Identiv, Inc. Q4 FY2021 Earnings Call

Good afternoon. Welcome to Identiv's presentation of its Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2021 Earnings Call. My name is John, and I will be your operator this afternoon. Joining us for today's presentation are the company's CEO, Steve Humphreys; and CFO, Justin Scarpulla. Following management's remarks, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin, please note that during this call, management may be making references to non-GAAP measures or guidance, including adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. In addition, during the call, management will be making forward-looking statements. Any statement that refers to expectations, projections or other characteristics of future events, including future financial results, future business and market conditions and future plans and prospects is a forward-looking statement. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed in these forward-looking statements. For more information, please refer to the risk factors discussed in documents filed from time to time with the SEC, including the company's latest annual report on Form 10-K. Identiv assumes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, which speak as of today. I will now turn the call over to CEO, Steve Humphreys, for his comments. Sir, please proceed.

Thanks, operator, and thank you all for joining us today. During 2021, the advanced RFID applications market started to take off, and we put in place the technology, capacity, team and key customer design-ins to lead in the market. We've clearly established leadership as we start the pivotal year of 2022. This is the year that launches the next stage of IoT devices as RFID and NFC become embedded in almost everything we touch. Already this year, we've launched several initiatives for advanced RFID technologies. In January, we announced our partnership with Wiliot for Bluetooth low-energy-enabled RFID devices, launched our industrial-grade On Metal RFID devices, focused on high-value use cases in medical and industrial products and announced our industrial-grade NFC programmers. In February, we announced our partnership with NXP for their 22x chips that enable batteryless condition sensing, making fill level and wet/dry sensing easily embeddable into any product. Now there are two themes here. First, we become the partner that industry-leading companies in advanced RFID and NFC are turning to for advanced solutions. Second, all of these are focused on advanced applications that incorporate secure data, sensing, tamper, authenticity and enable truly unique product experiences. We are in this position as we start 2022 because throughout 2021, we've built our leadership in the industry and put in place everything we need to support it. We finalized our major hiring and system capabilities, shipped record levels of RFID units and completed our technology and project management platform. The fourth quarter also showed us two areas we needed to strengthen to really be ready for 2022. We've now done that, which I'll describe in a few minutes. But first, here are some metrics from 2021 and our fourth quarter, reflecting the momentum that we built. For 2021, overall, our total revenues were up more than 19% to a record $103.8 million. Our unit shipments in RFID were up 36% for the year at 185 million units, showing both growth and our ability to scale. We exited 2021 shipping over 65 million units in the fourth quarter, an annual rate of 260 million units. Now this is a key metric: our ability to scale past the 0.25 billion annual unit level. The second half of 2020 already had major volume growth in RFID. To meet demand in 2022 and beyond, we had to prove that we can scale to the next level. We went from shipping 136 million units in 2020 to a run rate almost double that going out of 2021. Now while driving this unit volume step-up, we also kept leverage in our business, with operating expenses up 3% while we grew revenues 19%. The RFID unit growth and overall operating expense leverage are our key metrics, which drove 23% year-over-year revenue growth in our Identity business. Our Premises business also delivered strong results. It grew 14% in 2021, more than double the industry rate. Our key premises growth metrics are even stronger. Our core federal government security revenues grew 21% year-over-year. And overall, our growth in premises accelerated from about 13% in the first half to more than 15% in the second half of 2021. As we add commercial strength through new products and channel expansion plus pent-up demand from lockdowns and increased government spending, we're confident that 2021 has positioned us very well for 20% to 25% growth in premises in 2022. On the RFID side, in late 2021, we more than doubled our sales force and project management team to support design wins. The key metric indicating how we're positioned going into 2022 is backlog. Our total backlog at the end of 2021 was up 45% over our total backlog at the end of 2020 at over $30 million. Now this is a strong indicator that our expected 25% to 30% growth for 2022 for the company overall is on track. Now looking at Q4, I mentioned that RFID units were up 36% for the full year. And in Q4, RFID unit shipments grew even more, up 49% over Q4 2020. Now remember that Q4 2020 was the second quarter of a step-up in units shipped, particularly to a major mobile device manufacturer. So the comparable is a pretty high bar that 49% grew off of. Growing in 2020 to the production levels needed then was a challenge, and it was critical that we demonstrated our ability to scale up another step function in Q4 2021. We made the shipment step up, but I also mentioned there are two things we learned in Q4 that we needed to get ahead of, and this showed us one of them. RFID is a project-based industry. Each use case has its own unit prices and margins, and they even can vary over the life cycle of a project. The result is margins and unit prices can fluctuate with project growth cycles. At our scale, this can change our overall margins in a specific quarter, even as the long-term trend of expanding margins continues. In the fourth quarter, this brought our margins down even as our units grew very fast. We managed the production and shipping, met all the demand and took market share. We scaled fast, but we didn't balance this with enough offsetting higher margin ASP devices in our sales in the quarter. As a result, our overall gross margins declined by about three percentage points. At the same time, we were determined to keep our track record of fulfilling every major customer shipment request to our premises customers. In the last couple of weeks of the quarter, a vendor tried to de-commit supply. We successfully worked with them to deliver, but then had onetime extra inbound freight costs, and this cost us almost three more percentage points on gross margin. Now this premises event in particular, we're confident is a onetime event that we will not let happen again. So we've applied these tough lessons from Q4. In RFID, we've taken actions to keep a more balanced progression on margins. We've put in place real-time systems and people with focused ownership. So even when we have an RFID volume step-up of almost 50% in a single quarter, we can manage the blended margin impact from a financial and production perspective. With these controls in place, we expect to make