Omnivision Quarterly Earnings Call

Seeking Alpha published transcript of Omnivision's quarterly earnings call for the quarter ended on Oct. 31, 2009. The company's revenues reached $183 million representing sequential growth of 74% over the previous quarter. Gross margin also improved to 24% for the last quarter from 22.4% in the previous one. Omnivision's cash and short term investments at quarter end increased to $354 million.

Some interesting quotes form the call:

Shaw Hong, CEO:

...we are actively designing our second generation Omni BSI 2 pixel technologies while our competitors are still trying to deliver their first generation technology.

Ray Cisneros, VP Sales:

In the [recent] quarter we shipped approximately 145 million units at an average selling price of $1.27. This compares with approximately 75 million units shipped in the [previous] quarter at an average selling price of $1.40. Sequential revenue growth was driven by our strong position in the Smart Phone handset market, mainstream handset market and notebook market. The sequential decline in ASP is the result of an exceptionally strong demand in the mainstream handset market that drove a revenue mix shift towards lower resolution products.

...we secured significant inroads into the Japanese market for digital video camera application using our 8 megapixel BSI product... Our 5 megapixel BSI products have also secured multiple design wins in the digital still camera market and shipments began in the third quarter.

Q&A session:

Quinn Bolton – Needham & Company:

...Shaw in your closing remarks said that the CameraCube and Omni BSI were now shipping to multiple Tier One’s. Can you give us a sense of when you think those revenues will become material contributors to revenue?

Ray Cisneros:

We are extremely excited about the traction we have in design wins with customers buying our CameraCube. It is tangible. It is material, albeit a very small percentage right now. The way it is working out to be, most of these cameras are backing into the secondary camera application and handsets so therefore the actual mass or volume of this particular camera is not as large as the primary camera. Going forward we expect to transition this technology into primary camera applications but that has yet to be plans laid out or openly discussed yet so we are still very excited about this whole trend.

Yair Reiner – Oppenheimer:

Shifting over to China, you mentioned some strategy for dealing with more competition in China before. Can you talk a little bit about what some of those strategies might be?

Ray Cisneros:

As Bruce mentioned in his script there is the launch of our new VGA 7675. It is I would say the best, bar none, balance between cost and performance. The other strategy we have been talking about here is the CameraCube for secondary camera applications. Going forward there are other strategies we need to take into action as we go forward because the China market as we mentioned we feel has expanded because of its infrastructure and readiness to basically change business models globally.