To: Elvis Jones who wrote (134 ) 10/23/1999 1:21:00 PM From: Alan A. Hicks Respond to of 168
It was an awesome quarter! CAMD not only beat expectations but most impressive was the acceleration in new orders and new design wins for their IPDs. The summer is usually a slower quarter but $9.4 million in revenues was the highest since Q197 with orders hitting a record pace. Backlog grew $1.8 million in the quarter. The Book-to-Bill was 1.24-1. Bookings averaged over $1 million for 12 straight weeks (that includes the first two weeks of this quarter) and a yearly rate of $51 million. Orders for IPDs literally exploded up 89%. Design wins, which had been expected to decline from the very strong 43 wins in the June quarter, jumped again to 61 design wins. Last 4 quarters for design wins are 16,33,43,61. These design win numbers point to a very strong year ahead. All this is happening inspite of the short-term negatives of the Camino chipset delay from Intel and the Taiwan earthquake which disrupted some of their customers production. But, management indicated both of these situations are medium to longer term very positive for the company. Camino has delayed some design wins going into production, but the problems with Camino/Rambus enables CAMD to highlight their high speed bus solutions with their thin film silicon IPDs. CAMD sees that at 200MZ and beyond there are problems in preserving signal integrity with traditional thick film passives. CAMD already supports 400 MZ buses in servers and believes their current IPDs support considerably faster buses. Management indicated that while orders were down from Taiwan since the earthquake, they expect that once their Taiwan customers get production back on schedule, CAMD's Taiwan business could "come back with a vengeance." The Taiwan earthquake is also having the impact of opening doors to new customers since the earthquake has tightened already tight passives industry conditions. Also there has been very strong interest in the new power management chips CAMD recently announced and that these have just gone in to high volume production for the current quarter. These chips support energy-saving "sleep" mode in PCs, portable PCs and a variety of add on cards and peripherals such as modems, networking cards etc. Management also said they have begun to put a priority focus on design wins from European cell phone manufacturers with the opening of a European sales office. Management gave guidance of $10.5 - $11 million revenues in the December quarter and profitability. That would be a 25-29% growth rate over last year. This puts the company on track for 30-40% revenue growth for next year. At 1.2 * this year's revenues I believe CAMD is considerably undervalued. Traditional thick films passives companies sell for 2x revenues growing only 10-15%. I believe CAMD should be valued more as an analog IC company which sell for 5-10 times revenues. At a 30-40% growth rate, I believe CAMD should sell at least at 3-4 times revenues. With cell phone design wins it could be even higher.