progress towards our gross margin goals regardless of unit prices and individual devices. As unit prices increase over the long term, that will drive sustained gross margin expansion. To be clear, in a fast-growth project-based business like ours, quarter-to-quarter margins can fluctuate but with an upward long-term trend. Going forward, we have to be able to manage volume step-ups like this because we're building a pipeline of business that we expect to drive step-ups in future. Now one of the main drivers of step-up growth applications and a margin expansion is our expanding pipeline of customers that have contracted with us for paid nonrecurring engineering development. Nonrecurring engineering, or NRE, is contracted when a customer has specific technical and functional needs. Engaging in an NRE contract has lots of benefits. It validates their commitment to the project, builds the contractual relationship, fosters project success between our technical teams and usually results in a custom solution that we're in a unique position to fulfill. It also builds trust through joint development, so customers are ready to do design refinements and feature expansion. This supports expanded margins and reduces competitive risk. So we don't do NRE for the money; we do it for all of these business benefits. Now new NRE paying contracts include RECA for Smart Packaging for Castrol oil, Fanatics for Collectibles, Promate for a range of medical devices, Cellar for wine authenticity, a surgical devices company and a dozen others. These and the other design wins from 2021 are the broad base of design win growth drivers that are at the core of our expected 40% to 50% RFID growth. In addition to this broad base of growth drivers, our major transformational opportunities made progress in Q4 and early this year. Our auto-injector project has progressed on several fronts. We're entering into an NRE development agreement with them, and we're meeting almost weekly on both the product and their production process. So the core auto-injector project continues to be on track. Now a completely new project with the same company on a different medical device has come together fast and has already started a 20,000 unit pilot run and could result in an initial million unit order as early as this quarter. These units are in the $0.20 range rather than the much higher ASPs for the auto-injector, but they have healthy margins. Most importantly, they get a shipping volume for the customer, integrating us into their supply chain. And it's a category that by itself could move to tens of millions of units and potentially over 100 million units annually. Continuing with the NRE theme in the cannabis market, we've signed an NRE development agreement with the leading company for the Canadian cannabis market. We are designing a customized combination UHF and NFC device. As a result, we got an initial 1.4 million unit order. We're now building the first 50,000 units to run a pilot and systems test. I'll go into more details in our 2020 outlook. But so far, this is a faster start than we expected. This lays the groundwork for the multimillion unit orders we expect later in 2022. Also in the 2022 discussion, we'll update our relationship with TrueGreen in the U.S. where we already have a 20 million unit frame order for an even more ambitious device that combines digital signatures, UHF tracking, content authentication, tamper protection and enables personalized customer engagement. Now we'll go into more details in the 2022 discussion, but the net is that for cannabis applications, both the Canadian and U.S. market leaders are moving forward, and we're working closely with them both. So with these specific customers and projects making progress, we expect RFID to continue to be our core growth driver. The base customers were established by the end of 2021, and our transformational projects are on track. We also kept our track record of 100% customer retention in RFID. So as our customers' use cases grow, we believe we'll grow with them. Now RFID is our main growth driver. But in Q4, we also had strong growth metrics in premises and our overall business. First, premises usually are down sequentially in Q4 following the government year-end that drives growth in Q3. In Q4 and '21, our Premises business was up 6% sequentially versus Q3 rather than being seasonally lower. Another important metric, software and services revenue was up 20% in Q4 versus Q4 2020. Finally, our revenue per employee for all of 2021 was $315,000 per employee, up from about $267,000 per employee in 2020. Now the final area we had to address in Q4 to put us in position for a strong 2022 focused entirely on driving growth and business model leverage were vestiges from the peak of COVID. In late 2020, the public transit industry was hit hard. A few long-term customers struggled to pay their bills. Consistent with our conservative accounting policies and to remove distractions from executing our growth plans, we've charged off all of these outstanding receivables. They're mostly from 2020 and mostly in public transportation. It's a one-time noncash expense, but it skews our Q4 results. We believe we'll still collect some of these receivables, and we'll fight for every penny because whatever we collect is cash, but we need to comply with our policies on overdue accounts receivables. Going forward, our transit customers are either on prepayment terms or are now part of much larger diversified public companies. The business message is that it happened in industries that had a clear one-time impact from COVID shutdowns. We're confident it won't recur, both because the industries have stabilized, and we've taken a conservative payment policy to companies in these industries. Our new CFO, Justin Scarpulla, who will be on the call in a minute, will go into more details. It's painful for our Q4 GAAP results, though. I mentioned our 2021 operating expenses were about 3% over our 2020 operating expenses. This includes the cost of expensing these receivables. Without those charges, our leverage would have been even more with expenses basically flat, while revenues grew 19%. GAAP includes them though, and we own our own decisions. So that's how we're reporting them. For our ongoing business model for 2022 and thereafter, though, we do not expect to see this again. So in summary, 2021 laid all the groundwork for a strong 2022 as we built our teams, retained and expanded our customers, grew design wins in NRE and managed another volume step up to meet customer demand. Our major transformational projects each made progress with most now having designs done or well underway and preliminary orders placed for some. Our RFID business is clearly positioned going into 2022 to lead in the huge NFC and advanced RFID market that's taking off now. Our Premises business is also on a strong growth cycle to support our overall growth and business model leverage. Now we faced some issues in Q4 and fixed them. We put in place systems to control financials when we have step-ups in RFID unit growth and eliminated the last carryover effects of shutdowns, especially in the transit industry. We think this puts us in position both operationally and from a balance sheet perspective for strong, consistent leverage growth in 2022. So with that, I'll turn the call over to Justin to go through our financial results in more detail, then we'll look at 2022 and beyond.

