million with a loss of TWD 0.41 per share.

Moving on to our revenue by application. Let's first look at the bar showing the Q2 revenue breakdown. The upper half in gray and blue colors is the general applications, including TV backlights, notebook, monitor, mobile backlights and displays. These are still the company's main sources of revenue. The bottom half in warmer colors is our premium applications. These are the strategic and niche products that the company continues to focus on including professional lighting, sensing and automotive applications.

Their contributions to the revenue increased in Q2 with professional lighting rising to 14% and sensing to 10%. In addition, although automotive products was flattish as a share, its revenue also increased slightly Q-o-Q. These 3 applications not only performed better, but also delivered higher gross margins. Meanwhile, display also posted a higher revenue.

Next slide. At the end of Q2, our cash and cash equivalent was TWD 14.7 billion. Net cash after deducting bank borrowings was TWD 11.7 billion with abundant cash. Regarding the inventories, while the revenue increased, the amount of inventories was flat Q-o-Q at TWD 4.7 billion or so. Inventory turnover also dropped from 83 days to 77 days. In addition, the Q-o-Q decrease in the amount of real estate, plant and equipment was mainly due to depreciation and the disposal of a few factories and production lines. The decline in bank borrowings was mainly attributable to long-term borrowings.

Next slide, cash flows. Despite the OP loss in Q2, we continue to generate from operating activities a positive cash inflow. CapEx was TWD 367 million. In addition to repaying bank loans in Q2, we bought back approximately TWD 650 million worth of shares. We ended Q2 at a balance of approximately TWD 14.76 billion.

This concludes the briefing on ENNOSTAR's Q2 results. Now I hand over to Paul.

[Shuang-Lang Peng, executive]

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'm Paul, Chairman of ENNOSTAR. I would like to quickly go over our business updates. In Q2, thanks to more active restocking by our customers, the company's revenue surged both Q-o-Q and Y-o-Y. We also actively adjusted our product mix. So both the gross margin and OP margin improved and the loss was significantly reduced.

The company's financial structure remained very healthy with net cash of TWD 11.7 billion, and the inventory turnover also dropped by 6 days from the previous quarter, resting at 77 days. We have been developing towards 3 strategic applications, including advanced automotive display, professional lighting and smart sensing. Their combined revenue contribution has increased sequentially, reaching 45%. If other premium applications are included, the combined revenue share of the high-value products rest at about 50%, and we still are in the process of continuous improvement.

In May, the Board of Directors approved Unicorn's structural adjustment plan. Accordingly, ENNOSTAR will discontinue the microelectronics foundry service. Recently, we have also completed equity equipment transactions with our joint venture partner. Unicorn will become a 100% owned subsidiary of EPISTAR in the future. Simultaneously, we will remain focused on the development of our core business of optoelectronics.

In the past, the relatively small economic scale of Unicorn caused a relatively large loss. The structural adjustment will enable us to gradually reduce the loss. ENNOSTAR has also vigorously reorganized our nonperforming assets in the past year, including tangible and intangible ones. Although there will cause some pressure on our profitability in the short term, as the revamp comes to an end, our financial performance will be more aligned with actual results of the operating performance.

The end market demand in Q3 hasn't been as strong as the previous years. The company will cautiously navigate the seasonal fluctuations. However, we will continue to improve our product mix and increase the proportion of more profitable products. We expect our revenue in Q3 to be higher than that in Q2. Without the impact from the non-op loss in Q2, we believe we will deliver stronger profits. So that is how I think the Q2 and Q3 performance will be and is.

Thank you for your participation.

[Damon Tzeng, executive]

Thank you, Paul. Next, we will talk about ENNOSTAR's business outlook for the third quarter. Terry will focus on advanced display sensing, special lighting and displays and Patrick will focus on automotive and backlight. Terry, we should go over your remarks first.

[Terry Tang, executive]

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I am Terry. I would like to talk about our business outlook for sensing, professional lighting and display. Let's first look at the sensing business. Sensing products generally experienced stronger stocking demand in Q2. However, there are several new products slated for rollout in Q3, and Q3 revenue is expected to be flat or slightly lower Q-o-Q and up by double-digit percentage points Y-o-Y.

