邁威爾科技 (MRVL) 2013 Q4 法說會逐字稿

Good day ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the quarter four 2013 Marvell Technology Group Limited earnings conference call.

My name is Sean.

and I will be your operator for today.

At this time, all participants are in listen-only mode.

We will conduct a question-and-answer session towards the end of this conference.

(Operator Instructions)

As a reminder, this call is being recorded for replay purposes.

I would like to turn the call over to Mr. Sukhi Nagesh, Vice President of Investor Relations.

Please proceed, sir.

Thank you Sean, and good afternoon everyone.

Welcome to the Marvell Technology Group's fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2013 earnings call.

I'm Sukhi Nagesh Vice President of Investor Relations, and with me on the call today are Sehat Sutardja, Marvell's Chairman and CEO and Brad Feller, Marvell's Corporate Controller and Interim CFO.

We will all be available during the Q&A portion of the call today.

If you have not obtained a copy of our current press release, it can be found at our Company website under the Investor Relations Section at marvell.com.

We have also posted a slide deck summarizing our quarterly results in the IR Section of our website for investors.

Additionally, this call is being recorded and will be available for replay from our website.

Please be reminded that today's discussion will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from management's current expectations.

The risks and uncertainties include our expectations about our overall business, our product and market strategy, statements about market acceptance of our product, statements about general trends in the end markets we serve, and future growth opportunities, statements about market share, and statements regarding our financial outlook for the first quarter of fiscal 2014.

To fully understand the risks and uncertainties that may cause results to differ from our expectations and outlook, please refer to today's earnings release, our latest quarterly report on Form 10-Q, and subsequent SEC filings for a detailed description of our business and associated risks.

Please be reminded that all of our statements are made as of today, and Marvell undertakes no obligation to revise or update publicly any forward-looking statements.

During the call today, we will make to certain non-GAAP financial measures, which exclude the effect of stock-based compensation, amortization of acquired intangible assets, acquisition-related cost, restructuring costs, and certain one-time expenses and benefits that are driven primarily by discrete events that Management does not consider to be directly related to our core operating performance.

Pursuant to Regulation G, we have provided reconciliations of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures in our fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2013 earnings press release, which has been furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K, and is available on our website in the Investor Relations Section.

With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Sehat.

Thanks Sukhi and good afternoon everyone.

Today we reported fourth quarter revenues of approximately $775 million, a decline of 1% from the prior quarter.

This was better than our expectations, as we saw increased demand from our mobile, wireless, and storage customers in the quarter.

We also delivered the following non-GAAP results for Q4, gross margin of 53.2%, operating margin of 13%, and earnings per share of $0.19.

In addition, we continue to return cash to our shareholders as we repurchased roughly 34 million shares totaling $283 million and paid $32 million in dividends during the quarter.

Fiscal 2013 was a softer than expected year for Marvell.

For the full year, our storage business performed better than the market as a result of share gains, but nevertheless we had to navigate a year-over-year decline in HDD TAM itself.

On the networking side, our business grew approximately 2% for the year, which was significantly better than most of our peers, who were down mid-to high single digits for the year.

In mobile, we endured product transitions which negatively impacted our business for the year.

However, we believe the worst is now largely behind us, and we expect Q1 to be the trough for our business.

We are optimistic about our growth prospects for fiscal 2014, as we have multiple drivers that we believe will deliver sustained growth beginning in Q2.

At this point, I would like to reiterate some of our target goals for the new fiscal year.

By end markets, our goal in storage is to continue to deliver better than market results through share gains in HDDs and growth in SSDs and hybrids.

We are also targeting to grow at or better than the overall networking end market as we increase our focus in the carry service provider space.

In mobile and wireless, we are making excellent progress gaining tractions with our key customers, and expect a rebound in revenue starting in Q2.

On the capital REIT front, during fiscal 2013, we bought back approximately 16% of outstanding shares and paid approximately $100 million in dividends.

The combination of these two shareholder friendly actions amounted to over $1 billion for the entire fiscal year, and was approximately 70% in excess of free cash flow generated for the year.

For fiscal 2014, we expect to continue to return capital to shareholders through both share repurchases and dividends.

I would like to make some comments on recent progress we have made in each of our businesses.

First, in mobile, we are making some progress on our products transition and are now well-positioned to drive growth starting in Q2 from key customers for 3G and later in the year for LTE.

I would like to provide you an update on where we currently stand on the adoption of our unified 3G platform.

We have just started initial production shipments of our dual core devices with leading OEMs for smartphones and tablet designs.

In addition, we recently introduced our new quad core device for our unified 3G platform, which is already sampling to lead customers.

We are expecting production shipments for these quad core device this year.

We continue to be focused on our target goal of 10% of WCDMA smartphone volume exiting Q4 of fiscal 2014, and we are making excellent progress towards this goal.

Given our active engagements with leading smartphone OEMs, we are increasingly confident that the breadth of our technologies and our strong roadmap will help us achieve our target market share goal.