Thanks, Steve. As Steve mentioned, our financial results reflect our continued strength exiting 2021 with the delivery of year-over-year growth in revenues and future backlog. We believe these results, paired with our continued investments in the RFID organization and its capabilities position the company to achieve its growth and profitability potential in 2022 and beyond. We closed the fourth quarter of 2021 with $28.5 million in revenue, up 15% compared to the fourth quarter of 2020 and in line with our normal seasonality exiting 2021. Our full year 2021 revenue was $103.8 million, up 19% compared to the full year of 2020 and near the midpoint of our guidance. For the fourth quarter of 2021, our GAAP and non-GAAP adjusted gross profit margins were 33% and 34%, respectively, compared to 35% and 36% in the fourth quarter of 2020. For the full year 2021, our GAAP and non-GAAP adjusted gross profit margins were 36% and 37%, respectively, compared to 39% and 40% in 2020. Gross profit margin changes resulted primarily from our product mix, increased freight and logistics costs and the continued investment in technology and manufacturing processes and systems to meet the near- and long-term project profiles of our customers. Specifically, in the second half of 2021, we ramped up projects with RFID customers and made investments in technologies to drive new processes, increase automation and boost manufacturing speeds to support an annual run rate of 260 million units. These investments have been fruitful and will continue to contribute to the company's growth in the current year and the years ahead due to the competitive advantages created as a result. We remain committed to a long-term gross margin target of 40% to 45%. GAAP operating expenses, including research and development, sales and marketing and general and administrative costs were $11.3 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 compared to $8.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2020. As Steve mentioned, GAAP operating expenses in the fourth quarter of 2021 included a one-time expense totaling $2.3 million for the expensing of aged accounts receivable from our balance sheet. Without this one-time expense, our operating expenses were $9.0 million, nearly flat compared to Q4 2020. We have tightened enforcement of our accounts receivable policies and procedures, including weekly reviews of outstanding balances, credit limits, prepayment arrangements and moving to credit holds quickly and timely. In a high-growth environment like ours, implementing and maintaining strict financial controls, systems and policy discipline are my top priority as CFO. I am confident we have taken the necessary steps that we will continue ensuring rigorous controls as we scale. Our full year GAAP operating expenses increased 3% and demonstrate our continued efforts to drive business model leverage. Our Q4 GAAP net loss was $1.9 million or a loss of $0.10 per share. This compares with a loss of $0.7 million or a loss of $0.05 per share in Q4 2020. Excluding the $2.3 million expense of aged accounts receivable, net income would have been $0.4 million. Our full year GAAP net income was $1.6 million or $0.02 per share compared with a loss of $5.1 million or $0.34 per share in 2020. We have provided in the appendix today a full reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP information, which is also included in our earnings release. Our next slide further analyzes trends by segment. Beginning with Identity, Revenue from our identity products totaled $17.5 million or 61% of our total revenue in Q4 2021. Our Identity segment generated 62% of our full year 2021 revenue or $64.7 million, a 23% increase from 2020. The year-over-year increase in identity revenues was primarily driven by higher sales of RFID transponder products. These increases were driven by current customer expansion, new customer wins and our ability to deliver versus competitors' constrained supply chain. The sequential change in revenue was due to normal seasonality. Our Q4 2021 Identity segment GAAP margins were 20%, driven primarily by product mix and the rapid production step-up in transponders. Our full year 2021 Identity segment GAAP margins were 24% compared to 