RF Micro Devices, Inc. at Credit Suisse Annual Technology Conference - Final.

Original Source: FD (FAIR DISCLOSURE) WIRE

BOB BRUGGEWORTH, PRESIDENT & CEO, RF MICRO DEVICES: -- questions later on when we get to the question-and-answer, but I did want to talk about that. So again, when we look at our business we look at three parts, our cellular business, which is our PA front-end modules along with our transceivers; wireless connectivity business units, which is a Wireless LAN PAs or WiMAX PAs for mobile applications; GPS and Bluetooth and infrastructure segment, which is primarily -- our focus today is on our high-power amplifiers for gallium nitride.

You know, it was about a year ago we were here and there was a lot of questions in the Q&A and comments about "Is RFMD going to be able to continue to grow?" A lot of our competitors were talking about POLARIS is late, POLARIS doesn't work, EDGE isn't going to happen. We are taking RFMD's business and I think you can see in the trailing four quarters, so four quarters September a year ago to September this year, we have grown about 39%.

A lot of that revenue growth, as you can see from here, was driven by POLARIS. It has grown almost $0.25 billion of our revenue. So again there was a lot of doubt, a lot of noise, a lot of people out there saying, "Look over here, look over there." What we told you guys is we have got the wins. We have got the product. It works. I think from these kind of numbers you can see we delivered on what we said.

You can see our gross profit grew faster than our revenues. Our operating expenses grew much slower than our revenues, at about 5%. We are still making investments. I have talked about the three parts of our business. Most of this revenue is again in our cellular business and we are still making investments off of those operating expenses in our growth businesses that are just beginning to grow.

You can see what has happened then from an operating income. We went from a loss of about $1 million to operating income of about $82 million. You can see our earnings per share has grown about $0.38. So we have had a pretty good year and we expect to continue to be able to drive our top line and our bottom line.

So let's talk about the market. How is the wireless marketplace? Well, we consider it to be extremely strong and growing. I know a lot of times when we were out and we just did our analyst day a couple of weeks ago, we got questions about inventory in the channel. I can tell you from our perspective -- and again I think you know our customer base quite well and we work with the leaders in that large parts of their business and the way we do our business with them -- with our components, there are no concerns of our products that are being inventory in the channel.

We have seen extremely strong demand and call-offs us that our customers through last time we said October -- I am now updating through November -- pretty much on plan as we expected for the quarter. We have seen strong demand. We don't know of any signs out in the marketplace of any inventory buildup. We think the industry is extremely healthy at this time. So from a marketplace, things look pretty good.

Now, as far as what we are focusing on, we are focusing on developing technologies and products that are game-changing events so that we can take significant share. Again, if you look at what I showed you, we have grown about 39% over the last four quarters. If you look at that year over the year before, you see we grew in the 25% range. That is where we are focused on, so when we talk about our R&D efforts and where we are trying to drive our business, I think you see what we are able to do.

Now, we also expect to be able to continue to grow in our RF and analog components. We still see this as an extremely strong growth opportunity for the products that we bring to this market. Now, we believe that that growth will come through diversification in further penetration in our customers, penetrating multiple customers and in multiple markets. So we are going to get it through product diversification, customer diversification, and market diversification. Again, as I touched on earlier, a lot of that growth we expect to come from our wireless connectivity business unit and our infrastructure …