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[ "ey're going to be more expensive due to higher component costs. But at the same time, it looks like you guys have proven that there is a market for low- cost geographies with phones like iPhone SE. So how do you see these two different segments within the smartphone market evolving over the next one to three years? And then I had a follow-up for Luca.\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nAgain, I want to stay away from commenting about future products. But generally, I think it's important when you think about 5G is to look around the world at the different deployment schedules. And some of those look very different perhaps than what you might be seeing here. And so, that's very important. In terms of the price, I wouldn't want to comment on the price of handsets that aren't announced.\nKrish Sankar -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGot it. No worries, Tim. And then I have a follow-up to Luca. Opex as a percentage of sales for March looks like about 15% higher than in your prior quarters. Kind of curious how much of that is part of it is driven by some of your Intel modem asset purchases or TV+ in the opex or how do we think about it on a go-forward basis?\nLuca Maestri -- Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer\nYeah, I think we felt good about our opex results because they were at the low end of our guidance range, but clearly, we want to make all the necessary investments in the business and from -- in terms of the new services, not only for TV+, but all the new services that we launched during 2019, this is a period where we're making the necessary investments in advertising and marketing and that level of investment is reflected in our opex results. And also as you correctly stated, we completed the acquisition of the Intel baseband business during the December quarter. And so, we had -- we reflected the run rate of the expenses related to that business partially during the quarter after the completion of the transaction. And we -- that is a very important core technology for the Company. So we will continue to make all the necessary investments also there. There is a third category of expenses that affected the December quarter and is the fact that our revenue was very strong. And we have certain variable expenses, for example, credit card fees that are associated with the higher volume and of course, impacted our opex results.\n", "Tejas Gala -- Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations\nThanks, Krish. Can we have the next question please?\nOperator\nThat will be from Mike Olson with Piper Sandler.\nMike Olson -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nAfternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. So slightly different take on an earlier question on Wearables and that is -- what impact do you think Wearables is having on driving people into the Apple ecosystem? You mentioned 75% of watch buyers are new to the Apple Watch, but many of them new to Apple overall. I'm sure a lot of existing iPhone, iPads or Mac users are going to be Wearables customers, but do you think Wearables bring people into the ecosystem to buy other devices in a material way?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI think that -- Michael, it's Tim. With each Apple product that a customer buys, I think they get tighter into the ecosystem, because they like -- that's the reason that they're buying into it is they like the experience -- the customer experience. And so, from that point of view, I think each of our products can drive another product. I would think in that case, it's more likely that the iPhone comes first. But there is no doubt in my mind that there is some people that came into the ecosystem for the Watch.\nMike Olson -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nOkay. And then I think you recently mentioned that augmented reality will pervade our entire lives. And I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts about how you think it starts to impact our lives more significantly? For example, will the inflection point in AR come from gaming or industrial usage or some other category. In other words, where will the average person, kind of, first feel the impact " ]

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[ "the macro environment is still a risk, and there's also regulatory risk.\nOver the past few months, there has been a further tightening of the regulatory regime, especially in relation to online activities. The operating environment for financial institutions and their partners has become more challenging. While we do anticipate difficult moments ahead, opportunities are also abound. The need to invest in IT, proper IT has never been greater, be it to replace an outdated system or to adopt the first ever cloud-based solution. Chinese regulators have put their weight behind technology and technology companies. They have strong policy initiatives for digital infrastructure.\nAs the market becomes more competitive, all players have to explore new ways to do business, capture new revenue opportunities, increase efficiency, and improve customer experience. This is exactly what OneConnect aims at achieving. This is why we are confident that revenue growth rate in 2021 will be no less than the past year. With continuous cost discipline, our net loss will further narrow. We expect the improvement in the net loss ratio this year to be in the double-digit percentage.\nLet me talk more about what we have been doing to drive the business further. OneConnect's mission has always been to be the top -- the one-stop shop for financial institutions. We started at the application level. The different applications like car components in the auto analogy we put in the slide, were then connected and turned into a total package, like car manufacturing. This represents our end-to-end approach, which enhances our value propositions to customers.\nThe rollout of the cloud services platform in 2020 completed the picture, taking us from SaaS applications for middle office services into core systems and finally penetrating down to the cloud. The depth and breadth of our solutions are unparalleled, giving us a unique edge in the TaaS market.\nWe are able to couple the full cycle needs of financial institutions, starting from sales and marketing to product development, risk management, operation management and infrastructure. This diversification allow us to meet the needs of financial institutions across different macro scenarios, ensuring also the resilience of our performance through cycles.\n", "Products and customers are like the twin engines that power our business. At the product level, we have reinforced lifecycle management and monitoring. This is part of the optimization exercise. Resource allocation and assessment criteria are set according to the stage of development of our product. Sales strategy is [Indecipherable] linking products to customers. We have adopted a differentiated sales approach. The needs of a nationwide bank are not the same as those of a regional player. The scale of asset, complexity of products and customers profile, risk appetite and availability of internal resources can be miles apart. Customer segmentation and more proactive pipeline management enable us to more effectively up-sell and cross-sell.\nOne of the results from the ramping up of sales and solution is our Digital-Bank-in-the-Box. The different modules on offer are supported by the infrastructure backbone and our expertise. Our initial institutions can make them match, depending on their stage of development and needs. Of course, picking up the whole package will give the best performance.\nIn Southeast Asia, we just signed a contract with a leading regional bank to provide such all-around digital support. For that particular client, our offering spend from core banking to mobile banking, open banking, lending platforms and data platforms. Our virtual bank in Hong Kong, PAOB is another example showcasing our all around capability.\nIn insurance, we have also moved from modules to an integrated approach. Sitting at the core is the smart claim solution, comprising different modules. The contract size goes up, as our customers upgrade from single modules to end-to-end system, as well as service. The new customers added this year show the potential. So far, our insurance " ]

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[ " the morning progresses.\nAs I mentioned earlier, our revenue grew $40 billion last year, putting us at least a year ahead of where we thought we might be. So we need to lean in more aggressively in key markets with increased capital and fulfillment capacity, supply chain, automation and technology. This new infrastructure will allow us to expand eCommerce assortment, enabling us to reduce both shipping time and costs. We'll step up automation in DCs to deliver aisle and department-ready pallets, stores. We'll continue to refresh our existing stores by enhancing pickup and delivery capacity, merchandising programs and efficiency initiatives.\nIn India, we see significant growth opportunities for Flipkart and PhonePe. It's exciting to see the emerging middle class rapidly adopting eCommerce and using their mobile phones to use money transfer, insurance and other services. Meanwhile, we'll step up technology investments to continue upgrading legacy enterprise systems and customer-facing technology. We're on a multi-year journey of modernizing our tech stack and capabilities to increase the efficient use of the cloud and simplify customer and associate experiences.\nAs we accelerate investment, capex is expected to be around $14 billion this year with most of the increase versus last year in the U.S. Over the next few years, we expect capex to be around 2.5% to 3% of sales. While this is higher than the past few years, it is far below the capex peak of 4% to 5% of sales during the period of heavy Supercenter growth. This spend will allow us to fully optimize our strategy, and in turn, accelerate the company's top-line and profit growth rates in the mid to long-term.\nAfter years of transition, these investments should put us in position for 4% plus sales growth and operating income growth rates higher than sales. 4% top-line growth would basically be the equivalent of adding a Fortune 100 company every year. Our unique financial strength allows us to continue to deliver strong returns to shareholders while growing the business. And as you saw this morning, we increased our dividend for the 48th consecutive year. And we authorized a new $20 billion share repurchase program, which we plan to execute over the next three years or so. There are so many initiatives under way that give us confidence that these are the right investments at the right time. We're already seeing proof points, and you'll hear more about these later on.\n", "We expect continued strong growth in the U.S. businesses and expect even higher international growth rates as we focus on key markets and making money in new ways. We'll continue improving margin mix through an enhanced general merchandise offering, new brands and marketplace growth with a greater push toward expanding fulfillment and other services for sellers. We'll drive existing and new customer growth through initiatives like Walmart+. We'll grow sales and profit increasingly with growing higher margin businesses and advertising, financial services, marketplace, healthcare services and the like. Our operating discipline will continue to sharpen. After a pause in FY '22, primarily because of additional wage investments, I expect expense leverage to continue at or above 20 basis points a year.\nLet me turn now specifically to our expectations for this current year. We feel very good about the underlying business and ability to compete from a position of strength. However, we're still facing similar COVID-related challenges as we have over the past several quarters, which caused us to suspend guidance and continues to make short-term guidance very challenging. Despite that we want to give you the best view we can at this time given what we know and what we see right now.\nWe know we'll have both headwinds and tailwinds this year, the balance and degree of which isn't clear. As the year progresses, we hope to get more clarity around COVID impacts, vaccine efficacy and availability, the scale and duration of economic stimulus and the mid-term economic climate globally. Even if conditions stay generally similar" ]