28% in 2020. As previously mentioned, our decision to opportunistically grab market share resulted in very rapid growth from customers in the early stages of their RFID deployment strategies, consequently resulting in a higher proportion of lower ASP RFID units sold. Quarter-to-quarter margins can fluctuate, but we expect long-term margins to trend upwards from current levels as we expand and deepen our existing customer and technology partnerships. We believe our increasing NRE business as we move to more complex devices and relationships will only further strengthen our margin profile for all new opportunities to ensure that our higher margin goals are being met. Any temporary exemption must be signed off by top management should we deem a relationship to be strategic to the future success of Identiv. We remain committed to a long-term gross margin target of 35% to 40% in our Identity business. Now turning to the Premises segment. This segment accounted for $11 million or 39% of our total revenue in Q4, representing an increase of 22% from Q4 2020. For 2021, our Premises segment generated 38% of our full year revenue or $39 million, an increase of 14% from 2020. The year-over-year increase in premises segment revenues reflected the continued strength of our federal business and select recovery in other verticals. GAAP gross margins for premises in the fourth quarter were 53% compared to 56% in Q4 2020, primarily due to the mix of products within the segment and short-term expedited freight fees. Within Premises, we have taken steps to ensure that any increase in freight and logistics will be passed through to our customers. Going forward, we have systems in place to proactively adjust these costs and prices. We remain committed to a long-term gross margin target of 55% to 60% in our premises business. For the full year 2021, Premises GAAP margins of 55% were comparable to 2020. Moving now to our operating expense management. Our GAAP operating expenses for the fourth quarter of 2021, which included the one-time write-off of these receivables, totaled $11.3 million compared with $8.9 million in Q4 2020. Our non-GAAP operating expenses adjusted to exclude restructuring and severance costs and certain noncash charges consisting of stock-based compensation and depreciation and amortization totaled $10.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2021 or 37% of revenue. This compares to $7.5 million or 30% of revenue in Q4 2020. For the full year 2021, our total GAAP operating expenses were $38.4 million, an increase of $1.3 million from 2020. Our non-GAAP operating expenses for the full year were $34.2 million or 33% of revenue compared with $30.7 million or 35% of total revenue in 2020. In summary, we continue to demonstrate operating leverage in our business model in 2021 by increasing our top line revenues while successfully reinvesting for growth within our current cost envelope. Now turning to the balance sheet. We exited Q4 2021 with $28.6 million in cash, a $17.1 million increase from Q4 2020. We remain debt-free, and we maintained our strong working capital position. In our 10-K filings, we will be providing a full reconciliation of the year-to-date cash flows. For completeness, we have included the full balance sheet in the earnings release in the appendix. Momentum exiting the fourth quarter of 2021, combined with a strong backlog, give management confidence in the company's growth expectations for 2022 and 2023. Sharing some metrics as we move into the first quarter, exiting Q4 2021, our total backlog for all future shipments was $30.2 million, up 45% versus Q4 2020. And total new orders booked through the first month of Q1 2022 was $12 million, up 43% over the same prior year period. These trends provide visibility into the current business momentum going into 2022. As a result, we are reaffirming our full year 2022 guidance today with expected revenues between $130 million and $135 million, reflecting year-over-year growth of approximately 25% to 30%. Management also is reaffirming its guidance for 30% to 35% year-over-year revenue growth in fiscal 2023. Normal seasonality is expected to continue. With that, I will conclude the financial discussion and pass the call back to Steve.