Now as the world rapidly transitions to LTE, we are accelerating our LTE product commercialization process.

We recently announced the availability of our quad core based FDD and TDD LTE device supporting global 4G broadband standards, as well as multimode 3G standards.

We are already making significant progress on design wins in the global OEMs, and expect commercial products based on these LTE device available this year as well.

Next in wireless connectivity, we continue to see increased tractions with our 802.11AC portfolio of products.

In Q4, we introduced the industry's first four-by-four 11 AC solution targeting the enterprise, carrier, and access point market.

This four-by-four solution is designed to ensure seamless throughput of high bandwidth, multiple stream HD DDR cross-service provider gateways and set top boxes.

The solution incorporates our proven beam-forming technology, which greatly improving robustness and performance.

We are already gathering significant traction for this solution with major enterprise and carrier customers.

In fact, the majority of global carriers, including those in the US, are now starting to realize that the four-by-four 11 ACD is the necessary architecture for HD video distribution.

Marvell is the only four-by-four 11 AC solution provider in the market today.

In addition, in consumer electronic devices, our customers are upgrading the two-by-two 11N wireless connectivity solutions with our two-by-two AC combo solutions, which provides better performance at similar cost.

The transition to 11 AC continues to expand the opportunity for wireless connectivity, and as a result, we continue to invest in next generation connectivity technologies.

We anticipate our connectivity business to deliver solid year-over-year growth in fiscal 2014.

Next in storage.

We have made strong progress over the last year and expect fiscal 2014 to be a year of continued share gains in HDDs and growth in SSDs.

The Marvell share in HDDs increased by roughly five percentage points in fiscal 2013, due to the ramp of our 2.5-inch 500 gigabyte platter devices at all the drive OEMs.

We expect share gains on mobile platforms to continue over the course of the year.

In addition to mobile, we also expect to see a meaningful pick-up in shipments on new enterprise platforms in the next few quarters.

Furthermore, based on our advanced product roadmap and engagement with all the HDD OEMs, we are well positioned for major new design wins for desktop platform this year.

As a result, we are confident that fiscal 2014 will be another strong year of share gains for our HDD business.

Moving to SSDs, our business grew roughly 40% in fiscal 2013, and we exited the year with approximately 50% share of the merchant silicon market.

We are currently seeing excellent traction at major SSD OEMs for our solutions.

Our focus in SSD has been on Tier 1 flash OEMs for customers with significant access to flash capacity, and we are currently seeing many of these customers starting to win in the market.

In addition, we expect many of our customers to ship Marvell-based dual hybrid solutions to the market this year.

In summary for storage, our continued investments are resulting in HDD share gains, and growth in both the SSD and hybrid markets.

Turning next to networking, we are better than peer results in fiscal 2013.

While we delivered modest growth for the year, most of our peers saw their networking revenue decline approximately mid-to high single digits.

Our diverse product portfolio was key to our performance last year, and has put us in a good market position for the new fiscal year as well.

Growth in our networking business in fiscal 2013 was driven by new products such as PON and programmable network processors.

Our customers are increasingly using our programmable network processors to manage both rising consumer bandwidth requirements and rising connected devices in the network.

In addition, the change to programmable architectures is making software an increasingly key element, and our continued investment in software for networking have been critical in quickly enabling differentiated platforms for our customers.

As for our focus in the networking, we are continuing to invest in core networking technology for enterprise and cloud data centers, and also expanding our presence in the carrier infrastructure market.

For networking as a whole, we believe we are well positioned to once again perform better than our peers in fiscal 2014.

In summary, demand in Q4 was better than originally anticipated, due to increased demand from our mobile, wireless, and storage customers.

We continue to make strong progress in mobile, with both our 3G and LTE platforms.

We are seeing the opportunities for our connectivity combo solutions across multiple applications.

We are also making headway on growth and share gains in HDDs, SSDs, and networking.

Finally, we remain committed to returning cash to shareholders through our buyback and dividend programs.

Now, I would like to make a brief comment as it relates to the CMU patent litigation.

As we have mentioned recently, we strongly believe that we did not infringe on the methods described in the CMU patents.

Our products use our own patented three-channel technology, which was developed in-house.

As a result, Marvell has filed multiple post-trial motions to overturned the jury verdict, and if necessary we will go through the peer process as well.

The court is expected to render a decision on this motion in the May to June timeframe.

We have a detailed FAQ on our website which may be updated from time to time.

With that, I would like to turn the call over to Brad to go over our fourth quarter financial results and the first quarter outlook.

Thank you Sehat, and good afternoon everyone.

As Sehat mentioned, we reported revenues for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2013 of $775 million, a sequential decline of approximately 1% from the previous quarter.

The better than expected revenue was due to upside from a mobile customer, and a late quarter increase in demand from storage customers, due to build aheads in advance of Chinese New Year.

In storage, our overall revenue increased 5% sequentially, and represented approximately 50% of total sales.

Our HDD business grew as we continued to take share in mobile platforms, as well as a benefit from pre-Chinese New Year demand.

