InterDigital, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDCC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

InterDigital, Inc. (NASDAQ:IDCC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript February 15, 2023

Operator: Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Fourth Quarter 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in al listen-only mode. After the speakers presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker for today, Richard Lloyd. Please go ahead. The floor is yours.

Richard Lloyd: Good morning to everyone, and welcome to InterDigital's fourth quarter 2022 earnings conference call. I am Richard Lloyd, Communications Director. And with me in today's call are Liren Chen, our President and CEO; and Rich Brezski, our CFO. Consistent with last quarter's call, we will offer some highlights about the quarter and the company and then open the call up for questions. 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 sections of our 2022 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 our financial metrics tracker, which is available on the Investor Relations section of our website. With that taken care of, I will turn the call over to Liren.

Liren Chen: Thank you, Richard, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. 2022 was an excellent year for InterDigital with continued success in our core smartphone licensing program and record-setting performance in our CE and IoT, including Auto licensing programs. We increased recurring revenue to a record level, significantly increased our net income year-over-year, and we believe put the company in its strongest position ever to deliver future business growth. I will first discuss our fourth quarter performance, then I will provide some more highlights in our key achievement in 2022 and some thoughts, our positioning in 2023 and beyond. In the fourth quarter, despite of ongoing macroeconomic headwinds, we continue to execute exceptionally well in our goals across the business.

Revenue for the fourth quarter was up to $117 million, a 5% increase year-over-year, while net income jumped by 48% year-over-year to $32 million, thanks to new licensing deals and continuing disciplined management of operating expenses. We once again demonstrated our strength in our smartphone core with a binding arbitration agreement with Samsung for a new license. We grew our revenue from consumer electronic licenses by renewing our deals with Panasonic and announcing a new deal with LG, and shortly after the year-end, we announced a large expansion of our share buyback program. Our Samsung arbitration, as we have previously disclosed, both parties have agreed that the new license will start January 1 of 2023. We will continue to negotiate for a period of time before letting the arbitrator decide on issues we cannot agree on.

This is a binding process for both parties that will lead to a new license, and we estimate the whole process will conclude around the middle of 2024. Rich will cover the topic of revenue recognition in his section. I want to remind everyone that Samsung has been licensed to our patents for more than a quarter of a century, and their commitment to another deal reflects how foundational our industry means to the mobile industry. Together with the renewal of our Apple deal in the third quarter, our agreement with Samsung is further evidence of our position as 1 of the leading innovators and a top license source in the smartphone industry. I'm pleased that Samsung has recognized the quality of innovation, and our relationship with them will continue.

In the fourth quarter, we also built our increasing momentum for licensing in the spaces of CE and IoT, including Auto. Our agreement with LG include both televisions and PCs and licenses LG to our patents related to HEVC and VVC, the latest video compression technologies, where we believe we are a world leader and where we see further licensing opportunities. Like Samsung, Panasonic is a long-term licensee and our new agreements with the company, along with our new deals with LG, underlines the growth strength of our CE licensing program. Coming into 2022, we knew it was going to be a pivotal year for our company. We are thrilled that as a company, we have risen to the challenges, with continued headline smartphone agreement led by a new Apple deal with an incredible strong 12 months for our licensing program outside the smartphone space.

We not only welcome LG as a new HEVC and VVC licensee, but also entered into a multiyear license with Amazon, covering a wide range of Amazon's consumer electronic devices and their InterDigital's patterns. We also saw considerable growth in the automobile market through our licensing partner, with more than 80% of the connected cars currently licensed to our 3G/4G portfolio. Annual revenue from CE and IoT, including Auto, reached more than $100 million for the first time, with recurring revenue increased 63% year-over-year. That helped push total revenue to $458 million for the year, an increase of 8% from 2021, including almost $404 million recurring revenue, a record setting level, up by 15% year-over-year. This continues our recent trend of delivering consistent increases to our top line.

As I mentioned in our last call, our recent licensing successes mean that we have signed more than 20 new agreements and renewals with an aggregate contract value of over $1.5 billion since early 2021. This gives us an incredible strong platform for which to drive further growth and continue to invest in our innovation footprint. At our heart, we are innovation business. I'm extremely excited by the role that we are playing in the evolution of technology in cellular, video, AI and beyond, technology that only become more central to consumers and businesses around the world. The emphasis we place on innovation is clear in the pipeline of new inventions with our new -- with our number of invention disclosures increasing by more than 40% in 2022.