Thanks, Justin. Our 2021 results and the activities behind the numbers have us positioned for expanded growth in 2022. With the strength in the advanced application RFID and NFC market and the team and customers we've established, we're confident in 25% to 30% growth for the entire company, led by 40% to 50% growth in RFID. The transformational projects are moving forward with our position more entrenched in each. Our design wins expanded fast with more NRE engagements than we've ever had. Our existing customers are all staying with us and are growing strongly. We've established ourselves in leadership roles in nearly all of the relevant trade and industry groups, which further drive sales opportunities as we're better known as the go-to for advanced NFC applications. We've established solid partnerships with the technology leaders in advanced RFID, including NXP, Wiliot, CollectID, Blue Bite and others. We've augmented these partnerships with our own technology initiatives across Tag On Metal, authentication servers, application developer kits and more. We took actions to make sure sudden volume growth in RFID is managed financially as well as operationally, make sure there aren't balance sheet exposures, kept our track record of delivering on every customer request regardless of today's unreliable supply chains and held our cash steady while expanding our team. Now our strategic priorities for 2022 remain the same. First is our top priority: RFID growth, driven by design wins, current customer growth, technology partnerships and industry leadership. Our second strategic priority is our federal government growth. And our third strategic priority is expanded software services and recurring revenues. With our teams, financial resources and tight financial controls in place and with our pipeline growing, 2022 is all about execution on these priorities. Our first design win focus is our transformational projects. In the opening, I mentioned the NRE commitments from our auto-injector and cannabis customers. I should add that our largest already deploying customers, including one major mobile device customer and our prescription customer, also engaged in NRE contracts with us early on. I also gave some updates earlier about both cannabis and the auto-injector and related projects. The measurable point to highlight in both is the design progress and initial orders already in place earlier than we had expected. Now for the cannabis market in Canada, the dual technology, UHF and NFC device we designed for our customer is an ideal solution. This design plus the pilot run order for over 1 million units that I mentioned has us on track for production volumes ramping in Q3 to Q4. These initial production volumes will cover the base demand we're expecting in our 2022 plans. Beyond this, additional volume would be upside. The customer continues to project a market opportunity of over 1 billion units, but we're not projecting higher revenues into our 2022 or 2023 expectations until we can confirm timing of the larger ramp-up. Also in cannabis, I went into some detail earlier about our progress with TrueGreen, mostly for the U.S. market. The product we developed together is exactly aligned with our advanced RFID strategy and our recently launched authentication server, and we already have a frame order for 20 million units in place from TrueGreen. The auto-injector project also continues to make progress. In addition to design refinements, we're developing an IP agreement together, another clear sign of their commitment to our technology. In addition to this flagship project, I mentioned earlier the third use case for the same company. We did a fast design turnaround. Our design outperformed our competitors, and as a result, we're already working on a 20,000 unit pilot rent. Now I won't repeat the details, but the point is we're on track with this customer for our 2022 plan with some areas moving faster than we planned. Another transformational project is RFID tagging for prescription pharmaceuticals. The initial CVS use case for the visually impaired is continuing to grow well. Now they won't let us disclose unit volumes, but one metric we can share is on the programmer side. We've deployed RFID programmers to nearly all of their pharmacies. Now either this quarter or next, we're deploying about 3,000 more programmers for them. They won't do that or wouldn't do that unless they needed their pharmacists to be able to issue more RFID-enabled prescriptions than they can do already. So deploying additional readers certainly is an indicator that the demand is moving above where they initially deployed for. So our transformational customers are already establishing their baseline demand to support our 2022 outlook. If they continue to bring their plans forward, that would be upside. But the key goal to get them on the deployment path is happening. Beyond that, it should be a matter of time until full opportunities reached in each case. So these and other very large opportunities are key for our company to get much larger than we are today. Now in fact, most of the core growth that drives our expectations for 2022 are among existing customers and some of the smaller new ones that are near term with faster rev cycles. These have progressed well and can deliver some upside to their own, but the main implication is that they set the base growth for our business. Among these design wins that are moving into production are a COVID test kit manufacturer, who issued a $4.5 million PO for supply across 2022 and into 2023. A robotic cleaner manufacturer has issued a 2 million unit order for a new design. CollectID is expanding their sporting brand lines into major global soccer clubs. Four new designs have been completed for another consumer brand company. One European customer in the medical industry was about $2 million in 2021. And already for 2022, we have orders in hand for revenues of about $2.9 million from this customer. Now there's, of course, some upside, but 45% growth is a good start to have in backlog already from one customer. Now there are a couple of dozen companies in this category, customers