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[ "Artist Robert West is proud of his connection to the Pullman Company. His grandfather, Allen Parrish, was a Pullman Porter and helped inspire some of his train paintings. Robert West paints his latest project in his Atlanta, Georgia, studio. \"When I was growing up, we would often take grandfather to work at the train station. I became impressed and mesmerized with trains through this experience. This passion ultimately led me to become a full-time railroad illustrator,\" West said. The Pullman Company was one of the largest employers of African-Americans in the 1920s and '30s. It hired them as porters in railroad sleeping cars to assist railroad passengers and make up beds. These jobs were once highly regarded in the black community because they offered the opportunity to travel and better pay and security than most jobs open to blacks at the time. West says trains have an important place in African-American history -- from symbolism in Negro spirituals to a real conveyance for the mass migration of blacks moving to the North in the 1930s, '40s and '50s. \"Trains have so long symbolized hope, freedom and power -- what better metaphor could there be to represent our struggle and our assimilation into mainstream American life,\" West said. Many of West's paintings depict historical scenes with the now defunct Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, because that's where his grandfather worked for many years. Watch award-winning artist on trains and history » West paints other trains, including the Steam, Gas turbine, Electric, as well as first through sixth Generation Diesel Electric Locomotives. He wears a conductor's hat as he works. \"I think it's important that all the cultures in the United States look back at our history by way of the railroads,\" West said. \"It was through our contributions to the railroads, that also pushed us forward as a nation and as a human race.\" West has been drawing and painting trains since the age of 2. In 1973, he decided to make railroad illustrating a profession. Through the years his work has won several awards in shows of national and regional scope. \"I'm probably more of a visual historian more than anything else, because I conduct weeks, months, sometimes years of research prior to doing a painting,\" he said. West has painted more than 500 original works, which have sold across the United States and around the world. Train enthusiasts are his largest market. ", "\"When one looks at my paintings, I like for them to not only feel a sense of joy, but to feel good about times when times were happier, kinder, and gentler,\" he said. E-mail to a friend" ]

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[ "The news on the housing market continues to be bleak as bleak can be. In just one example, the January numbers from the Case-Shiller index -- a popular collection of data about repeat sales of single-family homes -- show that home values in Phoenix are down almost 50 percent from their peak in July 2006. Clark Howard has bought several foreclosures over the years and has his eye on another. There are similarly dismal numbers in Las Vegas and Miami (both down more than 40 percent) and San Francisco and San Diego (both down 40 percent). But you've got to realize that housing stats are skewed by bubble markets such as these, where people were trying to get rich quick on someone else's money. Yet still, sometimes you can be left feeling like there's no good news in all of this. Well, I have some for you. Half of all home purchases in February were by first-time homebuyers, according to The Financial Times of London. Those buyers were taking advantage of incredible interest rates and low housing prices, not to mention new tax incentives for first-time homebuyers. How about you? If you want to get in the game, you've got to look REO -- and I'm not talking about the classic rock band REO Speedwagon! REO stands for real-estate owned property. It's where you buy directly from the bank after they foreclose on a property. Banks are notoriously bad property managers. It's not uncommon for them to let a property go unloved and neglected for several months. Before long, the property starts looking like a haunted house on Halloween. The grass is unkempt, the shutters are falling off and windows may be broken. That's when you can really swoop in and steal a deal. I've bought a number of foreclosures over the years. My most recent purchase was last year, but I'm thinking about buying another foreclosure I saw while filming with my HLN show crew. Watch Clark finding a bank-owned bargain » I'm particularly a fan of houses that smell! The odors can usually be eliminated very easily. But buyers are quickly turned off by a stinky house, and that means I can really underbid on my offer. If you want to start looking for REOs in a specific part of town, try finding a real estate agent who farms that area. You can also try searching the web by visiting sites such as HUD.gov, HomeSales.gov, EmailForeclosures.com and Trulia.com. ", "When searching for foreclosures or distressed property in the single-family home market, be on the lookout for several things: an established neighborhood that's 10 years or older; a neighborhood that is mostly owner-occupied; and a house that is structurally sound with cosmetic damage only. My rule of thumb has always been that you want to buy 20 percent below fair market value for homes and 30 percent below fair market value for condos. Speaking of condos, the condo market in particular has a lot of hazards. When you buy a condo, you're buying an obligation and a commitment in a condo association. Do not buy in a building that has been recently constructed. You want to look for established condo buildings that have been there six years or longer. With established buildings, you know that most people are paying their condo fees. And finally, remember that foreclosures and REOs are just part of a larger category of \"people problem\" houses. These are the kinds of houses that sit on the market as wounded ducks because the owners endured job loss, divorce, relocation or any other of a host of troubling scenarios. The real key to finding a deal is to know the local market conditions where you're buying. Go after the properties that are REOs for 45 days or longer. Lenders are usually unrealistic about the pricing of properties on their books for about the first 6 weeks. Remember, out of adversity comes great opportunity." ]

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[ "BANGKOK, Thailand (CNN) -- Thailand's military has denied abusing refugee boat-people from Myanmar after claims some were whipped on a tourist beach and hundreds more left dead or missing after being towed at to sea without food and water. Photograph released by Thai navy showing a group of illegal immigrants captured on December 12. Photos showing refugees being made to lie face down on a popular beach and media reports claiming refugees been deliberately lost at sea have sparked concerns for their safety. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says it is \"concerned\" about the fate of the Muslim ethnic minority Rohingya people, who have fled from Myanmar's border with Bangladesh. The agency says it has written a formal note to the Thai Ministry of Foreign Affairs asking for clarification of what is happening. CNN spoke to one Australian tourist, who declined to be named for fear of being barred from Thailand, who says boat-people were \"whipped\" by Thai guards on popular diving resort island in the Similan Archipelago last month. Local media also report claims by Rohingya survivors that the Thai military have been detaining hundreds of them an island called Koh Sai Daeng before towing them back out into open water without supplies. The survivors say hundreds of them drowned and only the lucky ones made it to the Indian Andaman Islands or Indonesia's Aceh province. The Thai Navy denies knowledge of the incident. Rear Admiral Naris Pratumsuwan told CNN \"as a normal practice, if Navy finds illegal immigrants, we will hand them over to related authorities, e.g. police or immigration police.\" He said he had not received any information on an island where migrants are being detained. There were reports of another boatload of 46 Rohingya detained by the Thai military Friday, but there was no official confirmation. The Rohingya have been fleeing persecution of the hard-line military regime in Myanmar, formerly Burma, for years and often seek refuge in Malaysia. Boat loads of Rohingya arriving in Thailand is nothing new, but non-governmental organizations are increasingly worried about what they say is an apparent change of government policy. They say the army's Internal Security Operations Command is forcing the Rohingya out to sea rather than deporting them overland back to Myanmar. \"The Thai government is taking highly vulnerable people and risking their lives for political gain,\" says Refugee International's Sean Garcia says. \"It should be engaging the Burmese government on improving conditions at home for the Rohingya if it wants to stem these flows. ", "\"The Rohingya will continue to make the journey because they have no hope for a better life in Burma. Pushing them back out to sea is not an effective deterrent it just jeopardizes lives.\"" ]

