On Monday, Adeia (NASDAQ:ADEA) discussed first-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.

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The full earnings call is available at https://events.q4inc.com/attendee/499188663

Summary

Adeia reported strong financial performance for Q1 2026 with revenue of $105 million and an adjusted EBITDA margin of 60%, driven by new license agreements with AMD and Microsoft.

The company made significant strides in its semiconductor business, highlighted by a multi-year agreement with AMD for access to its semiconductor portfolio, including hybrid bonding technology.

Strategic initiatives include five tuck-in acquisitions aimed at enhancing its portfolio, and the company repurchased shares and paid dividends as part of its balanced capital allocation strategy.

Future guidance reaffirms revenue expectations of $395 to $435 million for 2026, with a focus on expanding recurring non-pay TV revenue streams and moderating portfolio growth.

CEO Paul Davis announced his intention to step down later in the year, with a search for a successor underway, highlighting a steady leadership transition amidst strong operational momentum.

Full Transcript

OPERATOR

Good day everyone. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Adeia's first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. During today's presentation, all parties will be in a listen only mode. Following the presentation, the call will be open for questions. I would now like to turn the call over to call over to Chris Chaney, Vice President in Investor Relations for Adeia. Chris, please go ahead.

Chris Chaney (Vice President in Investor Relations)

Good afternoon everyone. Thank you for joining us as we share with you details of our quarterly financial results. With me on the call today are Paul Davis, our President and CEO, and Keith Jones, our CFO. Paul will share with you some general observations regarding the quarter and then Keith will give further details on our financial results and guidance. We will then conclude with a question and answer period. In addition to today's earnings release, there is an earnings presentation which you can access along with the webcast in the Investor Relations portion of our website. Before turning the call over to Paul, I would like to provide a few reminders. First, today's discussion contains forward looking statements that are predictions, projections or other statements about future events which are based on management's current expectations and beliefs and therefore subject to risks, uncertainties and changes in circumstances. For more information on the risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual result to differ materially from what we discussed today, please refer to the Risk Factors section in our SEC filings, including our Annual report on Form 10-K and our quarterly report on Form 10-Q. Please note that the Company does not intend to update or alter these forward looking statements to reflect events or circumstances arising after this call. To enhance investors understanding of our ongoing economic performance, we will discuss non Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) information during this call. We use non Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) financial measures internally to evaluate and manage our operations. We have therefore chosen to provide this information to enable you to perform comparisons of our operating results as we do internally. We have provided reconciliations of these non Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) measures to the most directly comparable Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) measures in the Earnings release, the earnings presentation and on the Investor Relations section of our website. A recording of this conference call will be made available on the Investor Relations page [email protected] Now I'd like to turn the call over to our CEO Paul Davis.

Paul Davis (President and CEO)

