Shares of smartphone audio processing technology vendor Audience (ADNC) were halted just after market close, right before the company reported Q4 revenue and earnings per share that topped analysts’ expectations, and forecast this quarter’s results significantly higher as well.
Revenue in the three months ended in December rose to $38.7 million, yielding EPS of 14 cents.
Analysts had been modeling $37 million and 20 cents.
For the current quarter, the company sees revenue in a range of $43 million to $46 million, and EPS of 15 cents to 19%. That is well above the consensus for $32 million and 1 penny per share.
CEO Peter Santos emphasized the company’s involvement during the quarter with the development of several devices, including Google‘s (GOOG) Motorola-brand “Razr I,” its “Nexus 10″ tablet, and Huawei‘s forthcoming “Ascend D2.”
Audience management will host a conference call�with analysts at 4:30 pm, Eastern time, and you can catch the webcast of it here.
As I wrote earlier this month, Audience has been on the comeback trail since last fall, when its shares tumbled after it disclosed Apple (AAPL) was dropping the company’s audio-processing technology from the iPhone, after having used it in the iPhone 4 and 4S.
Shares are expected to resume trading at 4:30 pm, Eastern time.
Update: The stock has resumed trading and is up $3, or 25%, at $15.22.
Update 2: Audience’s Santos was kind enough to chat with me by phone following the company’s conference call to discuss the mobile field and the company’s priorities. On the call, the company talked about how it is expanding beyond the phone and tablet market to new�PCs from�Dell�(DELL) that will be coming out soon.
Will there gadget market continue to have the same ceaseless parade of new gizmos? I asked, choosing to start with a rather obvious question.
“We are working with a pretty broad-base of customers of quite significant platforms, and you will see a steady stream of things from us. I think you will see for at least the next couple of years and beyond that pretty regular innovation in the form of new types of devices and capabilities. I believe that there is significantly more potential in terms of the kinds of experiences and capabilities taht tech can provide to people on devices they use, and the investment to bring those to market is going to be made.”
Is the smartphone market concerned about the steadily slowing rates of unit shipment growth?
“People are certainly concerned about it (shipment growth). Broadly, you are going to see slowing growth in smartphones, as we are approaching a point where in developed markets smartphone has swallowed the phone market whole; that does not conflict with the pattern of innovation that remains ahead of us in smartphone market. From our perch as a tech provider, while I think you will see tempering rates of growth in smartphone, because you will see high rate of innovation, you will see opportunities for us and OEMs who are winning the innovation battle to have really significant rates of growth.”
On the dominance of Apple and Samsung:
“People tend to think that Apple and Samsung have won, and it’s game over; I don’t believe that’s the case. There is so much pressure to innovate that it’s going to be very hard for market conditions to remain static. I’m not predicting bad things for those two companies, but the view market share will remain static is not well-informed. You could see at the OS level that there will be a few people who will win, but there is room at the OEM level and the tech provider level for high growth rates.”
We keep hearing about the rise of mid-priced and low-priced smartphones as being a crucial issue, especially in the emerging markets. Are you hearing a lot of talk about that, a lot of concern, from customers of yours?
“People are definitely preoccupied with questions of the mid-market. It is a topic that is very hotly discussed among OEMs today, and carriers around the world are paying attention. As an example, if you think about people using voice instead of touch to be able to interact with devices, that’s something that could move quite far down into the mid-market and below. Because there are cost pressures in those segments, as you move down the portfolio, there tends to be a process of removing functions to make the device cheaper. But if you start to see expectations by users, or demands by carriers, to provide interactions with voice, what you could start to see is advanced voice becomes a feature that is not taken out as you waterfall down the market segments.”
How should we think about Audience’s profile?
“The way you should think about Audience is a voice and audio and sound processing company. I personally believe that user interface is the most exciting place to be in technology today. Audience has created a really unique position in the market and value proposition around sound. That’s where all of our focus is today. Our view is that voice and audio and sound is going to have a very, very broad role in human interface on mobile devices. Anything you can think of in terms of sound coming into your device or coming out that would allow for interaction is somewhere in our road map and our portfolio. Put another way, if you think of the ability that humans have to comprehend and act on sound, or create sound, that’s where we see the bar is for sound capability. So, there’s a lot of headroom.”
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