Seeking Alpha published Omnivision quarterly earnings call transcript. Some interesting quotes from Q&A session:
Raj Gill – Needham & Company:
...could you describe a little bit about your market share position in the camera phone market? Did you feel that you are gaining share against your competitors? Where do you see upside? And maybe describe a little bit about your technology – “technology leadership” in BSI-1 and BSI-2 relative to your competitors. How do you characterize that?
Ray Cisneros, VP, Worldwide Sales:
...our BSI position backing into some high value projects, high value customers, represents a significant market share gain. Now, obviously that’s just an opinion. We will have to wait till the market analysts quenched our numbers when the calendar year closes out. But that’s our opinion going forward. In regards to technology of BSI, obviously to ship the quantities that we are shipping today, it’s a long learning curve. We regard that as extremely a big advantage to OmniVision, and our competitors will probably face that step when they get to it. And it’s not easy to ship the volumes we have.
Betsy Van Hees – Wedbush:
You guys talked about the competition in BSI, and I think the commentary was that you guys remain ahead of the competition. Could you please give us a little bit more color behind that and what's differentiating you and why are you so far ahead of the competition?
Bruce Weyer, VP Marketing:
We have been developing the backside illumination technology with our strategic partner TSMC for many years. This has been a five-year effort for us. And there has been a tremendous amount of intellectual property developed between the two companies in that process. And that’s very hard to reproduce and is very hard to reproduce in a short time period. So if you look at our success and the growth we’ve seen, it’s really been fueled by BSI. So that should give you an indication that a great portion of that learning has already taken place for us. So we think that as a big barrier for the competition.
Yair Reiner – Oppenheimer & Company:
...traditionally, in the CMOS unserved market, like-for-like prices tend to drop on the order of 20%, 25% a year. ...Should we expect BSI chips to kind of follow those same patterns over the next year or two?
Ray Cisneros
...going forward, everything we could possibly do, we try to prevent similar type of price erosion that we’ve seen in our standard FSI-type technology products. So I’d like to say we’ll definitely try to drive the BSI to a better proportion to the marketplace and to our shareholders.
Bruce Weyer's comment is very strange. 5-year effort with TSMC. What if TSMC turns off the tap!?
ReplyDeleteBasically it is a technology that's extremely closely tied to TSMC. OVT on their own will not stand a chance to keep BSI as a differentiator.
There are certainly contracts and agreements that make it hard to "turn off the tap." And even if they could, why would TSMC chose to? If OVT is successful, TSMC benefits, too.
ReplyDeleteGuess what he is talking about ?
ReplyDeleteYou will see the answer soon.
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Ray Cisneros: "
Well, you can look around in the space – in the consumer space. You go to any good electronic store, you can pick up a variety of different, very small form factor, portable devices that provide all kinds of entertainment for the consumer. I will leave it at that without getting too specific. As you march through the fiscal year with us, you will obviously come across the end products on the store shelves. But it’s any kind of media that a consumer would like to have at his fingertips, be it video, music, images of digital still camera, that sort of thing. It’s a very broad category that we’d like to look at the portable media players as. "