As Sehat mentioned, over the course of the entire year, we gained slightly over five percentage points of share in HDDs.

In addition, our SSD revenue for the quarter was in line with our expectations and performed relatively better than our competition.

We exited the year with roughly 50% share of the merchant SSD market.

We expect to have incremental share gains in both HDDs and SSDs throughout the coming year.

In networking, our revenue was down 1% sequentially, and represented approximately 23% of total sales.

Our networking business performed better than most of our peers for Q4, and for the entire year, on account of growth at enterprise and carrier-focused customers.

In Q4, our switching controller, and fi businesses were roughly flat in aggregate.

We saw a modest demand slowdown in our PON business, due to the late buildouts, which was offset by growth in network processors and arm-based server CPUs.

Our mobile and wireless end market declined roughly 11% sequentially, and represented approximately 23% of overall sales.

This was better than initially expected, due to upside from our North American mobile customer, as well as the increased demand from wireless connectivity customers for our four-by-four 11N access point solutions.

Moving next to margins and expenses.

Our non-GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter was 53.2%, which was slightly better than the midpoint of our guidance.

Non-GAAP operating expenses came in at $315 million, which was at the high end of our guidance, mainly due to higher legal expenses related to the CMU trial.

This resulted in a non-GAAP operating margin of 13% for the quarter.

Net interest and other income was $6 million, and we recognized a tax benefit of $300,000 for the quarter.

This resulted in non-GAAP net income for the fourth quarter of $104 million, or $0.19 per diluted share.

The shares used to compute diluted non-GAAP EPS during the fourth quarter were 544 million.

as compared to 578 million reported in the prior quarter, showing the benefit of our continued share buybacks.

Cash flow from operations for the fourth quarter was $205 million, as compared to $137 million reported in the prior quarter.

And free cash flow for the fourth quarter was $161 million, as compared to $113 million in the previous quarter.

Now summarizing Q4 on a GAAP basis.

We generated GAAP net income of $50 million, or $0.09 per diluted share, compared to $69 million, or $0.12 per diluted share in the prior quarter.

The difference between our GAAP and non-GAAP results during the fourth quarter was mainly due to stock-based compensation expense of $36 million and $13 million related to amortization of intangible assets and acquisition-related costs.

Now turning to the balance sheet.

Cash, cash equivalents, and short-term investments were $1.9 billion, a decrease of $98 million sequentially.

During the fourth quarter we repurchased approximately 34 million shares for a total of $283 million.

Over the past 10 quarters we have repurchased and retired approximately 184 million shares, or about 27% of our outstanding shares.

We also paid dividends of $32 million in the quarter, or equivalent to $0.06 per share.

Net inventory at the end of the fourth quarter was approximately $250 million, and declined about 23% sequentially, due mainly to higher revenues during the quarter.

Days of inventory were 77 days, down from the 81 days reported in the prior quarter.

This being our fiscal year end, I'll briefly summarize our results on a full-year basis.

Overall revenue for fiscal 2013 was $3.17 billion, a decline of 7% from the prior year.

Our storage end market declined 4%, and represented 47% of total revenues.

Our HDD business performed better than the 7% decline in the overall TAM, due to share gains throughout the year, and our SSD business, which grew about 40% year-over-year.

Our networking end market grew approximately 2% year-over-year, which is better than most of our peers, as a result of share gains in both the enterprise and service provider markets.

Our mobile and wireless end market declined about 15% for the year, as we endured continued soft demand from our North American customer and product transitions within the TD market in China.

Despite these challenges, we ended the year with a solid balance sheet and relatively strong free cash flow margins for the year.

On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin for fiscal 2013 was 53.4%, versus 57% reported a year ago.

Non-GAAP operating income was $486 million, or approximately 15% of revenues, compared to $784 million, or 23% a year ago.

Non-GAAP net income for fiscal 2013 was $498 million, or $0.86 per diluted share, compared to $795 million, or $1.27 per diluted share, reported a year ago.

Turning to cash flow metrics, we generated $626 million in free cash flow for the year, representing a free cash flow margin of 20%.

Moving next to our outlook for the first quarter of fiscal 2014, we currently project first quarter revenues to be in the range of $700 million to $740 million.

At the midpoint of this range, this represents a decline of 7% sequentially.

We expect Q1 to be the trough for our business, with growth starting again in Q2.

By end market, we expect storage to decline mid-single digits sequentially, due to seasonality and the Chinese New Year-related slowdown.

However, we do expect our SSD business to grow double digits in Q1, as we continue to gain share in the market.

We expect networking to decline approximately mid-single digits, mainly due to a weaker demand environment.

Finally, we expect mobile and wireless to decrease mid-to high teens sequentially, mainly due to seasonality in demand for our wireless connectivity products.

We currently project non-GAAP gross margin in the range of 52.5% to 53.5%, and currently anticipate non-GAAP operating expenses to be in the range of $300 million to $320 million.