Thank you Chris and thank you everyone for joining us today. I'm pleased to be here to share our results for the first quarter of 2026. After last year's strong finish, including our license agreement with Disney, we entered 2026 with significant momentum which continued into the first quarter. We signed foundational agreements with both AMD and Microsoft along with additional deal activity across multIPle verticals. Our strong execution is demonstrated in our first quarter results. We delivered revenue of $105 million with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 60% and $58 million in operating cash flow. We also continue to execute on all four pillars of our balanced capital allocation strategy, paying down our debt, which is now less than $400 million, returning capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases and investing in our portfolios through five strategic tuck in acquisitions. The eight license agreements we closed during the first quarter were highlighted by AMD and Microsoft, which were among our three new customers. We closed five renewals with customers across a diverse set of verticals including pay TV, consumer Electronics, Semiconductors and Automotive. I'm very pleased that in early March we resolved our dispute and signed a seminal multi year license agreement with AMD for access to our semiconductor portfolio which includes our hybrid bonding technology. The agreement was reached within four months of filing litigation, underscoring the strength of our semiconductor portfolio and the effectiveness of our approach. It also represents an important milestone for our semiconductor business and provides further momentum as we pursue additional semiconductor opportunities in both logic and memory that will be driven by continued adoption of hybrid bonding. The significance of our agreement with AMD cannot be overstated. AMD is a highly respected innovator and a leader in advanced semiconductor design. Their early adoption of chIPlet architecture and hybrid bonding highlights the relevance of our technology in next generation computing. While AMD was an early adopter, hybrid bonding is now becoming more broadly adopted across the semiconductor industry. We are seeing increased adoption in both logic and memory supported by significant investment in next generation architectures and increasing use in advanced semiconductors for high volume consumer electronic devices. This adoption is being driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high performance computing which are fundamentally increasing power density and interconnect demands. As traditional Moore's Law scaling reaches its limits, our hybrid bonding and thermal management technologies have become essential to enabling continued performance gains. We believe our portfolio is well positioned to deliver value across both logic and memory markets as the industry pushes beyond the limits of traditional scaling. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven growth in semiconductors is remarkable with the total semiconductor market anticIPated to exceed $1 trillion annually by the end of 2026. In addition to AMD, we also added Microsoft as a new customer in the first quarter with a multi year license agreement for access to our media portfolio. Our media portfolio has broad applicability across Microsoft's products and services including its consumer electronics and social media businesses such as Xbox and LinkedIn. In recent weeks, we also expanded our presence in e-commerce with a new license agreement with L'Oreal adding another global brand to our expanding customer base in e-commerce. While e-commerce remains a relatively small portion of our revenue to date, our growing momentum and robust pIPeline in this market gives us confidence that it could be much more significant in the future. We continue to make steady progress towards reaching our long term goal of $500 million in annual licensing revenue. Our strong start to 2026 reinforces our confidence in that trajectory. A key driver of this progress is our ability to add new high value customers such as AMD and Microsoft agreements that provide sustainable recurring revenue streams. These new deals are contributing to the continued diversification of our business. In the first quarter, non pay TV recurring revenue grew 28% year over year reflecting further expansion into growth markets. Our most significant growth market is semiconductors. The rapid evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high performance computing is driving fundamental changes in chIP design, including the broad adoption of chIPlet architectures with hybrid bonding. Our agreement with AMD is an important validation of our position in this space. Other leading logic and memory companies are following similar paths and we believe hybrid bonding will play an increasingly central role across both logic and memory applications for years to come. In addition, demand for high performance memory continues to grow rapidly, particularly in NAND (Not AND) and high bandwidth memory. We are already seeing contributions from earlier agreements with NAND (Not AND) manufacturers and we expect further adoption as production volumes scale. We are also beginning to see early indication that these technologies are expanding beyond data centers into consumer devices, which represents an additional long term high volume opportunity. Importantly, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and high performance computing workloads continue to scale, thermal management becomes a critical constraint. Our rapid cool technology is designed to address these challenges and we continue to make meaningful progress through further development. We have improved its cooling capability to approximately 5 watts per square millimeter, up from 3 watts less than a year ago, and interest from potential partners continues to grow. Our IP portfolio remains the foundation of our business. Since the beginning of 2023 we have grown our portfolio from approximately $10,000 to over 13,750 patent assets. While we have delivered strong double digit growth in recent years, we expect portfolio growth to moderate over time. We believe our portfolio today is well positioned to support multIPle licensing cycles and in both our core and growth markets, and our innovation engine is primed to continue to refresh these licensing cycles well into the future. We continue to invest strategically in both organic R&D and targeted tuck in acquisitions to ensure we maintain and enhance the value of our portfolio over time. In the first quarter we increased our M&A activity, closing five tuck in IP portfolio acquisitions across a wide spectrum of technologies focused on growth areas. We are very proud of these accomplishments. We continue to focus on expanding our customer base which includes our history of developing long term relationshIPs. This has been a primary objective as we invest heavily in our portfolio development to support the ever evolving technology solutions that help drive our customers products and services. Despite our tremendous track record of renewals, we occasionally find ourselves in customer disputes on the value of our portfolios. To that end, we are disappointed we could not reach acceptable terms for a renewal with Dish Network after their agreement expired at the end of March. Dish and their predecessor companies have been customers for decades and throughout many renewals over the years they have enjoyed the use of our IP. Since the last renewal, we have continued to innovate, add to our portfolio and strengthen our relevance within the pay TV industry. In the past few years we've successfully signed agreements with Hulu Plus, Live tv, Optimum, formerly Altice, Verizon and Frontier. Even through litigation, we keep the channels of communication open for the purpose of reaching terms on a license agreement, which is our ultimate goal. Leveraging our success with recent similar situations with Optimum, Disney and amd, each of which was resolved efficiently and relatively quickly, we are confident we will reach successful outcomes with Dish and DirecTV. Our technologists remain at the forefront in their fields and are often panelists or speakers at industry conferences. We are recognized as market leaders and innovators and are actively engaged in the ecosystems in which we operate. I'm proud we were named one of the top 100 global innovators by LexisNexis Intellectual Property Solutions. We earned this recognition based on the quality and strength of our portfolios and the measurable improvements we've made in our innovation impact over the past two years. Unlike rankings based solely on patent volume, this award highlights companies driving meaningful advances in technology and that is exactly what our teams do every day. We had a strong first quarter and we have built meaningful momentum to start 2026. I'm particularly pleased with the addition of AMD and Microsoft as new customers, both multi year agreements that expand our presence in key growth markets and strengthen our recurring revenue. Basically, our strong financial performance supports continued investment in our portfolio and ongoing balance sheet improvement. And with a growing and diversified pIPeline, we believe we have multIPle paths to achieve our objectives for the year. Before I turn the call over to Keith, I would like to address the other news we announced today. As noted in the press release, after much consideration and consultation with my family, I have informed the board of my intent to step down as CEO later this year to focus on my health and other personal pursuits. As I reflect on my last four years leading Adeia, including through its separation from Xperi, I could not be more proud of what the company has accomplished. Our exceptional leadershIP team has transitioned the company from being primarily reliant on the pay TV market to one with robust and diversified revenue streams supported by our evolving and growing IP portfolios and technology leadershIP. Our balance sheet is strong, having cut our debt nearly in half since separation and we are positioned well for continued growth. I have committed to the Board that I will continue in my current role until a successor has been identified and appointed and through any necessary transition period. During this period it will be business as usual as I remain focused on driving the team toward achieving our goals for 2026 and setting us up for continued long term success. Our goal is to find the next leader for ADIA by the fourth quarter. The Board has engaged a nationally recognized search firm and I am confident we will find a leader that will continue the successes we have built and drive the next phase of growth for the company. I want to thank my family, the executive leadershIP team and the Board for helping me through this difficult decision. I also want to thank the dedicated ADIA employees that are at the heart of all of our success. I will now turn the call over to my friend and our CFO Keith to cover our financial results.