We expect the Y-o-Y growth of our full year sensing revenue to be in the double-digit range. The growth mainly comes from the increased momentum of wearable applications and facial recognition products for laptops. In particular, our wearable product was adopted by Korean brand in the products such as Smart Rings last quarter, which is projected to be contributing more to our revenue in the future.

In Q3, the professional lighting revenue is expected to be flat Q-o-Q, while jumping by more than 30% Y-o-Y. The full year revenue of professional lighting is expected to increase by more than 30% Y-o-Y. The growth is mainly driven by the increased luminous efficiency of culture lighting products, which generates a stronger order stream as well as the increased adoption of our lighting applications in wearable devices.

As for displays, demand has picked up visibly in Q2. But in Q3, it is projected to be flat both Q-o-Q and Y-o-Y. As advanced displays are being gradually applied in the end market, we are projecting more meaningful growth in 2025. In view of this, ENNOSTAR is building a production capacity step by step. This concludes my sharing of the business outlook of our sensing, professional lighting and display businesses. Thank you for listening.

[Damon Tzeng, executive]

Thank you, Terry. Now we'd like to have Patrick to talk about automotive and backlight businesses.

[Patrick Fan, executive]

Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. I'm Patrick. I would like to first talk about our backlight business. We divide the backlight business into 2 segments. First is small- and medium-sized products, including mobile phone, notebook and monitor backlight. These products posted slightly higher revenue in Q2 Q-o-Q, mainly due to weaker macro conditions, decreased sales of high-end notebook products and increased sales of mid- to low-end products whose ASP was lower. However, in Q3, these dynamics will change.

So we are expecting stronger performance in Q3 than Q2, probably close to that of Q1 as large-sized TV sales has benefited from the 2 recent sports events, the Olympics and the European Football Championship, our TV backlight business has also benefited. Regarding the European football match, as the impact of brand sponsorships last beyond the event date, TV set sales may increase over time as the brand awareness grows. Therefore, we estimate Q3 performance to improve over Q2.

In addition, our mini LED backlights have been adopted by Japanese TV brands, which will also help drive growth. Therefore, we project our TV backlight business to grow slightly in Q3. A new trend in TV backlights is local dimming, which has been increasingly applied in TV designs. As a result, the number of LEDs used per TV set and the revenue of LED business has been rising even though TV sales have stagnated. Moreover, from Q2 2023 through Q2 2024, our automotive business has been -- has seen sequential revenue growth.

In Q2, the performance improved as the U.S. auto workers strike ended. However, there are some uncertainties in Q3. We can divide the automotive business into chips and backlight modules. The chip sales have been affected by the fierce competition in China. Meanwhile, despite the relatively low base periods for backlight modules and certain displays, we still achieved gains in the automotive markets in both Taiwan and Mainland China. Putting these 2 factors together, we believe the automotive business will continue to grow in Q3.

In addition, we can divide automotive applications into 3 areas. First, automotive backlight as automotive panels get larger and larger and the so-called independent displays experience growing popularity, there is increasing demand for higher brightness. Like TV, the proportion of local dimming backlight has increased and the number of LEDs used in each vehicle has also risen. This is a trend that we are seeing, and it has driven our automotive backlight revenue up further. The second area is sensing. For driver monitoring and passenger mode monitoring. Thanks to the synergies of ENNOSTAR as a group, our portfolio encompasses DMS, which coupled with unique optical design is being introduced into more cars. In the second half of this year, it will be utilized by several Japanese cars and ships shipped in larger volumes. Hence, we believe there is room for growth for our sensing business.