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[ " with my key customer, they really appreciate how Taiwan was managed throughout the pandemic, how the Taiwan semiconductor companies were managing the delivery in a very adverse supply chain environment, throughout the whole 2020.\nAnd I believe that would carry us far. For the partner that we support, they're gaining market share. And I think this is another reason that I believe not only we will grow or capture a huge chunk of the semiconductor growing logic space, we will also force and enable more outsourcing for IDMs. That I believe that in the next few years, we will enjoy a higher growth rate as a result of all of these factors.\nCharlie Chan -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nThanks for the insight, for the insight, Dr. Tien. I think that's a very clear. I mean, I also have a follow up, Roland's question about your gross margin trend. Sorry, I am not sure if you did give the gross margin guidance for this year? Can you kind of breakdown by your ATM business and the EMS business, the gross margin trend in 2021? And also, I know you don't go comment about the pricing, right? But may I know for flip chip and testing, do you expect the price to go up this year?\nTien Wu -- Group Chief Operating Officer\nJoseph, you will comment on the gross profit?\nJoseph Tung -- Chief Financial Officer\nAs I mentioned earlier on, I think the -- for 2021, I think we will continue to see margin improvement at the gross level with the steady or improving opex ratio. I think also on the operating margin, we'll continue to see improvement. And that comes from a lot of the efforts that we put in, in terms of improving our efficiency, creating synergy with SPIL, and also the higher loading facility, of course, it helps, a friendlier pricing environment also help. I think all these put together give us a very high confidence that we will be improving our margin going forward for ATM.\nAs far as EMS's perspective, I think the more relevant margin is at the operating level. Because of the different product mix, it will have quite a bit of fluctuations on the gross level. So the more relevant or more meaningful benchmark is really on the operating level. For that, we are targeting a 4% operating margin for EMS business. That's slightly up from what we achieved in previous year, which was at 3.8%.\nTien Wu -- Group Chief Operating Officer\n", "Okay, for the other line of business, flip chip, the fan-out and all of the others, we're also seeing a more friendly environment, but not as friendly as wirebond, they're friendly. Okay, I will not comment anymore.\nCharlie Chan -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nThat's OK. Okay, thanks, gentlemen. It's very helpful, thank you.\nOperator\nNext one to ask question, Sebastian Hou, CLSA.\nSebastian Hou -- CLSA -- Analyst\nThanks for taking my questions. So just follow on the pricing and the margin, that part. Just if I look at your Q4 2020 margin that has improved, I think there is a combination of the utilization rate improved, synergies, and then pricing. But looking now into your 1Q guidance, revenue and margin will be similar to last quarter. So, can we say that the pricing is not a factor anymore in this quarter to drive the margin for improvement?\nJoseph Tung -- Chief Financial Officer\nI think it's -- to have a similar margin for first quarter compared to last quarter, it's quite a bit of a challenge itself already, because we are facing further NTD appreciation, which will have a over 1% impact on the margin. We are going through Chinese New Year, and some of the factories are going through annual maintenance. So then we will have less working days. And also, throughout the -- there's a lot of homework that needs to be passed out. Overall, compensation expenses is going to be higher for the quarter. So all the things put together, I think we are doing a pretty good job in maintaining our margin at similar margin from fourth quarter.\nTien Wu -- Group Chief Operating Officer\nI mean, just for clarification, the so-called seasonality is still here. In other words, some of the key customer run their high-volume device for consumer or" ]

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[ "Six U.S. troops were killed in Iraq on Monday, making 2007 the deadliest for the American military in the Iraq war. The grim record came despite lower death rates in recent months, which were not enough to offset death tolls that topped 100 during three months in the spring. Four soldiers were killed when a roadside bomb exploded near their vehicle in northern Iraq's Tameem province; another died in combat in Anbar province. A sailor was killed in Salaheddin province \"as a result of injuries sustained from an explosion while conducting operations,\" the military said. According to a CNN count of Pentagon figures, 853 U.S. service members have died so far in 2007. The next highest death toll was in 2004, when 849 were killed. The total number of U.S. military deaths in Iraq stands at 3,856, including seven civilian contractors of the Defense Department. The high number of deaths this year corresponds with the U.S. troop buildup called the \"surge\" and a crackdown on insurgents in and near Baghdad. Monthly death tolls were highest in the first part of the year: 83 deaths in January, 81 in February and 81 in March. Numbers peaked in the next three months, with 104 deaths in April, 126 in May and 101 in June. The numbers have dropped from that level since -- with 78 in July, 84 in August, 65 in September, 38 in October and 12 so far in November. Civilian deaths have also dropped in recent months, U.S. and Iraqi authorities say. The Iraq war began in March of 2003 and in that year there were 486 U.S. military deaths. In 2004, major offensives were responsible for many fatalities, including the massive operation in Falluja in November and fighting between U.S. troops and Shiite militants in Najaf. The number of deaths in 2005 was 846 and in 2006 it was 822. The U.S. military also announced on Tuesday that it intends to release nine detained Iranians in Iraq \"in the coming days,\" a move that dovetails with the American hope that Iranian authorities are honoring a recent pledge to stop Iranian help to insurgents in Iraq. \"These individuals have been assessed to have no continuing value\" and don't pose a \"further threat\" to Iraqi security, said Rear Adm. Gregory Smith. Two of them are from the \"Irbil 5\" detained in January. ", "Irbil is the largest city in the Kurdish area of Iraq. The U.S. military had accused the five Iranians arrested in Irbil of having links to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard-Quds Force, a military unit accused of aiding insurgent activity -- including the distribution of roadside bombs. Smith said Tuesday that materials for roadside bombs \"do not appear to have arrived into Iraq after the Iranians have made their pledge to stop arming, funding and training extremists.\" \"We hope in the coming weeks and months to confirm that Iran has indeed honored its pledge through further verification that the flow of ammunitions and other lethal aid has indeed stopped,\" said Smith, who noted that Iran, Iraq and the United States plan to hold another round of security talks. Last month, Gen. David Petraeus, the top-ranking U.S. military official in Iraq, told CNN the Iranian ambassador had given assurances to his Iraqi counterpart that such training and supplying of insurgents would end. Meanwhile, a Kurdistan Regional Government official on Tuesday confirmed to CNN that two Iranian consulates had been established in the region, offices created in the wake of the arrests in Irbil. At the time of the arrests, Iran insisted the arrested officials were \"diplomats\" working in a diplomatic mission, while Iraq's Foreign Ministry and the U.S. military said it was a \"liaison\" office which did not have diplomatic status. One of the new consulates is in a building in Irbil that had been closed down during the January raid, the Kurdistan official said. Also Tuesday, the U.S. military reported that U.S. and Iraqi troops found 22 corpses buried in Iraq's Lake Tharthar region. The Iraqi Army and local security forces \"are investigating the mass grave to determine the" ]