at meaningful scale and growing fast. It's the core reason that our backlog coming into 2022 was up 45% versus a year ago. Our orders for the first month of this year also are up 43% over an already strong order period last year, showing continued growth momentum. The result is that we have over 60% of our 2022 RFID plan already covered with billings, backlog and run rate business. Also, among our current customers, our mobile device customer is continuing to grow and to support NFC as core technology platform strategy. In our baseline scenario, we expect them to grow around 10% this year. If they expand into other use cases and drive their platform more aggressively, that creates upside. Now I could go through lots more. Companies like Angel, Grapheal, Coach, Procure and Johnson Controls. But you get the sense. Now another thing you'll notice is that these are almost all new names. The ones we've mentioned before are still with us contributing to our growth as they grow. They also don't have to be huge already to contribute a lot to our growth. For example, another medical device company is coming from a sub-$100,000 base in 2021; they're expected to triple this year and then grow next year to be more than $2 million a year. Now let me give you one specific example of the sorted company in this last category, smaller companies with use cases that could expand massively. A company called Grapheal is a graphene-based biosensor device in France. Their biosensors have a lot of uses, all enabled by RFID devices. On their website, they have a great demo video showing use cases like smart wound bandages that can track if a wound is using fluids or healing well without taking off the dressing to check every time. They have lots of other use cases from rapid biotests to smart dressings. And you can decide for yourselves how big the market will be. But in their video, you can see how central our RFID devices are to their solution. Now with multiple medical use cases like Grapheal, we know that some of them will take off. They have unit volume potentials in the hundreds of millions or billions of units and our RFID devices are core to their delivered value. Now that's just one example of a design win that could scale meaningfully. Our partnerships are our third strategic growth driver. The partnership we announced with Wiliot has opened a range of projects. They have a few dozen prospects in their pipeline. And as these move into production, we'll be in a position to supply and then to ramp the use cases across each industry. The partnership with NXP around their very low-cost sensor-enabled 22x DNA RFID chips is just as unique. The built-in capacity sensor is perfect for fill level and diaper sensing. Think of everything from diapers that tell you when they need to be changed to lotion bottles that tell you when they're getting low and need to be reordered and hundreds of applications in between. Fill level and refill insights for both consumer and industrial uses is another category that clearly can be billions of units. Now our focus on RFID reflects the massive scale potential of that market. For 2022, our Premises business is contributing strongly also. The market itself is growing as a technology refresh cycle kicks in, combined with deferred demand from lockdowns and an emphasis on physical security combined with digital systems. We expect our growth to be above even this positive market growth cycle because government demand is very strong, our integrated physical security platform is the most complete in the industry and fast-growing sectors like PropTech, federal and local governments, education, infrastructure and others have the most critical need for complete solutions. This is happening as lots of competitors have hollowed out their solutions, outsourcing their firmware, hardware and other components right when customers want confidence that overall security systems are seamless, secure and easy to manage. Because of our depth as a complete technology provider and our strength in some of the highest growth segments, we think we're in a solid position to deliver 20% to 25% revenue growth in premises with some upside, especially in the federal government and our integrated video intelligence and access solutions. So as we came into 2022 with strong growth, you can hear from these details that we now have visibility to our growth expectations for this year and beyond. We have a strong growth engine, but we also learn things. We absolutely have to manage across our business model when we have to deliver sudden growth step-ups. We're confident that we now have them all in place, positioning us for accelerated growth, consistently improving margins and expense leverage. Now to be clear, our top priority is growth. In an emerging market like this, keeping leadership and expanding market share is critical to building value as the market reaches scale. We've got potentially revenue-multiplying projects on track in 2022 that we have to keep focus on and a growing base of design wins that we have to keep supporting and driving. That's how we're building a business that's uniquely valuable in this nearly unlimited market. So with this focus from account-specific progress to partnerships and industry-wide leadership, you can see why we think we're set to lead the advanced RFID and NFC industry to grow fast and ultimately to a much bigger scale. We have the backlog and pipeline in place to deliver on our 2022 plans and the industry reach and team already built to expand our leadership across the market. That's why I opened my comments that 2022 is now all about execution. We have the business elements in place and the market itself is clearly taking off with use cases that are transformational. So with that, we'll open the call to questions. And I also want to mention that we also have on the line Dr. Manfred Mueller, and Amir Khoshniyati, who are the real architects and the drivers behind our RFID business. So if you have questions about that part of the business, we can get it directly from the people who are driving it forward. So operator, please open the line for questions.