Keith Jones (Chief Financial Officer)

Thank you Paul. I'm pleased to be speaking with you today to share details of our first quarter 2026 financial results. During the first quarter we delivered strong financial results within our expectations. Revenue of $104.8 million was driven by the execution of eight deals across a diverse mix of customers including semiconductors, consumer electronics, pay TV and OTT. During the quarter we signed three new license agreements highlighted by AMD and Microsoft. Our recurring revenue during Q1 was $66.3 million as compared to $94.5 million in the prior quarter. The decrease in our recurring revenue was due to both subscriber declines and and the timing of renewals with certain pay TV customers. Additionally, we are impacted by the timing of revenue as a result of the structure of our license agreements with both SanDisk and Kioxia, which contributed no revenue in Q1 but will contribute meaningful revenue in the following quarters. We expect our quarterly recurring revenue to grow over the course of the year, reaching approximately $90 million at the end of the year. Now I would like to discuss our operating expenses for which I'll be referring to non Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) numbers only. During the first quarter operating expenses were $42.9 million, a decrease of $6.3 million, or 13% from the prior quarter. The decrease was primarily due to lower variable compensation as a result of exceeding certain performance targets. In last year's fourth quarter, research and development expenses decreased $1.2 million, or 7% from the prior quarter. The decrease is primarily due to lower variable compensation and outside service costs, which was partially offset by seasonal personnel costs. Selling general administrative expenses decreased $4.6 million, or 18% from the prior quarter, primarily due to lower variable compensation costs and lower spending on outside services, which was also partially offset by an increase in seasonal personal costs. Litigation expense was $6 million, a decrease of $513,000 or 8% compared to the prior quarter, primarily due to lower spending on Disney due to the resolution of the litigation in the prior quarter, partially offset by new litigation matters. Interest expense during the first quarter was $8.5 million, a decrease of $894,000, primarily attributable to our continued debt payments and due to lower variable interest rates during the period. Our current effective interest rate, which includes amortization of debt issuance costs, was 7.3%. Other income was $1.7 million. It was primarily related to interest earned on our cash and investment portfolio and due to interest income recognized on revenue agreements with long term billing structures under ASC606. Our adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was $62.3 million, reflecting an adjusted EBITDA margin of 60%. Appreciation expense for the first quarter was $492,000. Our non Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) income tax rate was 21% for the quarter. Our income tax expense consists primarily of federal and state domestic taxes as well as Korean withholding taxes. Now for a few details on the balance sheet. We ended the first quarter with $115.8 million in cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities and we generated $58.5 million in cash from operations. As demonstrated by our results, the first quarter has historically been a very strong cash generation period for us. This strong financial performance allowed us to execute on all four pillars of our balanced capital allocation approach. This includes paying down our debt, repurchasing shares, paying our dividend and making five tuck in portfolio acquisitions. We made $28.1 million in princIPal payments on our debt in the first quarter and end the quarter with a term loan balance of $398.6 million. I am also happy to announce that based on our strong financial performance, Standard and Poor's has upgraded their credit rating on us to to double B from BB minus in the first quarter, we repurchased approximately 446,000 shares of our common stock for $10 million, bringing the remaining amount available for future repurchases to $150 million. Under our current stock repurchase program, we paid a cash dividend of $0.05 per share of common stock. Our board also approved a payment of another 5 cents per share dividend to be paid on June 15th to shareholders of record as of May 26th. Now I'll go over our guidance for the full year 2026. We are reiterating our prior guidance. Our 2026 revenue guidance range is 395 to $435 million. As we mentioned in our previous call, our sales pIPeline was and continues to be very strong. Overall, we continue to see the first half of the year and the second half of the year being relatively equal in terms of revenue contribution, with the second quarter being modestly lower than the first quarter. Operating expenses are expected to be in the range of 184 to 192 million dollars. We expect interest expense to be in the range of 34 to 36 million dollars. We expect other income to be in the range of 5.5 to $6.5 million. We expect a resulting adjusted EBITDA margin of approximately 55%. We expect a non Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) tax rate to be 21% for the full year. We also expect capital expenditures to be approximately $2 million for the full year. As I conclude my remarks, I want to say this is obviously a challenging day full of emotions for me and the company. On a personal level, Paul is not only an incredible leader and boss, but also a dear friend that I cherish. Knowing Paul, this decision was very difficult for him and his family. Paul should take great pride in having helped to cultivate a legacy that will further propel ADIA to a great and promising future. As we look across the semiconductor and media landscapes, we continue to see broad adoption of our foundational technologies. We find ourselves at the right place at the right time. Speaking on behalf of all our employees, we take pride in this success. It is driven by the tireless and dedicated efforts of our entire team. The culture we have created will continue to thrive. Our future is bright and I cannot be more excited about the opportunities that lay ahead of us in the coming years. With that, it brings an end to our prepared remarks. I'd like to turn the call over to the operator to begin our question and answer session. Operator