In terms of automotive lighting, because ships have made up relatively high proportion of the automotive business, it is difficult to make further gains. But demand is rising for automotive lighting modules, we have observed 2 trends. First, treating the front and rear lights of a car at displays or LED magic displays, which has led to an increase in the number of LEDs used per vehicle. This kind of new design has recently been the subject of many discussions in many projects. Secondly, on August 5, ENNOSTAR announced our partnership with the ISELED Alliance. We will leverage ISELED's technology in making smart LEDs, which integrate RGBLEDs with drivers. We will deploy smart LEDs in interior automotive ambient lighting products and exterior vehicle displays to capture more opportunities and create more flexibility.

In addition, we also have other IC options and different solutions for various vehicle models. What is unique about this is that we also have temperature compensation and ambient light correction technology, allowing us to better align with carmakers' requirements. Overall, more and more LEDs are being used in a car. Although the sales volume of cars have not increased much, we are quite optimistic about the application of LEDs in vehicles.

[Damon Tzeng, executive]

Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Patrick. We will now proceed to the Q&A session. Thank you. We now start the Q&A session. We have collected some questions before the meeting as we are seeing increasing revenue contribution from the automotive segment. So we have many interest -- we have increasing interest from our investors about the outlook of our automotive segment. Do we expect to see steady growth going forward? Patrick, would you please?

[Patrick Fan, executive]

As I have talked to you about our Q3 outlook, in the previous section. Now let's take a longer-term view. Between 2024 to 2028, from the perspective of the group, we expect our automotive applications to experience multifold revenue growth due to several factors: number one, backlight. Local dimming will account for a bigger share. Today, there are rising requirements for touch on board and chip on board, which represents bigger technical challenges and at the same time, help improve quality. This also creates higher entry barriers for new industry entrants. So this is a trend that we have been observing.

Number two, display. As I talked to you earlier, in the front and rear of a vehicle, there are some different applications. In terms of the headlights, they are LED metrics, we have white light and RGB designs. In the rear light, we have red light LED metrics or we can use the rear lights as displays to deliver information. In terms of sensing, we are seeing an increase in demand for DMS and OMS. At ENNOSTAR, we not only have LED solutions, we also have surface emitting laser solutions to provide more alternatives for carmakers.

Earlier, I talked to you about Smart RGB because we are working with ISELED, so we can offer more flexible designs opportunities, both inside and outside the vehicle. Today, we are seeing their contribution to increase. Our automotive applications are gaining traction. Why can we deliver better results? Based on our own view, we think we are quite experienced in the backlight business. To develop backlight business, we are very experienced in SMT or touch on board and chip onboard. And we also are quite experienced in mass production of high-quality mini-LED products.

We also can offer very unique designs for optical electronics. So we can combine these experiences and expertise together to deliver better products. As the demand for backlight increased from several LEDs to dozens of LEDs to even thousands or tens of thousands of LEDs, the capability to provide high quality and mass production is extremely essential. So we can leverage our past experiences and our expertise to deliver local dimming backlights and front light and rear light or displays for vehicles. We can also deliver RGB and smart LED integrated with drivers. We have achieved certain results. We believe we are quite competitive in these aspects.

Overall, we are also seeing that as a share of our revenue, chip or chip packages will decrease. However, backlight modules will see its revenue contribution growing. As the LED revenue generated per vehicle increase, we expect the contribution to our revenue to increase. Another big aspect of the automotive business is headlights. We have achieved certain market share in the DRL business. So from chips to headlights, we believe we will make some gains in the second half through next year. If we take a longer-term view, today, we are developing ADB, and we are targeting 170 lumens and below, and this accounts for a bigger market share.

While some people are using micro LEDs, but that is a niche market and the volume is relatively small. So we decided to go for the larger volume headlight business. Based on these experiences, we believe that from 2024 to 2028, our automotive section -- segment will achieve double-digit growth in terms of our revenue. Thank you.

[Damon Tzeng, executive]

Thank you, Patrick. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our investor conference for this quarter. If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us at ENNOSTAR's IR department. Thank you very much. We'll see you next quarter.

[Operator]

Thank you for your participation. This concludes the 2024 Second Quarter Financial Results Conference of ENNOSTAR. You can disconnect now. Thank you very much.

[Statements in English on this transcript were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]