Our first question is from Brian Ruttenbur from Imperial Capital.

Yes. And thanks for all the color. So the first question is on the recovery of gross margins in 2022. And I feel very confident as to you about revenue growth. But how quick are we going to see the recovery from the fourth quarter to the first quarter? It sounds like half of the recovery pretty much comes automatically from freight? And then maybe you can talk a little bit about where we should see kind of sequential growth in terms of gross margins? And should we be getting back to kind of 2020 levels or something like that?

Yes, Brian, I'm glad you asked that question first because it's our main focus as Amir and Manfred effectively drive the business. We need to control internal processes and product mix, and that will be reflected as we move forward. I'll let Justin address this as well since he has been heavily involved. We do anticipate regular sequential progress. It won't happen all at once in one quarter; rather, it's going to take the entire year to expand margins. However, we do expect to see progress as we approach the first quarter. The key is to ensure we have consistent growth moving forward. While we have significant opportunities, we must satisfy those demands while maintaining balance. This is why I am being cautious, as we want to avoid overcommitting to anything. There will be immediate improvements and a sequential increase towards our target gross margins, although some fluctuations are expected along the way. We will ensure that the overall trend is positive. Let me let Justin provide additional details on this.

Sure. As Steve mentioned, we have a clear path for the first quarter regarding two specific items: drop ships and others that we can eliminate moving forward. I believe that throughout 2022, margins will progressively improve each quarter.

The next question is coming from Mike Latimore from Northland Capital Markets.

Can you provide more details on whether there are specific areas where customers receive automatic price discounts after reaching a certain volume, or is it primarily a case where new customers need to be offered a specific price to gain market share?

Yes. Good question because some customers do want the step downs as you go further. But as we've talked about in the past, even with our big mobile customer, who, of course, has that normally built in, we've been very effective at new designs that take them off of that price down step. So for us, in fact, the tightest margin is early in a project when sometimes there's new technology, we've got to put in and we're amortizing that earlier on over lower volumes. The margins tend to expand over time with projects for us, first off, because of volume learning curve and second off, because we get them to upscale their design and make it more complicated in that respect. So that's the profile that we typically see. Since we've got Manfred on and he, of course, has immersed in this and in the market, let me turn it over to Manfred as well to comment on the gross margin profile kind of over the life of a customer. Manfred?

Yes, I think it's absolutely right, the way you just have described it, Steve. On the other hand, of course, we did address the topic of a mix having some impact on the margin here and there. You also have heard about, let's say, the volume shipments, so with some substantial growth in terms of the overall output there. We also addressed various markets that were in the lower ASP area. And that was also basically one of the drivers there on top of some of the seasonal Q4 OCOGS topics that basically dropped down the margin, whether it's shipment or whether it was purchase price variations here and there. So from that point of view, that's basically what we have seen. We are addressing things also with regards to price increases. So it's not just that in days like this, prices drop down because not only we are passing on some of the component increases that we have seen. We also try to basically use that type of, let's say, opportunity to adjust the pricing wherever the market is allowing us to do so.

Yes. Just I guess the other one would be, how influential are these transformational deals on the backlog growth you just reported? Are they kicking in a material way yet? Or is that to come?

That's a good question. Some of the backlog already includes CVS, and both of our customers are accounted for. I mentioned a 1.4 million unit order from the medical company. However, most of the backlog does not include them, so the 60% of our business reflected in billings backlog and run rate will be further supplemented by that.

The next question is coming from Jay Cheung, a Private Investor.

First, on the RFID capacity, I know the run rate was 260 million units, but where is the capacity now? And where will it be by the end of the year?

Manfred, would you like to take that on directly?

Yes, I can comment on that. Last year, we delivered 185 million units. Currently, our capacity is approximately 220 million. By the end of the year, entering 2023, we expect our outgoing capacity to be 350 million, assuming we don't bring in additional equipment, which we already have on order. For instance, I was with a machine manufacturer in Germany this week, where we are finalizing site approval for the next piece of equipment, expected to arrive in Singapore in about 2 or 3 weeks. We also have another machine ordered for a July arrival, and there’s one scheduled for early 2023 that may also be expedited. All necessary capacity is being organized, so capacity should not be an issue at this time.

I see. Okay. Your supply chain team has done a great job ensuring that your customers' orders were filled, especially when your competitors couldn't. I believe this was true in both segments. As vendors notice this and see how well you serve your customers, do you anticipate a significant increase in your allocations from your vendors this year?