We anticipate R&D expenses of approximately $250 million, and SG&A expenses of approximately $60 million.

At the midpoint of our projected guidance, this should translate to a non-GAAP operating margin of approximately 10%, plus or minus 1%.

The combination of interest and other income should net out to approximately a $2 million benefit.

Tax expense should be approximately $2 million.

We currently expect the diluted share count to decline to approximately 530 million shares.

This share count does not reflect any share repurchases we may undertake during the quarter.

Taken together, we currently project non-GAAP EPS to be about $0.14 per diluted share, plus or minus $0.02.

On the balance sheet, we currently expect to generate between $25 million to $50 million in free cash flow during the quarter.

We anticipate our cash balance to be about $1.9 billion, excluding any M&A activity, continued share buyback, or other one-time items.

We currently expect our GAAP EPS to be lower than our non-GAAP EPS by about $0.10 per share.

About $0.07 of this is related to stock-based compensation expense.

With that, I would like to turn the call over to the operator to begin the Q&A portion of the call.

(Operator Instructions)

Please limit your questions to one per analyst with one follow-up question.

Please stand by for your first question.

John Pitzer, Credit Suisse.

Thanks for all the detail.

Guys, just relative to your commentary that you think the current quarter's the trough and you'll see a resumption of growth in the fiscal second quarter, I'm wondering just if you could give us a little bit of color by end market, why you're confident about the growth going into the second quarter?

What's the expectation for storage versus enterprise versus mobile and wireless, and how much of that do you think is just purely cyclical relative to what's going on in the overall industry versus some company-specific product cycle drivers?

I think the answer is both of those.

Partly cyclical.

Q1 is always a low number for us.

And with respects to particularly as compared to Q4.

So with respect to growth, in Q2, starting in Q2, we do execute our progress in our 3G, unified 3G platforms will help us there to grow in Q2.

Our new design wins in 11 ACs will start to benefit in Q2 as well.

So the share gains in HDDs and hybrids and SSDs, and also in enterprise server.

So Q2 will -- Q1, that's why we felt in Q1 is a trough for us.

John, if you look back -- this is Sukhi.

If you look back in time, Q2 always is a July quarter for us, and you know there's some seasonal uptake in storage and hard disk drive.

There's definitely share gains that we're going to experience that'll help us deliver storage in excess of what the market grows.

And then like Sehat mentioned, we should see a pick-up in mobile, and the connectivity side of business, as well as due to new programs.

Great, guys.

Then as my follow-up.

Sehat, you mentioned about the SSD market, that you thought you exited the year with about 50% market share in the merchant market.

Can you give us a sense of how much of your storage business is SSDs, how much of the overall market is merchant versus captive, and I guess importantly, how you see that trending over the next couple of years, and what's the catalyst to get some of the captive market into the merchant market?

Yes.

First, we do not split the SSD versus HDD.

We always say the SSD is still a smaller part of our HDD business.

So it's not going to be productive for us to talk about the percentage.

Maybe there will be a time when it may be 50/50, then we can talk about it, but at this point it's really, we have decided from day one that we will not talk about it.

What was the second question?

Yes.

So John, in relation to the transition to SSDs, it's really a market for us, and it's probably due to the declining prices of SSDs.

As they continue to go down, that will drive incremental volumes.

That's also why we think the hybrid markets, being in the middle of HDDs and SSDs, will be a nice source of growth for us as well.

Guys, just help me understand, how much of the market for controllers today is merchant versus captive?

John, last year about one-third of the market was captive, if you will.

2012.

And I think if you look at most industry analyst reports last year, there were between 30 million to 35 million units, SSD controller units that were sold, which is roughly, what, about 5% of the overall market?

So very small.

And this year, I think if you look at this forecast itself, there's all kinds of forecast out there, and it could -- anywhere from growth to 50% to 100% year-over-year for SSDs this year.

Like Brad mentioned, a lot of that is dependent really on how much the price comes down.

Needless to say, we're doing quite well in that market.

Perfect.

Thanks, guys.

Harlan Sur, JPMorgan.

Thanks for taking my question.

Sehat, on the re-acceleration on growth in mobile and wireless that you anticipate in Q2, you talked about the continued ramp of your unified 3G platform.

Is the ramp in the unified platform both TD and WCDMA smartphones?

And then you've also talked about 20-plus smartphone customers qualifying your unified platforms.

So I think it does give you guys fairly good visibility.

So I guess how confident are you that your mobile business will grow quarter-on-quarter for the remainder of the year, given the design win visibility that you have?

And then I have a quick follow-up.

Sure.

The platform is -- the ramp is on both the 3G standards, meaning the WCDMA and TD-SCDMA standards.

So to many of these customers, they are the same design.

In fact, we also mentioned that in smartphones as well mobile, again to many of our customers, the design is actually the same chip goes to tablets as well as smartphones.

So this is the reason why our team are very excited, because these are for the very first time in our history that we are able to build products that could easily be supported to many different applications.

And we also are very excited because not just we have the dual core, so we also have the quad core device.