OPERATOR

at this time, I would like to remind everyone in Order to ask a question, press star, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We request to limit yourselves to one question and one follow up. We will pause for just a moment to compile the Q and A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Kevin Cassidy with Rosenblatt Securities. Your line is open. Thank you and congratulations on the great results. And congratulations Paul, on making this decision, but hope you is a gradual departure, but thank you for leading the company. My question is around the AMD license and how much was it on retroactive royalty? These, you know, I guess things that we wouldn't see reoccurring in future years. Can you give like a percentage of what the upside was?

Kevin Cassidy (Equity Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities)

So hey Kevin, in terms of the

Paul Davis (President and CEO)

Okay, thanks. And maybe just on the top, top 10 customers. Yeah, just to be clear, they won't be a 10% customer going forward. And hey Kevin, thanks for the kind remarks and thank you for that. Appreciate it.

Kevin Cassidy (Equity Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities)

Sure. Yeah. The other question I had was around the tuck in technology acquisitions. Were there any scientists or employees that are included with that or were they only patents?

Keith Jones (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah. Hey Kevin, we focus right now primarily on patent portfolios that we think can be really helpful to really our growth areas. And that's what these ones are. We do evaluate and look at ones that are broader than that. But for the most part what we have been acquiring have been, you know, primarily patent acquisitions. In this case, very consistent with what we've done over the last couple of years. You know, we did five relatively small tuck in acquisitions individually, but you know, they start to add up and they're in growth areas. So for instance, like E commerce and automotive was a focus area this past quarter. But we look in all of our growth areas including you know, semiconductors, you know, continue in OTT like we've done before with a number of acquisitions over the last couple years. So, yeah, that's, that's where we've, where we focus on. But we do, we do explore other types of acquisitions as well.

Kevin Cassidy (Equity Analyst at Rosenblatt Securities)

Okay, great. I'll get back in the queue.

Keith Jones (Chief Financial Officer)

Thanks, Kim.

OPERATOR

Before going to the next question again, if you would like to ask a question, press Star. Then the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from the line of Hamid Carson with BWS Financial. Your line is open. Hey, thanks for taking the question. So first off, could you just talk about the IP funnel that you have on the licensing end that balances out Q2 and Q4 through the Q4 and how you're looking at that given these big announcements you've had in Q1 so far.