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[ " components and biopharma research and microbiology looks pretty good. Maybe NMR booking is a little weaker after they were growing at a wonderful pace last year.\nOverall, China, good revenue growth, a little bit slower order growth this year than last year. Many signals that you get overall. The specific question, the high-end research funding, we think continues very much. I think that remains a top priority for China is my impression.\nDerik De Bruin -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst\nThank you.\nOperator\nAnd our next question will come from Doug Schenkel with Cowen. Please go ahead.\nChris Lin -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nHey. This is Chris on for Doug. I just want to start with Calid. so Calid growth has accelerated meaningfully this year to double digits.\nI think you talked about the mass spec portfolio refresh and diagnostics driving an improvement in growth. But curious if there were any other dynamics. And not looking for 2020 guidance, but how sustainable do you think this growth is? And if we were to use a baseball analogy, what inning do you think you're in, in terms of the new instrument placement cycle?\nFrank Laukien -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nSo mass spectrometry and Maldi Biotyper do very well. Maldi Biotyper is in the baseball game for sure. That's clinical diagnostics. It's just all a need in a relatively steady market.\nAnd we have really great solutions there, and they have more and more capabilities. We're perhaps even winning market share there. And the Hain acquisition, by and large, is going well. There are more things in the pipeline for U.S.\nFDA clearance of certain additional capabilities. So that very steady business, and we're delighted that even the instrument part of that business is sort of back to the low teens. And the consumables business there continues to grow well north of 20%. So very solid, no end in sight, no final inning coming up there.\nProteomics. I don't know. I think where roughly where genomics was 10, 12 years ago. I'm not saying that proteomics will necessarily be as big as genomics in total.\nBut again, no baseball analogy there at all. I think these markets are healthy. And our technology is becoming more and more appreciated there. So no runway, no baseball games.\nThese metaphors really don't apply to these markets.\nChris Lin -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst", "\nOK. And then, Gerald, could you just help us bridge the EPS guidance for the year? I think you beat Q3 by $0.06 and then you increased the full-year EPS guidance by $0.02. The implied Q4 EPS growth rate is I think only about 4%, which is a meaningful slowdown relative to the 20.9% rate you posted on a year-to-date basis. So clearly, there has been some nice momentum this year.\nJust really want to make sure we're not missing anything here and updated EPS guidance is, I guess, an effort to derisk guidance for the full year.\nGerald Herman -- Chief Financial Officer\nWell, I guess what I'd say is that we posted very solid performance on an EPS perspective over the first 9 months. And we feel like we should clearly provide some of it into our updated guidance for the full year at this stage. Clearly, we're generating good profitability from the numbers we've posted thus far. So I think we're just moving it in a reasonable range at the moment.\nI don't think there's anything special that I really want to highlight other than we continue to drive operating margin performance. The mix being driven by our product is helping for sure. And more to come is the expectation.\nChris Lin -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nOK. Sorry. And just quickly last question. I think you know that you have strong growth in Japan.\nSome of your peers talked about potentially benefiting from a pull-forward of orders due to the increase in Japan value-added tax. Did that -- the dynamic impact you at all? If not, how sustainable is the Japan growth here?\nFrank Laukien -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYes. We're -- we don't have any data that would allow us to estimate whether it was a partial effect or material at all. Keep in" ]

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[ "ximately 350,000 shares valued at $20.53 per share. Turning to financial guidance for Q1 and full-year 2022. 2022 will be a significant growth year for Veritone. To support this growth and achieve our near and long-term objectives, we expect to continue making responsible investments.\nThese include forecasted increases in headcount by over 50%, which today includes just over 500 full-time employees. Our growth is largely dependent on these hires, the majority of which will be engineers, operational support, and sales. In addition, we have an active pipeline of strategic acquisitions to accelerate our planned organic growth and scale. In order to manage future growth and scale, we also need to invest in our infrastructure, including planned deployments of global systems, such as Oracle and Workday, in the first half of 2022.\nLastly, as Chad mentioned at the outset, where the world sees the great resignation, we see the great opportunity. We no longer have border restrictions on hiring. However, we also need to retain our current employees. And with higher inflation and wage increases globally, we will need to reinvest back into our current employees with newer retention rewards, higher annual raises, and richer benefits versus historical.\nIn total, we expect these one-time system and retention-related investments to be approximately $5 million of incremental costs to Veritone in 2022 versus 2021. With that backdrop and a reminder that PandoLogic has significant revenue seasonality with the lowest hiring in Q1 and accelerating quarterly throughout the year, we expect Q1 2022 revenue to be between $32.5 million and $33.5 million, representing an 80% increase year over year at the midpoint versus Q1 2021 GAAP and an increase of 39% versus Q1 2021 pro forma. Software products and services revenue is projected to increase over 80% as compared to Q1 2021 pro forma revenue, reflecting customer growth while maintaining consistent AAR and gross and net retention rates. Managed services revenue is expected to grow in the mid to high single digits.\n", "We expect Q1 2022 non-GAAP net loss to be between $3.5 million and $4.5 million, which is relatively flat versus Q1 2021 on both a GAAP and pro forma basis. As a reminder, the majority of our operating costs are fixed and payroll-driven when comparing Q1 2022 to Q4 2021, the seasonal decline in revenue results, and a decrease of over $20 million in gross profit. Even with this, we are still forecasting our core operations to be profitable in Q1 2022 and our corporate overhead non-GAAP net loss to be relatively consistent with Q4 2021. For full-year 2022, we expect revenue to be between $180 million and $190 million, representing a year over year increase of over 60% at the midpoint on a GAAP basis and near 30% increase on a pro forma basis for 2022.\nWe expect our combined software products and services revenue growth to be over 100% year over year on a GAAP basis. We expect full year non-GAAP net income to be between $10 million and $20 million. At the midpoint, this represents an over 100% improvement when compared to 2021 non-GAAP net income. If you exclude the previously discussed one-time expenses associated with retention and system upgrades, non-GAAP net income would be projected to be slightly up when compared to 2021 pro forma.\nIt should be noted that in 2022, we expect our fully diluted share count to be between 45.2 million and 47.2 million shares, largely due to the as if converted accounting associated with our convertible debt offering and, to a lesser extent, the outstanding options, warrants, and RSUs held primarily by our employees. Before I close, we will be speaking at the following investor conferences this month: the JMP Securities Technology Conference, March 7 and 8; and the 34th Annual ROTH Conference, March 13 through the 15th. Operator, now we would like to open up the call for questions.\nQuestions & Answers:\nOperator\nCertainly. [Operator instructions] The first question comes from the line of Darren Aftahi with ROTH Capital Partners. Please go ahead.\nDarren Aftah" ]

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[ "ey're going to be more expensive due to higher component costs. But at the same time, it looks like you guys have proven that there is a market for low- cost geographies with phones like iPhone SE. So how do you see these two different segments within the smartphone market evolving over the next one to three years? And then I had a follow-up for Luca.\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nAgain, I want to stay away from commenting about future products. But generally, I think it's important when you think about 5G is to look around the world at the different deployment schedules. And some of those look very different perhaps than what you might be seeing here. And so, that's very important. In terms of the price, I wouldn't want to comment on the price of handsets that aren't announced.\nKrish Sankar -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGot it. No worries, Tim. And then I have a follow-up to Luca. Opex as a percentage of sales for March looks like about 15% higher than in your prior quarters. Kind of curious how much of that is part of it is driven by some of your Intel modem asset purchases or TV+ in the opex or how do we think about it on a go-forward basis?\nLuca Maestri -- Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer\nYeah, I think we felt good about our opex results because they were at the low end of our guidance range, but clearly, we want to make all the necessary investments in the business and from -- in terms of the new services, not only for TV+, but all the new services that we launched during 2019, this is a period where we're making the necessary investments in advertising and marketing and that level of investment is reflected in our opex results. And also as you correctly stated, we completed the acquisition of the Intel baseband business during the December quarter. And so, we had -- we reflected the run rate of the expenses related to that business partially during the quarter after the completion of the transaction. And we -- that is a very important core technology for the Company. So we will continue to make all the necessary investments also there. There is a third category of expenses that affected the December quarter and is the fact that our revenue was very strong. And we have certain variable expenses, for example, credit card fees that are associated with the higher volume and of course, impacted our opex results.\n", "Tejas Gala -- Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations\nThanks, Krish. Can we have the next question please?\nOperator\nThat will be from Mike Olson with Piper Sandler.\nMike Olson -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nAfternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. So slightly different take on an earlier question on Wearables and that is -- what impact do you think Wearables is having on driving people into the Apple ecosystem? You mentioned 75% of watch buyers are new to the Apple Watch, but many of them new to Apple overall. I'm sure a lot of existing iPhone, iPads or Mac users are going to be Wearables customers, but do you think Wearables bring people into the ecosystem to buy other devices in a material way?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI think that -- Michael, it's Tim. With each Apple product that a customer buys, I think they get tighter into the ecosystem, because they like -- that's the reason that they're buying into it is they like the experience -- the customer experience. And so, from that point of view, I think each of our products can drive another product. I would think in that case, it's more likely that the iPhone comes first. But there is no doubt in my mind that there is some people that came into the ecosystem for the Watch.\nMike Olson -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nOkay. And then I think you recently mentioned that augmented reality will pervade our entire lives. And I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts about how you think it starts to impact our lives more significantly? For example, will the inflection point in AR come from gaming or industrial usage or some other category. In other words, where will the average person, kind of, first feel the impact " ]