So it's pin-to-pin compatible.

So again, our customers can quickly go ramp productions.

We say, in fact this year we are going to go production for the quad core device as well.

So again, doesn't matter whether it's for tablet or for smartphones.

So finally, on the LTE side, we also go into production this year, again using the same platform, to build those products.

So a lot of these design wins are happening.

We mentioned last quarter about a few of the Tier 1 OEMs that are working on our headsets.

And we are extremely focused on making sure those Tier 1 OEMs be able to go production as soon as possible.

So that's why we are putting a lot of efforts in our engineering efforts to support those Tier 1 OEMs to bring the products into the market.

And we believe that our engagement with the Tier 1 OEMs will be able -- through this engagement of these Tier 1 OEMs by the end of the Q4, we will be able to help us to achieve the 10% goals that we put on ourselves late last year.

Okay, great.

Thanks for that.

Then from a financial standpoint, the team committed on the last call to keep OpEx dollars relatively flattish this year over last year.

Are you still committed to that?

And if you are, are you still going to be able to commit the required resources to maintain the momentum you have in wireless?

And are those additional R&D resources coming at the expense of other programs or initiatives?

Thank you.

I will let Brad talk more about it.

Yes.

We are absolutely still committed to maintaining OpEx flat year-over-year.

To address your question about having the right level of resource to continue the momentum we have, we have that.

We'll do some product prioritization efforts that we've already undertaken.

And that will allow us to continue to grow and keep the OpEx flat.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Ruben Roy, Mizuho Securities.

Sehat, I just had a question on the mobile and wireless business.

If you look at the North American customer strength in Q4 and then you look at the guidance for Q1, I'm wondering if the other part of the business, TD-SCDMA, is doing a little bit better as you look into Q1, or what are the dynamics there?

And longer-term, what are the expectations for the North American customer?

Thank you.

I'll answer that.

I think the longer-term of the North American customers, we have very good relationship with these North American customers.

So we are working very, very closely with them on multiple fronts.

So we have -- we will have products that will support the next OS, as well as to serve the needs in future LTE products as well.

So our problems in our revenue -- the top revenue with them for the last year, hopefully will recovery itself toward the end of the year as we ramp up the effort to the new programs, and as we introduce the LTE products with them as well.

Ruben, to address your question on TD.

So Q1 should be the tail end of the product transition that we've talked about the last couple of quarters.

You should start to see revenue grow in TD in Q2.

We expect that market to grow, and we expect to do well at the high end of the TD market this year.

Okay.

That's helpful.

Thanks, Brad.

Then just to shift over to the networking side of the business, the PON weakness in Q4.

Was that inventory-related, or is there anything going on competitively?

And do you think you're PON business is going to grow year-over-year for 2014?

Thank you.

Ruben, it's not an inventory issue.

It's a decision by a government agency in terms of when they are going to grant a buildout to a certain customer of ours.

So it's really just a timing thing.

We expect our PON business to continue to do well this year and be a good business for us.

Great.

Thanks, Brad.

Yes.

Glen Yeung, Citi.

I just wanted to ask a question about the magnitude of the beat in the fourth quarter.

I guess it's almost $55 million more than the midpoint of your guidance.

And I understand, as you say, it comes from -- a lot from your North American mobile and wireless customer.

I wonder if you can quantify in some way exactly how much of the beat came from that customer?

And then, two, I heard your answer just now about coming back with that customer, but is that customer expected to decline, then, in the next quarter, or maybe you said it differently.

What's the pattern you expect from that customer over the course of the year?

Glen, I think it was a combination of all three.

The upside of $55 million, if you will, from the midpoint.

There was upside from our mobile customer in the in North America, there was upside from storage, there was upside from wireless connectivity.

I don't think -- we're not breaking out exactly what, how much was from each, but it was definitely a combination of all three.

Related to that customer specifically, we expect the BB7 sales continue to be good this year.

Later in this year, as the BB10 devices with our products start to launch, we should see some upside there as well.

To your other question, Glen about Q1, we did guide Q1 to be down in mobile and wireless to be down mid-to high teens.

Obviously that incorporates a seasonal aspect, as well as a decline in that customer.

Okay.

Second question is, I guess, for Sehat.

You mentioned in your prepared comments, your programmable network processors and the opportunity there.

I wondered if you could discuss with us what you think the opportunity is, where you're positioning those processors, be it high-end or low-end, and what risks you see from captive solutions in that market?

Yes.

So these programmable network processors really target very, very high-end service providers' carrier space where they need to have -- be able to change the kind of services that they provide on the continual basis.

So also people, they can change the requirements with a short lead time.

This is the reason why they are programmable, and the processors are starting to get tractions into this market.

Now, it also helps that this programmable processors are becoming a lot more powerful, like hundreds of hundreds of processors, parallel processors in a single chip.

So in the past, when we were dealing with limited number of processors, the applications are quite limited.

It's too expensive, it's too power hungry.

