Omnivision Quarterly Earnings Call

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.