Last year, we also made a key hire to our executive team with the appointment of Dr. Rajesh Pankaj as our new Chief Technology Officer. Since he joined, Rajesh has hit the ground running, and his expertise and leadership are proving invaluable as we play a key role in the development of next-generation connected ecosystems. Shortly after quarter end, we received further validation of our position as well towards leading innovators, as we were included for the second consecutive year in LexisNexis Innovation Momentum, the Global 100 Report. This report recognized not only our impact on innovation today, but also the likely impact of our innovation in the longer term. On the litigation front, we have recently win three decisions since the start of the year from courts in U.K. in our dispute with Lenovo.

On each decision, our patent was held to be valid and essential to various cellular standards and infringed by Lenovo. We are very pleased with these results. These decisions serve as further confirmation of the quality of our patenting innovations that many of the leading device manufacturers have chosen to license. We are still waiting for the U.K. court's decision in our friend licensing trial, and we remain confident in the strength of our case. So as we celebrate our 50th year as a leader in developing connected technologies, I'm delighted that 2022 was one of the most productive and successful years in our history. Looking ahead in 2023 and beyond, we believe we are well positioned to deliver additional smartphone deals, increased revenue in consumer electronics, close new agreement in the high-growth IoT, including Auto sectors, and make progress in our new licensing opportunities in services.

From our innovation pipeline to our business momentums to our financial strength, we believe the company is the strongest position it has ever been in and we are perfectly placed to continue to deliver our compelling growth story. And with that, I hand you over to Rich to talk through our numbers in more detail.

Rich Brezski: Thanks, Liren. Our strong execution throughout 2022 delivered excellent financial results, but more importantly, puts us in what we believe is the strongest position the company has ever been in. Our final results for Q4 came in above our preliminary estimates, which we published last month. The improvement was driven by favorable order reports we received in the intervening period as well as a slightly lower effective tax rate for the year. Building on Liren's comments, I'll highlight a few noteworthy items from our full year 2022 results. In 2022, we reported over $400 million of recurring revenue, a record for InterDigital. In fact, including the fourth quarter of 2021, we have now reported recurring revenue in excess of $100 million in 4 of our last 5 quarters.

For our entire history prior to that period, we only had 2 such quarters. Our 2022 revenue included $104 million of CE, IoT, including Auto revenue. This is more than 4x our CE and IoT, including Auto revenue, from 2020 and demonstrates our ability to grow revenue by capitalizing on the value our fundamental horizontal technologies bring to markets other than smartphones. After initiating proactive cost management measures in 2021, we realized the related benefits in 2022. Our operating expenses decreased by $47 million year-over-year, including a $25 million reduction in restructuring charges. Our 2022 adjusted EBITDA was $254 million worth $8.35 per share, and our adjusted EBITDA margin was a healthy 56%, a 7-point improvement from 49% in 2021.

We ended the year with a $1.2 billion cash balance and $600 million of net cash. In 2022, we returned over $115 million to shareholders through dividends and share buybacks, and we currently have authorization to repurchase another $400 million. With all that we accomplished in 2022, the most important thing is that we have laid a strong foundation for future growth. With Apple renewed through 2029 and Samsung in binding arbitration, our first quarter guidance includes revenue from both accounts. In the case of Samsung, we are recording revenue at a conservative level, consistent with the revenue we have recognized from our patent license agreement that just expired on December 31, 2022. This conservatism is consistent with generally accepted accounting principles and reflects the fact that the binding arbitration with Samsung will define a patent license agreement that is effective beginning January 1, 2023.

We believe it is likely that the arbitration award will exceed the conservative revenue we are recognizing and require a catch-up at that time. As a reminder, we expect to receive the arbitration award around mid-2024. Moving on to cash. Our year-end cash balance was driven by $345 million of free cash flow in Q4, as we collected more than $400 million of customer receipts in the quarter. A significant portion of this relates to a large, upfront payments associated with the patent license agreement signed earlier in 2022. The strong free cash flow has a very real impact on our year-end balance sheet. With Apple signed and Samsung in arbitration, we are well positioned to continue our company's strong history of returning cash to our shareholders.

As a result, we increased our share repurchase authorization to a total of $400 million and subsequently launched a $200 million modified Dutch tender. Since we announced our first dividend in December 2010, we have returned nearly $1.4 billion to shareholders through buybacks and dividends. In that time, we've reduced our outstanding share count for more than 45 million to fewer than 30 million shares. At current prices, our $400 million authorization would further reduce our share count below 25 million shares. With lots of opportunity to drive our cash flow even higher, capital allocation, and specifically returning cash to shareholders, will continue to be among the foremost topics for the management team and our Board. With that, I'll turn it back to Richard.

Richard Lloyd: Thank you, Rich and Liren. Operator, you can now open the call for questions.

To continue reading the Q&A session, please click here.