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[ "arket. I mean, some of that's in China, it's sold globally. Our 8-bit product line is a 20-plus year product line with a lot of very high quality design. We actually did quite well and grew our -- both our 8-bit and 32-bit microcontroller products in 2020. We think that in 2021 that will moderate -- will probably be flat single-digit type numbers on the MCU side.\nAnd certainly the focus in IoT in terms of the new product development. We are developing a few new 8-bit MCUs to continue to drive differentiation and opportunity in there, but the predominant growth and the focus for the company is on the wireless side. And again those all contained microcontrollers and security and sensor interfaces and all of that stuff, but that's where we're specializing our products, but our microcontroller revenue is going to hold in there solid, and we do continue to invest opportunistically in there where it makes sense, in particular on the 8-bit side. 8-bit still has long life and a very large market opportunity in front of us.\nRajvindra Gill -- Needham & Company -- Analyst\nVery good. Thank you.\nOperator\nThank you. [Operator Instructions] And the next question comes from Bill Peterson with JP Morgan.\nBill Peterson -- JP Morgan -- Analyst\nYes. Hi, thanks for taking the question, and nice job on the quarterly execution. I was hoping, if you can help us understand within the industrial and automotive or the Infrastructure & Automotive segment, where do you see strength versus weakness, I guess directionally in the first quarter? Should we assume access broadcast consumer down again broadcast auto and the isolation products up and then timing, of course, as well as another impact, especially to margins. Where does that go directly in the first quarter?\nJohn Hollister -- Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nYes, Bill. This is John, so we expect some of the legacy access products to decline moderating a bit from the fourth quarter that would include the SLICs, which had a strong fourth quarter here. We expect timing to grow in the quarter and also see some continued strength in isolation. So it's consistent with the trends that you would expect for first quarter there.\nBill Peterson -- JP Morgan -- Analyst\n", "Okay, great. And then I guess related to the questions on gross margin. You changed the target model, but I guess a lot of these things we can think about it, at least becoming, I guess better over time, the supply constraints and so forth, especially as we look into next year. So I guess, what's the strategy for changing that now? And should we assume you could get back into the 59% to 61% next year, assuming the supply constraints add from this?\nJohn Hollister -- Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nYes, Bill, really it's a function of mix, as well as Tyson indicated earlier in the call with IoT and the Wireless IoT coming up, that I mean that mix could change. We saw something additional happened with Huawei or saw timing really take off. But at this at this point given the strength of IoT and how that's affecting the overall mix in addition to the cost situation we talked about earlier that we felt it prudent to go ahead and adjust the model.\nBill Peterson -- JP Morgan -- Analyst\nOkay. Thanks for that.\nOperator\nThank you. I would now like to turn the call back over to George Lane.\nGeorge Lane -- Director of Investor Relations and International Finance\nThank you, Keith [Speech Overlap] this morning. This concludes today's call.\nOperator\n[Operator Closing Remarks]\nDuration: 49 minutes\nCall participants:\nGeorge Lane -- Director of Investor Relations and International Finance\nTyson Tuttle -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nJohn Hollister -- Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nGary Mobley -- Wells Fargo Securities -- Analyst\nBlayne Curtis -- Barclays -- Analyst\nMatt Ramsay -- Cowen & Company -- Analyst\nCraig Hettenbach -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nSrini Pajjuri -- SMBC Nikko Securities -- Analyst\nTore Svanberg -- Stifel -- Analyst\nRajvindra Gill -- Needham & Company -- Analyst\nBill Peterson --" ]

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[ "u view 5G capability in a handset? And what's your view as to what the killer app will be from a consumer perspective?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nWe don't comment on future products. And so, I'll try to sidestep a bit. With respect to 5G, I think it's -- we're in the early innings of its deployment on a global basis. We obviously couldn't be prouder of our lineup and is -- and are very excited about our pipeline as well and wouldn't trade our position for anybody.\nTejas Gala -- Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations\nThanks, Katy. Can we have the next question please?\nOperator\nWe'll hear from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.\nKyle McNealy -- Jefferies -- Analyst\nHi, thanks a lot. So we're seeing some signs of new spectrum being deployed for 5G deployments and even additional 4G capacity, and it's already having a positive impact for handset upgrades to use that new capacity. Do you get the sense that wireless carriers are getting more incentivized to upgrade handsets to get leverage out of these new network investments? How much might this be helping and do you think it will continue to accelerate?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI think that we've had some great partners, not only in the US, but also around the world that was really helpful this quarter as partners. And so, I think probably a part of that is the level of investments they have and then a part of it is probably making sure that those customers stick with them in an environment where there's a lot of trading back and forth. So I'm optimistic that it will continue.\nKyle McNealy -- Jefferies -- Analyst\nOkay, great. And then the comment that you made about capacity in your Wearables division with AirPods Pro and Apple Watch 3, what should we think about the timeline of when there is capacity constraints might be alleviated and will they come from capacity additions or the natural work out of kind of unit shipments and something on the demand side?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI'm hopeful that the Series 3 will come into balance during this quarter on AirPods Pro. I don't have an estimate for that for you. I just can't predict when at this point. We seem to be fairly substantially off there, and we're working very hard to put in additional capacity.\nTejas Gala -- Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations\n", "Thanks, Kyle. Can we have the next question please?\nOperator\nYes, Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America.\nWamsi Mohan -- Bank of America -- Analyst\nYes. Thank you. Tim, Apple has a very valuable installed base of users. Can you see a future where Apple can become larger in the advertising market as you build out TV+ given you could have the unique position and ability to drive targeted ads to users without compromising on privacy?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI think it's -- I think it is possible to have advertising in a straightforward manner that doesn't encroach on people's privacy. I wouldn't want to conjecture about us in that business. I think for the TV+ business, we feel strongly that what that customer wants is an ad free product. And so, that's not our aversion to ads. It's what we believe that the customer wants.\nWamsi Mohan -- Bank of America -- Analyst\nOkay, thank you. And Luca, can you just clarify if the Services revenue this quarter had any impact of deferrals associated with TV+ at all and how can you help us maybe size the impact of the amortization of the content cost associated with TV+ as we think about the next couple of years? Thank you.\nLuca Maestri -- Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer\nYeah. So yes, of course, we launched the service. And so, there was a very small contribution to revenue from the deferral, and there was also contribution to revenue from the people, the subscribers that are actually paying for the service. When you think about what goes into the Apple TV+ revenue at this point, there are two components, the paid subscribers. These are customers that pay for the service. And we recognize revenue over the subscription period. And then, we've got the, what we call," ]