Now we took it with a solution that we provide, more and more the applications that used to be served by fixed engine, now can be upgraded to a more programmable functions.

So we believe this opportunity is going to be -- can only continue to grow as the consumer demands are -- keep increasing to becoming more challenging.

(multiple speakers) sorry.

Sehat, just in your opinion.

Do think the low end of the market will become more of a captive market and the high-end will become a merchant market?

The low-end market, so when we say the low-end means like the fixed functionality.

So we also are building those fixed functionality of communication device, but we don't call it network processors.

We call it switchings and packet processors.

So those are the one we targeted for the data centers.

So they are not -- when we have low-end because they are not really low-end.

Actually they are very high performance, just they're not as programmable in nature as in the carrier space.

Thank you.

There more ASIC.

Right.

Some of them are more ASIC, yes.

Now, it depends how you define upscale.

If you define it on the throughputs, a lot of these fixed switching, the packet processor, could have orders of magnitude higher throughput compared to these programmable network processors.

But if you look at the pricings, the pricings is the opposite.

The programmable processor are a lot more -- have a lot bigger die-size and as a result they command higher prices.

Thank you very much.

Blayne Curtis, Barclays.

I was wondering, Sehat, if you could just clarify, you were talking continued share gains in hard disk drives.

It seems like, if you listen to your competitor, it seems like you pretty much have the majority of the 2.5 drive market at this time.

I was just curious, if that's your thoughts, and then where do you see the opportunities outside of enterprise?

Thanks.

If you look at why we continue to see gains, the share gains, well, naturally continue to have share gains because as our customers transition the 320 gigs provider 2.5-inch production to 500 gigs productions, we will have that share gains.

And the transitions, it has not completed yet.

So the transition will continue to happen, at the very least, toward the end of this year, if not even a few quarters to the next year, as suspect.

Not every one of the end customers will switch from 320 to 500 gig overnight.

So that's why we have (inaudible) new share gains.

And as well now as on the enterprise, with new products as have been shipped to the customers, we'll continue to have share gains in the enterprise.

Thanks for that.

And then on the connectivity side, you're looking for growth this year.

Where do you see the biggest opportunities for you?

Is it more tablets?

Is it attach rate with your modem?

Or is it other opportunities?

Thanks.

So the four-by-four devices are targeted for -- the 11 AC four-by-four device targeted for the enterprise class, as well as for video distribution in the home set top boxes.

The two-by-two 11 AC devices are targeted for people that cannot afford to pay for the four-by-four, but they still want to have the higher performance of the beam-forming capability of the 11 AC device.

So those are the more targeted for the high-end tablets, game machines, and the entry levels of the access points.

And Ultrabooks as well.

So Blayne, we expect growth in all those different areas.

So as our mobile business starts to ramp, we'll have the connectivity in those devices.

We'll see more tablet and Ultrabooks launched this year, as well as the high-end access points.

Thanks.

Doug Freedman, RBC Capital.

Could you give us a sense of how you see the markets transitioning HDD to SSD and hybrid, and what that does to the content per unit that you guys will see as a result of that transition?

Yes.

So we've been saying this for the last, I think we have this question for almost the last -- for several years already.

So we've been consistently saying that as the price of the flash continues to drop, the adoptions of SSD will continue to increase.

So we've been -- what we have seen in the last several years is exactly that.

Now, along the way, obviously, in order to make that happen, it's not just costs.

We also have to build more advanced SSD controllers to tackle the degradations of the performance of the lifecycle of the flash as they shrink the die size for them to achieve lower cost structures.

So those increased complexity will actually, because of this increased complexity of the technology required to serve this modern base of flash technology, what you see is this chipset actually more complex than standard HDDs.

So as a result, HDD controller, I mean.

As a result, you see the ASP of these chips tends to be higher than compared to HDD.

So you see ASP bumps as a result.

Now, not -- we also say that's not every customers can afford to buy SSDs.

So there's always a natural limit what the world could support, support to buy SSDs.

So our guess is 20%, 25% of the market could be -- eventually could be SSDs, and the rest will be more like hybrid solutions.

So people that can only afford to buy a small stand alone SSD, let's say 24 gigabytes, or 32 gigabytes, and then coupled with ultra- low cost 500 gigabytes today single platter HDD, maybe a couple years from now one terabyte of single platter HDDs.

So those customers, the vast majority of people in the world, will more likely to be served with hybrids.

Now, eventually those hybrids will be integrated into a single chip solutions, when the volume is high enough.

When it makes sense to be on single-chip device.

So at that time, probably could be practically every chip will be hybrid.

But that's several years from now.

And that will increase the ASP also as a result.

So in the long run, actually the trends -- the success of SSD actually is going to help us in terms of ASP for even for the HDD hybrid chip.

Great.

And for my follow-up, it's actually a very similar question, but what are you seeing as far as your ASP per unit opportunity in the mobile market as you transition CDMA to WCDMA into your LTE solution, your dual and quad core?

What are you seeing as far as your ASP opportunity?

