Analog Devices Inc (NASDAQ:ADI) Q4 2017 Earnings Conference Call - Final Transcript

Good morning and welcome to the Analog Devices' Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2017 Earnings Conference Call, which is being audio webcast via telephone and over the Web.

I'd like to now introduce your host for today's call, Mr. Ali Husain, Treasurer and Head of IR. Sir, the floor is yours.

Okay, good morning everybody. Thank you, Jennifer. Good morning everybody. Thanks for joining our conference call. You can find our press release and relating financial schedules at their usual place, at investor.analog.com. With me on the call today are ADI's CEO, Vincent Roche; ADI's CFO, Prashanth Mahendra-Rajah; and Mike Lucarelli from IR.

(Forward-Looking Cautionary Statements)

And lastly, please note that ADI's first quarter of fiscal '18 includes an additional week, so fiscal 1Q '18 will be a 14-week quarter. And as expected, include one normal week of revenue expense.

Okay, so with that, I'll turn it over to ADI's CEO, Vincent Roche. With the exception of fourth quarter revenue, Vince's comments about our financial results are on a non-GAAP basis and exclude special items outlined in today's release and in our Web schedules. Okay Vince, it's all yours.

Thank you, Ali and very good morning everyone. I'd like to firstly welcome Prashant to ADI. This is, as you know, Prashant's first quarter as our CFO and I am really delighted to have him join ADI.

Turning to the quarter. The fourth quarter of fiscal 2017 was another very successful quarter for ADI. And I am pleased to share our results with you this morning. Revenue in the fourth quarter totaled $1.54 billion and was above the midpoint of guidance as the communications and consumer markets led our sequential growth, while the industrial and automotive markets were stable through the prior quarter.

Our strong overall revenue performance coupled with disciplined operational execution expanded growth and operating margins and drove diluted earnings per share to $1.45, which was above the high end of our guidance. Now to provide you with a historical perspective, over the last five years, ADI has doubled its revenue base to $5.2 billion, expanded operating margins by over 900 basis points to approximately 40% and nearly tripled free cash flow generation on a combined Company basis to $1.9 billion or 34% of sales, which is within the top 5% of all S&P 500 companies.

From a strategic perspective, 2017 was a Watershed year as we completed the acquisition of LTC, further deepening and widening our competitive moat, expanding our capabilities and high value signal processing and power management applications, and giving ADI the ability to more completely serve the ever expanding needs of our more than 100,000 customers.

ADI is now able to solve customer problems from sensor to cloud, from DC to 100 gigahertz and from nanowatts to kilowatts with a leading market position in all product segments. Fiscal 2017 was also marked by strong execution across our portfolio of products and customers. For example, in the industrial markets, which represented 46% of revenue in fiscal '17,