Hamid Carson (Equity Analyst at BWS Financial)

Yeah, thanks, Hamid. You know, really, really appreciate the question. You know, when we look at our pipeline, as Keith mentioned, you know, it's, it's quite robust and you know, we have remained multiple paths to get to our, you know, guidance range that we noted. It really comes from, you know, a number of areas including core markets, including pay tv, where we still have opportunities there, and then E commerce opportunities as well as consumer electronics, social media

Paul Davis (President and CEO)

and OTT that remain opportunities for us and then semiconductors, of course. So it's really across our different verticals and it will be a mix of both renewals and new deals. But new deals are still important for us to be able to hit our goals for the year. And we're entirely focused on on that as we have been last year as well. Those new deals are so important because they really continue to diversify our revenue and add new streams that we're able to offset some of the known declines we have. If you look at our growth in non pay TV recurring revenue, it continues to be very robust. So 28% year over year this quarter, which continues a trend over the last four or five quarters that we've had. And so we're really proud of that.

Hamid Carson (Equity Analyst at BWS Financial)

Okay, thank you.

Paul Davis (President and CEO)

Thanks, Hamid.

Matthew Galenko (Equity Analyst at Maxim Group)

Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Galenko with Maxim Group. Your line is open. Hey, thanks for taking my questions. I guess firstly you touched on maybe moderating the rate of growth of the portfolio. Although I think five tuck in acquisitions would be on the high end of what you've done to date. So can you maybe help us balance whether it's a shift in strategy to be more focused on external portfolios at this point or just kind of how things fell?

Keith Jones (Chief Financial Officer)

Yeah, I would say it continues to be a mix. Right. I think that's really important to Us, but one that's heavily weighted towards internal innovation. I think that's what we see the most value from. That's what our customers focus on as well. So we've had a 8515 split for 85 internal and 15 external for quite some time now. It's a metric that we like to maintain. We're not religious towards, can vary from time to time. But on the strategic acquisition side, we truly look for things that can, you know, round out our portfolio. And so it can swing one way or the other where we do have, you know, more activity in a given quarter and it can lead to, you know, that number being a little higher at any, any given time, but over a longer period of time. I think that 8515 split is something that we like to maintain. And we're still doing a ton of internal innovation and have been since, since separation. We've really ramped that and you're seeing that both on the semiconductor and the media side of our business.

Matthew Galenko (Equity Analyst at Maxim Group)

Thank you. And my follow up would be on capital structure given, you know, the continued reduction in debt balance. And I think you mentioned an upgrade to your credit rating. Does that change anything as, as far as your, you know, plans or thoughts on cash levels you want to keep on hand or kind of your leverage ratios or anything, you know, does anything change?

Matt

Hey, Matt, how you doing? Thanks for the question.

Keith Jones (Chief Financial Officer)

So, you know, we find ourselves at a, at a great spot and I just couldn't be more proud of us as a company and kind of how we've operated. What we've talked about before in the past is that there's a certain amount of debt that we, as a company that we're comfortable carrying. And we had talked about historically that being between 3 to $400 million just through our hard work and discipline efforts, we find ourselves in that threshold right now. Another nice little tailwind and benefit that we get from all that too is we had a nice upgrade from standard to force to that double B rating, which is going to be very advantageous to us. But with that being said, the timing in the market for us to refinance right now is, is not optimum. What we've seen really since the war is kind of broken out is that interest rates have been a little bit more on the rise and we would like to see things settle out before we get into the market and to refinance our, our debt. With that being said, our timing is that we'll be active and my ultimate goal or our ultimate goal is kind of have a new debt put in place at least 12 months before the debt matures and that debt matures in in June 2028. But with that being said, we're actively looking and we are thinking about fixed structures that we can put in place that's going to allow us to get more cash flow back into the business to do more tuck in acquisitions and return more capital to shareholders. So in in terms of that, we definitely have a very defined plan and it really comes on the heels of tremendous execution of deleveraging our balance sheet. So, you know, once again, thanks for that, that question and we're we're right where we want to be.

OPERATOR

I'll now turn the call back over to Paul Davis for closing remarks.

Paul Davis (President and CEO)

Thank you, operator. Once again, I would like to thank our employees for their hard work and dedication and also to our shareholders, partners and customers for their ongoing support. And thanks to everyone for being with us today.

Disclaimer: This transcript is provided for informational purposes only. While we strive for accuracy, there may be errors or omissions in this automated transcription. For official company statements and financial information, please refer to the company's SEC filings and official press releases. Corporate participants' and analysts' statements reflect their views as of the date of this call and are subject to change without notice.