And how should we think about as that business grows, what impact that will have on gross margins?

Yes.

So the LTE ASP opportunity is significantly better for us, because the LTE by nature is a lot more complicated.

And we, as one of the early players in the market, invested in LTE.

We will be able to tap into the demand of the LTE, and also the higher pricings that naturally happens in that market.

So if anything, if we're talking about the ASP, our belief is that that's where the money is going to be made in the space.

I think if you go from dual core to quad core to LTE, typically we probably obviously will get a ASP increase.

Remember, we're always selling a complete platform solution.

That includes connectivity, it includes our app, it includes a TMX.

So on a like-for-like basis LTE will definitely command a price premium over our 3G solution.

Can you give us some sort of a percentage of how much we're looking at it, the delta there?

You know what?

The market leader in the market today charges.

It will be below that, but it will be higher than what we have.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Chris Rowland, FBR.

You mentioned that you thought you were going to pick up share in SSDs, not only next quarter but also in 2013.

And some of our checks has sort of indicated that you guys were benefiting in part because of delays in your competitors third generation controller.

And I guess firstly, would you say that that's accurate?

Then secondly, what sort of gives you guys confidence that you can get gains in 2013, particularly because we haven't seen that next controller yet?

We don't know if there's going to be any special sauce, or whatever.

Does your confidence come on the back of design wins into a particular SSD OEM?

And perhaps growing designs into a particular PC OEM?

Sort of where does your confidence come from there?

Thanks.

I think maybe to answer this, maybe it's good for us to-- maybe let me explain how we develop SSD.

How do we take care of this business?

If you look at SSD controller, it's no different than HDD controller.

We actually built the products a year, or even sometimes two years, before we have before the customer brand.

So for the products that we are ramping today, that's the product that we built 1 year or a 1.5 years or 2 years ago.

So we do have even more advanced SSD controllers today in the pipeline, in entering with the customer sampling that will not see production for another couple quarters, or even a year later.

When we have product there, we will not see product production for another year later.

So if we're talking about products that our customers trying to introduce in the next couple quarters, that should be compared against our products that we are sampling today for the next quarter.

Or something we developed last year.

So in short, it doesn't relate to the competitor in terms of their timing and this kind of stuff.

We've chosen to partner with a lot of the top tier flash OEMs, and we're seeing them be very successful in the market.

Okay, great.

And I guess more of a housekeeping issue here on the legal expense, does it ramp from here?

Is this sort of a steady state for a while?

And assuming that it's not overturned in post-trial motions, do you guys have any sort of a sense of how long this appeal process might take?

What some of the legal expenses might be incurred on a run rate per quarter?

Do you guys have any sense of that?

Yes.

So you shouldn't expect our legal expense to grow related to the trial or anything else.

In relation to your question about timing, ultimately the appeals process could be up to two years.

So as we mentioned in the remarks, the post-trial motions will be -- the judge will rule on those in the May/June timeframe.

Assuming she doesn't overturn it at that point, it will go to appeals.

And it's really hard to say how long that could be, but it's likely in the 18 months to 2 years timeframe.

You won't see a noticeable increase in legal expenses, per se.

Nothing that -- those are the numbers that I was given, and I've seen from examples from other companies in the past.

Okay.

It will be nice to see that overhang go away.

All right.

Thank you, guys.

I agree.

Stephen Chin, UBS.

Sehat, first one, if I could on your storage controller strategy from a technology standpoint.

I think it's pretty well understood that in addition to the latest process, it's typically a good thing for your hard drive SSDs.

Wondering if you could talk a little bit about the status of the 20-nanometer generation of hard drive SSDs?

And secondly, for [I'll say drive] SSDs, could you talk about your enabling process for 20-nanometer or 19-nanometer generation and flash?

Okay.

I couldn't hear your questions so very clearly.

So I assume your first question's related to 28-nanometer HDD products?

Yes, that's correct.

Okay.

So 28-nanometer HDDs.

I think it's in the ramp to the customers should be sometime this year.

The silicon to those customers would deliver about like a year or so ago.

So I do expect by this year should be ramping in volume.

So what was the second question?

SSDs.

Right, Steve?

That's right.

SSDs in terms of whether or not your SSDs are fully supporting the latest 19- and 20-nanometer generation of NAND flash?

Yes, yes, yes.

So you're talking about like 2X nanometer of SSD.

1X.

I'm sorry.

The 1X nanometer, the 19-nanometer or 20-nanometer process nodes.

Most of our customers, the customers we're in production in last couple of months or so, are shipping products with either the 20-nanometer or the 19-nanometer nodes.

So the 1Y nanometer will not be ready for another six months or nine months or so for production.

That will probably be for production closer to the end of the year.

That's very helpful.

Just one quick one on the wireless business.

Just in terms of the new products that you announced this past week, the quad core chips for the 3G unified and LTE platforms, I noticed that you guys were talking about, at least for the 3G unified chip, cortex-based, 7-based product.

