Wireless chip-maker Skyworks Solutions (SWKS -0.86%) reported its financial results and hosted a conference call going over those results on July 20.
"We delivered revenue of $901 million, up 20% year over year, with gross margin of 50.7% and operating margin of 37%," Skyworks CEO Liam Griffin said in a prepared statement.
Image source: Skyworks.
Griffin then went on to say that the company "achieved earnings per share of $1.57, up 27% year over year and $0.05 better than consensus [estimates]."
In this column, I'd like to go over three things from the company's most recent earnings call that management seems to want current and potential investors to know about the state of its business.
More design wins, more money
Griffin stated on the call that Skyworks is "aggressively expanding [its] design win pipeline."
"In mobile, we are broadening our reach across all premier OEMs," Griffin said. "Specifically, we supported Huawei's feature-rich smartphones with SkyOne and SkyLiTE products."
The executive then went on to say that the company also "extended DRx solutions for Samsung's (NASDAQOTH: SSNLF) Galaxy Platform."
That wasn't all, either.
"We leveraged SkyOne and SkyLiTE at OPPO, Vivo, ZTE and Sharp, to name just a few," Griffin continued. "And we extended our antenna tuning wins across virtually all of the leading Chinese OEMs."
An expanding customer base could help Skyworks accelerate its revenue growth while simultaneously diluting its dependence on its largest customer -- Apple (AAPL -0.57%).
The mobile/non-mobile split
Skyworks has traditionally generated most of its revenue from sales of chips to mobile device makers, and that's not expected to change for a while yet. However, diversification -- both in terms of customers as well as in terms of the end markets that a company serves -- is a good thing as it reduces a company's dependence on a single industry while simultaneously enabling more rapid total revenue growth.
On the call, Skyworks CFO Kris Sennesael said that during the company's most recent quarter, the revenue split between mobile-derived revenue and its "broad markets" revenue (i.e., non-mobile) was roughly 73% to 27%.
Griffin added some additional information, saying that the company expects its "broad markets" revenue to cross $250 million in the current quarter, representing a "$1 billion [annual] run rate."
"Broad markets has been performing very well and we put a lot of investment around that in our portfolio around Wi-Fi, around ZigBee, and even LTE in some cases is really helping propel that momentum," Griffin explained.
Progress toward gross margin target
Analyst Toshiya Hari observed on the call that Skyworks' gross profit margin percentage "has been relatively stable over the past, say, four to six quarters despite revenue being weaker a year ago and now much stronger today."
"So, basically, we haven't seen much leverage to the upside nor the downside," the analyst continued.
Hari then asked, "Can you remind us what the long-term goal is for [Skyworks] in terms of gross margins?"
Sennesael said that the company's "target is to get to 53%," and that the company is "making good progress toward that target."
The executive then pointed out that in the third quarter, Skyworks enjoyed a 30 basis point gross profit margin expansion and that the company is guiding to another 30 basis point gross profit margin expansion.
"And, of course, in the December quarter, we expect on higher revenue further improvements on the gross margin as well."
Gross margin expansion is important because the higher a company's gross profit margin percentage, the more of each dollar in revenue gets converted into gross profit. And, all else being equal, this means more of each dollar in revenue is ultimately converted into net income -- creating more value for a company's stockholders.