Yes, that's a good insight, and the answer is yes. I mentioned NXP, and they're managing a lot of demand but have been very supportive, and we expect that to continue. They appreciate the nature of our projects and use cases, and they want to support them. I believe this will persist for several of our vendors. We're also seeing growth on the premises side because, as a credible supplier, we're providing more products to more customers. This means people are selling through us, and vendors recognize that we're increasing our market share, making us a preferred partner. This creates a self-reinforcing cycle. Additionally, starting March 1, we implemented a 10% price increase across our Premises business, which was well received. Our customers understand the need for this adjustment to maintain the health of our business, especially given the current challenges. Overall, we are in a strong supply position, better than our competitors, and our vendors are collaborating with us, allowing us to expand our gross margins by raising prices.

That's great. And then I assume this enables you to take new customers from your competitors. One, how meaningful of an impact were these new customers? And then two, do you see those customers now going back to their old suppliers? Or are they staying with you and reordering from you?

When you work with the customer in hard times, they tend to stick with you because everybody needs reliability. And even if they need to pay a little bit more for it, it hurts more. I think financial optimization sometimes looks like algorithms and that works when everything is on a consistent environment and everything is stable. Everybody knows that we are not in stable times and who knows when we'll get back to stable. And so being willing to put value on reliability and relationships and commitments as well as great technology, great solutions. I think everyone from CFOs on down are accommodating that kind of situation. So no, the customers we won back, that we won, I think, are going to stay with us. We're already in their course and talking about other products that we can do with them. They're starting to look at expansion of capabilities and then that allows us to look at higher gross margin products.

Okay. Great. And then on the '22 guidance, I noticed you were maintaining it from last quarter, but whether it's new projects, new customers, bookings, higher allocation from suppliers, it seems that momentum is only accelerating from 4 months ago. So why wouldn't guidance improve as well?

We really need to see the results in our hands before raising expectations. The timing of some projects can change, and if something shifts by a month, it may move from one quarter to another. We believe we are well positioned for 2022, but we prefer not to raise our guidance until we are certain about the numbers. I hope that makes sense.

Yes. Okay. And then on the call, just you reiterated your overall long-term gross margin target of 40% to 45% for the entire company and then 35%, 40% for the ID side and then 55%, 60% for the premises side. So what level of sales would you need to reach those gross margin targets for each segment? And what would be the resulting EBITDA or operating margins?

Yes, interestingly, it's less about the level of sales and more about the mix. While scale plays a role, the primary factor is the mix we achieve with high-end auto-injectors and various other projects. Our pipeline of NRE projects is larger than ever, which significantly impacts our gross margins. As these projects contribute more to our overall mix, gross margins are expected to expand. Regarding the $200 million revenue range, we anticipate that the mix will be established, potentially sooner if we manage it effectively. For the premises side, we have previously achieved gross margins in the 57% range, so we are at a scale where that level is attainable. Ultimately, the crucial element remains the margin associated with the mix, which becomes more stable and consistent as we grow in scale. All these targets are quite achievable from our current position.

Okay. If I could ask one more question. I know we're out of time, but you repeated your guidance for 2023 of 30% to 35% revenue growth. How much confidence do you have in your visibility to achieve what is typically an ambitious goal?

Well, we have visibility to that. And in fact, with the pace at which some of these bigger deals are moving through, if anything, the '23 number, we're feeling more confident about, it just wouldn't make sense to be moving '23 and not moving '22. But if you look at all these, we have in and then when you look at that pipeline, again, that I can't throw out all the names that are there, but you can hear from when Manfred and Amir are talking about the pipeline we're building and the projects we've got underway. That is an aspirational at all. That's as much line of sight as you can have. And all we're talking about at this point is 10 months out, 9 months out. So it's something that we have decent visibility too. Things can always change, but certainly, we're as confident about that as ever. And you're right. We have run over. So I'm getting the waves that we have to wrap up.

At this time, this concludes the company's question-and-answer session. If your question was not taken, you may contact Identiv's Investor Relations team at [email protected]. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Humphreys for his closing remarks.

All right. Thank you. And thank you all for joining us. I know we've run over, and it's a very busy time for everybody. But we really appreciate the support for the company, and we're certainly going to continue to drive it forward and continue to communicate out. We have some other investor events coming up, and we'll keep communicating as transparently as we can as the company moves forward. But we're certainly excited from a business perspective and committed to keep making progress on the overall business model. Thank you again for joining us.

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