Is that just a shift in the product strategy where you guys are using more (inaudible) cores from ARM as opposed to using your internally developed?

Yes.

Okay.

So our strategy is to have both processors.

For our internal team is not -- our internal compared to ARM teams nowadays, our team is [relatives] may be smaller than the ARM team.

So it is wise for us that we focus our internal team to build the very highest performance processor.

They are basically, they cannot be bought through the standard ARM route.

And then for products, the people only cares about checking the boxes, like they want quad cores.

We will just use standard processor, because that would be -- there's no point for us to build yet another standard simple processors if they will only just increase our expense for no reason.

So using a standard set of processors in those markets make a lot of sense.

And then in those super high performance, that's where we use our own internal processor developed in-house.

Answered your question, Steve?

Yes, perfect.

Thank you so much.

Srini Pajjuri, CLSA Securities.

Sehat, I think last quarter you mentioned that Seagate notebook design win is about 30% ramped.

Just wondering where we are in that ramp right now, and also how you see that progressing.

And the other question I have is that if you are gaining share in HDDs and SSDs are growing double digits in Q1, why guide down mid-single digits, especially given that TAM is relatively flat?

Yes.

So Srini, let me address that.

In terms of the penetration rate on the notebook side of that customer, it's now greater than 50%.

So it continues to grow for us.

In terms of the guidance for Q1, the biggest impact there is Q1 is always a seasonally down quarter for us.

The other impact is Chinese New Year.

So we talked about some of the customers building ahead in advance of Chinese New Year.

That's having a negative impact on our Q1.

Okay, fair enough.

And then on the wireless side, Sehat, the target that you have to achieve 10%, can you give us an idea what the linearity of that ramp will look like?

I mean, you did say that Q2, you expect the ramps to start.

Are you expecting most of the design win volume to come in late in the year?

Is it going to start in Q2?

Kind of, it's going to be fairly linear.

And any color you'd provide would be useful.

Thank you.

Sure.

It is going to be mostly closer to the end, because usually what we see is a few customers, they want to go production first, and then there would be -- and then followed by other customers.

There tends to be not as advanced or customers, they like to wait and see until somebody else goes to high volume productions.

So as a result of this typical behaviors of the customers, you'll see that the volumes will pick up more and more as time progresses.

Now, even we talked together, even for the very first customer, you also -- I do, Stephen, that, I do expect as they build more and more devices, initially they built a single device, and then they build two devices, and then third device, and four devices, and then only times can solve their problems.

So as time progresses, they have more devices, and the volume also increases naturally over time as there are more products in the pipeline.

So that's multiply effects will happen even naturally, even for a single customer.

You have a follow-up, Srini?

Yes, just a quick one for Brad.

Brad, you said your goal is to maintain the OpEx relatively flat.

I just want to clarify that.

Is that year-on-year, or are you suggesting that OpEx is going to be flat on a quarterly basis from here on?

Thank you.

Yes.

So there will be some fluctuations quarter-to-quarter, Srini, but the goal is to keep it flat for the full year.

Great.

Thank you.

Hey, Sean.

We'll take one last question, please.

Romit Shah, Nomura.

I just want to get my arms around the 10% target for WCDMA market share.

Some of the third-party forecasts we've seen, you peg the market at about 800 million units this year, which would then imply that you guys are targeting 80 million units on an annualized basis, or about 20 million units exiting Q4.

So that would seem to suggest revenue in the range of $200 million to $250 million by the end of this year.

I just first want to make sure that these numbers make sense to you guys.

And I have a follow-up.

Okay.

So I will, first we never talk about the pricing.

With the only exception we say that the pricing in 3Gs could be -- might not be as attractive as LTE.

So I would not want to make comments on the revenue, what the (inaudible) revenue for that.

But I do want to reiterate that we are still on track of achieving this 10% target for many different reasons.

We have, as I said, we have the unified platforms, we have customers building products, first customer building second products, and we expect them to build third products and so on over the next couple quarters.

So as more and more of these customers building -- see the benefits of our technology, be able to go to quad core, easily to move from dual core to quad core.

I mean, like basically almost practically overnight, well nothing is overnight, but very easily to move to quad core solutions.

And move to LTE as well.

So I do have very high hopes that we will achieve that 10% target.

It's a very challenging target to achieve.

That's granted.

We never say it's an easy target.

We also say that this is the target that is -- any target that is less than that, it's meaning that we are not serious in this business.

I'm just curious then, as a follow-up, on what the trajectory might look like.

You mentioned April would be up, but is your expectation that revenues grow every quarter subsequent to that to get to your target?

On wireless?

Yes.

I mean, I think that's probably an accurate assumption.

Okay.

Thanks a lot.

Good luck.

Thank you.

I'd like to turn the call over to Sukhi Nagesh for closing remarks.

Thank you, Sean.

I'd like to thank everyone for their time today and continued interest in Marvell.

We look forward to speaking with you in the coming months.

Thank you and goodbye.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining today's conference.

This concludes the presentation.

You may now disconnect.

Good day.