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[ "his evolution. The underlying thesis supporting this lead is the concept net that suggests it has been for the last two decades in the deployment of wireless networks, shared neutral host infrastructure will be the most cost-effective and efficient way to rapidly deploy cloud-native 5G applications at scale. And given that our attractively located tower sites have existing access to fiber and end power while already hosting multiple communications providers, they are natural candidates to represent hub locations for these low-latency wireless edge data centers. Scale deployment of the true mobile edge remains several years away, but in our view, the TAM could be quite significant, running well into the billions of dollars annually.\nIn the meantime, we have some half-dozen ongoing small-scale distributed commute trials at our tower sites, creating a beachhead to larger scale through mobile edge deployment. Additionally, our Colo ATL facility continues to outperform our expectations and we are having meaningful conversations with a number of key stakeholders across the data center and cloud sectors regarding the optimal requirements for the 5G Edge. As we've noted previously, we intend to explore global joint ventures or partnerships to effectively leverage these inherent opportunities and we continue to work through a number of different scenarios in that front. The early data points we are seeing throughout the industry all suggest that this can be a meaningful scalable opportunity that can represent solid upside for us in due time.\nAnd we are devoting resources internally to ensure that we are in a position to be opportunistic and agile. In the context of the long-term outlook we discussed last quarter, we believe that mobile edge compute could eventually represent meaningful potential upside. Having said that, we are going to remain disciplined from a capital deployment perspective as you would expect. Recurring revenue for all long-term growth prospects, healthy ROIC, and an attractive margin profile are all prerequisite for us to deploy meaningful capital anywhere, and that includes our efforts on the platform expansion side.\nOur preliminary assessments indicate that the edge opportunity fits nicely into our framework, but we will need to prove out this thesis going forward. So taking into account the strong underlying baseline growth path we have in the U.S. for the next decade, we are in a position to be thoughtful, deliberate, and strategic with these types of initiatives. Additionally, while we are laser-focused on driving incremental value in the U.S., we expect to have attractive opportunities to deploy capital internationally, for high-quality scaled Macro Tower portfolios are likely to come to market.\n", "And while my comments today are focused on our U.S. operation and marketplace, the exact same approach can be duplicated globally, whether it's growth, platform expansion opportunities or margin expansion, the message globally are identical. With our roughly 220,000 site pro forma for the Telxius acquisition, we have an unmatched presence in some of the fastest-growing wireless broadband market period and we can offer to a number of different parties and one-stop capability that is second to none. While we would expect to expand the depth of this presence over time so as not to be complacent, we believe it already gives us a significant competitive advantage.\nAs we've always done on a global basis, we will be seeking to maximize long-term growth and AFFO per share while maintaining attractive returns on invested capital. We also continue to invest in our people, our systems and processes, and remain focused on numerous ESG initiatives while dedicating ourselves to ensuring a diverse and inclusive culture throughout the company. To summarize, I want to reiterate our excitement about the U.S. market.\nWe are in the very early stages of a transformative there in U.S. wireless technology, one that has the potential to fundamentally alter how we live, work, and play while opening them up tremendous new possibilities a" ]

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[ "Edwin Salau knew coming back would be hard. But he had to do it. The retired U.S. Army first lieutenant needed to know that his sacrifice was worth it. Retired Army 1st Lt. Edwin Salau says he sees progress in Iraq since he left five years ago. \"I wanted to make sure I didn't bleed in vain for the Iraqi people,\" Salau said. \"And what I found is I did not. I see the progress over five years. I see free Iraqis doing what Iraqis want to do in their country, and I see the U.S. taking a back seat.\" Salau left the battlefield in November 2004, after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and small-arms fire during an ambush close to the town of Tuz. Those injuries cost him most of his left leg; it was amputated above the knee and he now wears a prosthesis. Recently, he and seven other wounded American veterans returned to Iraq so they could heal emotionally. It was part of a nonprofit pilot program called Operation Proper Exit, an initiative started a little over a year ago by the Troops First Foundation, based in Maryland. The USO supports the mission. Watch Salau describe his feelings on returning » Rick Kell, head of Troops First, traveled to Iraq with the soldiers and said the idea came from American troops. \"After spending much time at Walter Reed and Brooke Army medical centers, inevitably in any conversation, something reminds somebody that they want to go back. And the soldiers don't hesitate to tell you that,\" Kell said. \"They are soldiers and they want to come back primarily for several reasons, but they want to come back and let the troops here on the ground know that they are still part of them, they support them, and they would very much like to be with them, although they can't.\" It's an emotional journey for the returning veterans, a chance to visit bases where they were stationed, and, in some cases, the sites where they were wounded. Though other programs have allowed wounded American soldiers to return to the scene of their service and sacrifice, this is the first to allow them to do so while a war is still being waged. All in all, 13 soldiers have participated in the program so far -- eight this trip and five on a previous trip, which took place in June. The earlier trip was kept quiet because of fears that the experience would be too overwhelming for the participants. ", "According to Kell, he encounters many soldiers who would like to return, but those who are selected are chosen carefully. \"Well, first of all, when we come in contact with someone who wants to come back -- and that's somebody who is thriving, that is mentally and physically moving forward in their life, they've demonstrated that they have a plan for what's next and they've begun to implement that plan,\" he said. \"So we feel pretty good about this person being squared away. And there are concerns, but it's a very personal decision. We only ask for one of three answers: yes, no or not now.\" Salau, who now works with other wounded soldiers at Camp Lejeune, in North Carolina, thinks he's become an ambassador for them. When Salau departed Iraq the first time, he couldn't do it on his own. That's why this trip was so important to him. \"My purpose for this trip was for my soldiers to have that last memory of me in Iraq walking out of here on my own power,\" he said. \"And I achieved that and it was closure.\" Salau and Kell think the program has been a success so far. According to them, the main reason for that is the support they've gotten from the military command in Iraq, particularly Gen. Raymond Odierno, the top U.S. commander there. Odierno's experiences with his son, who lost his arm in Iraq, helped the general better understand these soldiers' plight," ]

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[ "how do you bring that together and weave that together to a one-stop place for innovators, large conglomerates, anybody looking to take advantage of various capabilities in the open market, and we see it as a huge opportunity.\nWe highlighted just a very small subset of clients already leveraging our next-generation capabilities across all three segments. You're going to see that grow very dramatically over the next three years. You will also continue to see our level of technology debt get displaced, as our existing clients migrate to this framework as well. So we're really excited about the future. We highlighted another two wins on Modern Banking Platform today.\nOne of those wins was the first customer that has signed up for an existing core banking system of FIS to start transitioning to MBP. So as we've talked a lot, we're really at the forefront of this transformation, and this is just the next step in FIS' journey. And we'll continue -- and while we're so confident in our long-term guide of 7% to 9% and mid-teens EPS, and you'll continue to see that resonate in the coming years.\nTien-Tsin Huang -- JPMorgan Chase & Co -- Analyst\nGood stuff. Thanks for your thoughts.\nOperator\nYour next question comes from the line of Jason Kupferberg with Bank of America.\nJason Alan Kupferberg -- BofA Securities -- Analyst\nOn margins, and I know you're targeting 50 to 100 basis points a year on average of expansion there. And certainly, we understand there's natural economies of scale in the business. But just wanted to make sure, do you feel this type of margin expansion still gives you enough flexibility to invest in the business to the extent that is contemplated by the updated capital allocation strategy just given the dynamics in your various end markets are obviously changing faster than ever? And maybe just as an extension to that, just what's your current thought process around where consensus sits for 2022? I think it's kind of exactly in line with your multiyear guide, but just wanted to see how you're feeling about that.\nJames W. Woodall -- Corporate Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\n", "Yes. With regard to the 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion, we do think that's sustainable through our midterm outlook. As we've talked about numerous times, there's tremendous operating leverage within the business, as we continue to drive automation and drive efficiencies through normal operations of the business. Incremental revenues have high contribution margins that help with that margin expansion as well. With regard to the investment side of it, we've baked in our expectations of investment into that 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion. So we feel good about our ability to continue to invest to drive and sustain that accelerated growth profile that we've built out.\nSo yes, Jason, those are the two comments I really would think about margin. If you think about 2022, we're not updating our formal 2022 guide until February. That said, we're not changing anything in terms of our midterm outlook around 2022 of 7% to 9% revenue growth and 50 to 100 basis points of margin expansion. So continuing to keep that as a longer-term outlook, consistent with what we've been saying for a number of quarters.\nJason Alan Kupferberg -- BofA Securities -- Analyst\nOkay. Understood. And just for my follow-up, I wanted to ask on M&A. It sounds like a little bit more emphasis there as part of the updated capital allocation strategy. I know Stephanie is spending a lot of time in that area. Can you help us understand just where are you in terms of M&A pipeline build? It certainly sounds like the tilt there will be toward some higher growth assets. And could you be considering deals that might be dilutive initially?\nGary Adam Norcross -- Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer\nYes. Look, let me start, Jason, and then we'll let others add on. Certainly, Stephanie's return, focusing on strategy and helping to drive and continue to focus on M&A is important. I would say our strategy has not shifted there. We've been very focu" ]

