Seeking Alpha publishes a transcript of Omnivision Q2 FY2009 Earnings Call. As many have expected, the guidance for the next quarter is down and the company forecasts an operating loss. Its strong cash position of $283M should help it survive and continue to invest in new technologies during the downturn, at least Shaw Hong, the CEO, believes so. He also tells that the company has already taken steps to reduce its operating expenses.
Gross margin for the Q2 was 25% compared to 25.2% the previous quarter. Excluding stock-based compensation expense gross margin was 25.4% compared to 25.7% reported in the Q1.
Omnivision continues its work to migrate to 300-millimeter wafer production, both with TSMC and VisEra.
Ray Cisneros, VP of Sales, says:
During our fiscal second quarter, we sold about 99 million units into the marketplace.
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Our 2-megapixel sensor shipments into smart phones have been particularly strong over the past two quarters. And now, this quarter, we have ramped up our 3-megapixel sensor shipments.
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just over 60% of our revenues came from the mobile phones and just under 40% from emerging products. As for the unit mix in the quarter, the VGA and below was 65%, 1.3-megapixel was just over 15%, and 2-megapixel and above was just below 20%.
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sensors on notebooks represented our strongest growth area during the quarter and represented approximately 30% of the company’s revenue.
One of suspicious omissions in the conference call was absence of any word on BSI sensor volume production start, general sampling or design wins. No analyst asks about it in Q&A session either. This brings some food for thought.
Correction: As written in comments, the earnings call does have a statement that two BSI products will be qualified for mass production in the first half of 2009.
BSI will be qualified for mass production in the first half of 2009:
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Our 5-megapixel sensor is the world’s first 1/4-inch system-on-chip solution of its kind. Within this sensor we have incorporated two of our key proprietary technologies, BSI and TrueFocus. Based on our 1.4-micron OmniBSI architecture, this sensor will provide our customers with best-in-class low light performance in a small footprint, which positions the product well for next generation phones requiring ultra-thin camera modules.
We’ve also included our most powerful signal processing engine with our TrueFocus ISP. This ISP improves image quality through enhanced sharpening algorithms and improves camera performance by delivering extended depth of field while using standard lens technologies. Our 8-megapixel sensor is also based on the 1.4-micron OmniBSI architecture. Being the world’s first 1/3-inch 8-megapixel product to leverage the BSI technology, we have many of the same pixel advantages of our 5-megapixel solution, obviously with higher resolution. Both products will be qualified for mass production in the first half of 2009."
Thank you. I missed this statement. I hope that BSI products qual would be on schedule. But it's still strange that there is no mention of BSI design wins or sampling.
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