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[ "anying the rapid growth of 5G and high-performance computing, there's a noticeable increase in demand for semiconductor for advanced processes. The trend toward an ever more connected digital world also drives higher needs for mature nodes, notably demands from display driver IC, power management IC, CMOS image sensor, automotive industry and various AIoT devices that are already all around us and still increasing rapidly in number.\nAdding these all up, what we have is a structural shift in demand and supply dynamics, especially for the mature nodes, which have lacked meaningful capacity expansion for many years. As I mentioned on our last earnings call, we have managed to secure more capacity for this year compared to last year, with accessible capacity expected to grow quarter-by-quarter during 2021. Looking further ahead, we are taking measures to work with our strategic foundry partners to further enlarge our long-term capacity pool. We'll give more details as they come about.\nSeparately, taking advantage of the current favorable environment, we are also making efforts to reposition ourselves toward higher-end and high value-added products by working more directly and closely with select leading end customers. We have made tremendous progress across various industries that we serve. For large display areas, we are pleased with the results so far in switching our focus more toward high-resolution TV, high-performance monitor and low-power notebook.\nFor smartphone, wearable and tablet, we are gearing up for the AMOLED driver IC development in partnership with strategic customers and foundry providers. For automotive market where we are already the leader in display driver IC, we are deepening our working relationships with Tier one players and end customers across all major markets. Last but not least, in our nondriver areas, we are pushing hard for the promotion of WiseEye ultra-low power AI sensing solution, which have been -- which have seen widespread adoption for numerous AIoT applications.\n", "Our 3D decoder IC is also already ramping in volume. I will elaborate on this in a few minutes. Now let us start with an update on the large panel driver IC business. For the second quarter, we expect large display driver IC revenue to increase by around 20% sequentially, with the three major product lines offset for further growth. We expect decent increase in both monitor and notebook IC sales in Q2, thanks to persisting work-from-home and learn-from-home demands. For the TV IC segment, we anticipate an impressive quarterly growth in Q2, mainly due to shipments of high-end TV products going to a world-leading end customer, an illustration of the strategy toward high-end products and leading end customers that I just mentioned.\nNevertheless, our shipping quantity is constrained by capacity shortage for the large panel display driver IC business during the second quarter. Recently, we saw strong customer demand for high-end monitors unfolding post pandemic. When people work, study and play games at home, which they do much more than before, they are demanding high resolution, higher frame rate, ultrawide aspect, curved view an even multiple monitors sometimes. Himax continues to lead the high-end monitor market by providing advanced driver ICs and Tcons in partnership with leading panel makers and end customers.\nNow let's turn to the small and medium-sized display IC business. In the second quarter, we see continuous strong demand for all three segments, namely smartphone, tablet and automotive. Again, we are unable to meet all customer demands due to tight foundry capacity. As the leading supplier for the Android tablet market, we are strategically allocating capacity in favor of tablet over smartphone to support the needs for home working and remote learning. For the second quarter, we expect tablet sales to grow by mid-teens and smartphone sales to be flattish compared to the previous quarter, reflecting our capacity allocation decision.\nWith enlarged capacity as we indicated in the last earnings call, automotive driver IC b" ]

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[ "hout asking for any new infrastructure, they just have a sudden increase of new -- of systems. And therefore all devices are short. This is the problem we're addressing.\nWhen people are talking about the COVID-19 impact will dissipate, we don't see that. Of course we do understand sooner or later, this will disappear. However, you have the following multiple waves of AI, IoT, smart manufacturing, that we're aggressively building up the infrastructure, which will in turn require a lot of new system which demand semiconductor devices all levels. So I think industry will be in short. And this is a comment that the Foundry guys are making. I mean, the 2021/2022, 29 new fabs are being deployed. Everybody sees this, but the industry has no incentive to build the manufacturing infrastructure ahead of the curve. This is standard practice. The COVID-19 give you a very good short term incentive, even though we do not know, this impact will be three years, four years or two years. However, we have enough belief and vision that all of the capacity will be needed and will be good for the world. And this is what the -- our view is.\nKen Hsiang -- Head of Investor Relations\nNext question, please.\nRandy Abrams -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst\nThanks, great. And the second question -- OK, yeah in the second question and one clarification in the first too. The local adjustments, if you think those are all driven by the constraints up and down the chain or are you seeing any pockets of application weakness? That's just kind of just a clarification. And then my second question just on the guidance, I know you mentioned that first quarter above seasonal. For fourth quarter, if you're coming up with above seasonal third quarter, do expect to grow in the IC ATM in fourth quarter? And then the other part on pricing being stable, I know you talked about there's expedites and a friendly environment. So I'm curious, given we're in the peak season, what's kind of keeping price stable or why you're not seeing a little bit of a sequential improvement on pricing?\nKen Hsiang -- Head of Investor Relations\nRandy, so you're looking for a fourth quarter, somewhat of a fourth quarter outlook, and also a pricing environment commentary for the rest of the year.\nRandy Abrams -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst\nYeah, yeah.\nTien Wu -- Chief Operating Officer\n", "Okay, I think the first comment is, yes, we're seeing some local adjustment. And I -- we do not know the reason why there are local adjustments. It could be business related or it could be a component shortage related. However, those are very localized and temporal. And we're seeing the adjustment down and adjustment up right away. So at this point of time, I think the best comment we can give to you is, it does not affect the overall business momentum, at least this is what we can see now. The comment on the Q3 to Q4, yes, we are expected Q3 growth. We're expecting Q4 growth, just like last year. The comment about Q1 of 2022, of course, I'm hoping to see another record. Q1 is better than Q4 of the previous year. However, I'm not going to say that right now. But this is what I'm hoping for. And I believe, if we have a clear, a good optimistic Q1 in 2022, that momentum will carry throughout the 2022. And this is our current view, and then we'll deal with 2023 at a later date.\nJoseph Tung -- Chief Financial Officer\nA thing on the -- also, this is Joseph here. I'd say, also on the margin side, we will see sequential growth on a quarterly basis for the second half of the year as well as we continue to see volume expansion as well as continuous effort and efficiency improvement, including automation. That is an aggressively growing bottom line. And for next year, we're still seeing, there's also room for improvement further in terms of our margin. And we're seeing a very, very healthy development in overall financial performance. going forward.\nTien Wu -- Chief Operating Officer\nI mean, there's one comment, I will not talk about the overall pricing comparison. However, pricing is given by the market. I mean, it's not defined b" ]

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[ " ultrawideband, and potentially even Millimeter Wave. Driven by this market recognition and potential, we expect 2021 to be the breakout year for our XBAR technology. Turning to Slide 4.\nThere's a ton of excitement in the media around the promises of 5G, and understandably so as it will affect every industry and broadly improve many parts of our day-to-day lives. However, I'd like to spend some time clarifying where we are and where we are headed as it relates to the rollout of 5G, as well as the ultrafast next-generation networks such as Wi-Fi and ultrawideband, which are often dependent upon each other and are critical to the connected world we all envision in the future. The improvements in speed and latency with their foundation in power handling at high frequency and wide bandwidth, the next-generation networks require to open the door to massive connectivity between people and things are taking shape on a broader scale. Mobile phones, smart devices, home appliances, connected vehicles, and many more applications are poised to benefit from this real-time communication.\nAnd all of the networks powering these applications need RF filter solutions such as the ones Resonant's XBAR technology enables. While the network operators are working hard to deliver nationwide 5G coverage in its initial form, bringing the very early stages in its performance and capability, we are essentially rounding first base with today's 5G as it's only available in relatively few cities across a limited number of expensive devices that exhibit less than marketed performance. The revolutionary improvements that 5G networks will provide is not yet available. Real 5G data speeds will be 100 times faster than 4G with -- with latency 25 times that of 4G, and this will only be achievable with protection against interference.\nIn January, U.S. mobile network operators spent over $80 billion to acquire new Sub-6 gigahertz RF spectrum, upon which their 5G network services will be built, a new record. This is another indication of our forecast that the second wave of 5G deployment will be in the Sub-6 gigahertz range and it won't be until 5G's third wave for full Millimeter Wave deployment. What this means is in the absence of XBAR technologies being deployed, the market would leverage aluminum nitride BAW, which has shorter range, requiring more base stations to be deployed in the operators' networks, which equals higher cost.\n", "We believe there is a potential for billions of dollars of spectrum that could be wasted in the U.S. alone due to interference degrading spectral efficiency or based on the increased number of base stations to deliver the same coverage. 5G will also depend on next-generation networks such as Wi-Fi 6E and ultrawideband, which bring additional capacity and speed, as well as extreme location accuracy. These new networks serve as a backstop to the 5G cellular network, which can easily reach capacity and become overloaded.\nTurning Slide 5. The challenge that exists with these networks is unlike any other in the history of wireless technology. Delivering state of performance to these next-generation networks requires every device to have high-performance RF filters. It's well-documented that the RF filters that were designed for 4G requirements are not technically well-suited and cannot scale to meet the demands of these next-generation networks due to the physics behind the base technology not having the required power handling and bandwidth at high frequencies.\nBut let's take a few minutes to explore what would happen in a world where Resonant's XBAR technology did not exist. The handset OEMs are going to demand that the market's leading providers of RF filters deliver the best solutions they can that can support the standards of 5G operation. Remember, 98% of the RF filter market is controlled by seven companies. Turning to Slide 6.\nWithout XBAR, those legacy filter technologies will be adapted to deliver the best solutions available, pushing the boundaries of their existing performance by adding external components or creating modu" ]

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[ " units opened outside of China, contributing to 5% unit growth in the rest of world year over year. Both KFC Division and Pizza Hut International delivered another exceptional development quarter with 587 and 283 gross units opened, respectively. While Yum China continues to be our lead developer, there were significant contributions from each of these brands in India, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America.\nTaco Bell remains on track for another record development year with growth in next-gen assets in the U.S. and additional markets reaching scale internationally. On that front, we're excited to share that Yum China has committed to expanding the Taco Bell brand, which will allow even more people to live mas as we build our brand identity globally and grow our footprint in that market. To that end, we now expect to have three more markets to cross the critically important scale threshold of 100 units by the end of 2022, joining Spain, which reached that milestone in 2021.\nThe global development landscape is increasingly complex. But the sophistication, scale and capabilities of our teams and franchisees provide competitive advantages that allowed us to deliver yet another quarter of record unit openings. The visibility into our development pipeline remains strong. Now I'll discuss our Unmatched Operating Capability and the three key elements we're leaning into: Easy Experiences, Easy Operations and Easy Insights.\nBefore I provide an update across our Easy pillars, I want to comment briefly on our global supply chain. Our supply chain teams continued doing an amazing job building supply chain contingencies and acting as needed to secure product availability, including restaurant equipment, which is necessary for new store openings. Additionally, I'm proud of how our sourcing teams are leveraging our scale and cross-brand purchasing power to help our franchisees and equity stores manage costs in this highly inflationary environment as an important lever in maintaining long-term profitability. This scale combined with our operating experience and learnings from exposure to over 155 markets around the world create a unique competitive advantage for us as we navigate these inflationary pressures.\nStarting with Easy Experiences. With continued reopening trends in markets around the globe, a frictionless experience remains front and center for the consumer. With that in mind, we are constantly adding new convenient ways for our customers to access our brands. KFC U.S.\n", "and The Habit Burger Grill have made digital ordering even easier. Customers can now order via the app and pick up their food from a specific cubby or shelf within the restaurant. This enables a quicker and more seamless experience that eliminates the need to wait in line at the counter or in the drive-thru. Quick Pick-up is fully deployed across the KFC U.S.\nsystem, and roughly one-thirds of the Habit stores currently have dedicated pickup shelves, with plans to expand more broadly in the coming months. In addition, Taco Bell U.S. recently launched a similar program in their equity stores and will continue to deploy it across their systems more broadly in the coming quarters. Both delivery and early tests of Quick Pick-up continue to free up drive-thru capacity for the Taco Bell system, which helped fuel their ninth consecutive quarter of average drive-thru times under four minutes, with a sequential improvement from their fourth quarter drive-thru speed.\nInternationally, we have exciting projects in early stages, including our KFC Australia business, which is piloting a drone delivery program that gets our finger-licking good products to our customers' home or office in less than 15 minutes on average from when it's ordered. Next, I'll move on to Easy Operations, in which we are focused on streamlining operations for our team members and franchisees. We are installing a new kitchen display system and smart hub and leveraging our cloud-based point-of-sale system in our Taco Bell locations with the goal of modernizing the employee experience and providing more " ]

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[ "ons in memory.\nWe also secured an advanced dielectric position with a major logic producer And then a bunch of pad opportunities that were able to be secured as well, including some consumable sets. So what we're seeing is not only a strong overall growth environment, but we're also winning new opportunities that, obviously, they ramp up or different trajectories over time. But I think the end state will be increased participation for us, as we've talked about. And so we're really pleased with CMP. One thing I'd note is that I think there's a lot of industry growth numbers that are being talked about probably in the kind of mid- to high single-digit range for the industry as everything is running pretty full. I'd say when you think about CMP, different parts of that semiconductor market are going to grow at different rates. We think CMP is probably growing at mid-single digits. So that gives you a proxy about how well we're doing in that area. I think we've outpaced CMP for a while now, and we continue to have plans to do so.\nSo that gives you a little bit of background on slurries and pads. On the EC side, yes, it's a different business for us. Obviously, it's a lot more regional. We participate in North America, Europe and a bit in Southeast Asia. Those markets are doing OK. But I think of EC as more of a solid growth business. It's not going to be as dynamic. It is a little bit more transient at least at the time -- since we've had it, under our portfolio. I would say that we're making some investments to improve our quality, to improve the technology of our offering and the supply chain. And I think that's going to further differentiate us from the other participants in that EC market. The other thing I would note is that a lot of the recent capacity expansions are in the U.S., particularly like TSMC and Intel. And so that should offer us additional growth opportunities for EC. But the growth trajectories are different for those different parts of our business.\nToshiya Hari -- Goldman Sachs Group, Inc -- Analyst\n", "Got it. That's super helpful. And then as a quick follow-up on the PM side. You guys booked a $280 million goodwill impairment charge. And I think in the prepared script, you talked about a lower-than-anticipated recovery post the pandemic and an increase in raw material costs. If you can kind of elaborate on those two points, what's changed over the past three months? And perhaps more importantly, post this writedown, Dave, how would you characterize the importance of the DRA business within the context of your overall portfolio?\nScott D. Beamer -- Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nYes. So Toshiya, I'll start. Yes, you listed the two items that we mentioned in our materials. And I think as the raw material cost in the near to midterm, that's a supply demand issue in the marketplace. We won't be too specific about any particular material. But of course, you can expect us to work to manage that. So it doesn't have a significant impact in that over our rest of the year for our business. And any impact of that is included in the guidance that we increased both the top and the bottom end of that range. As we think about the lower than initially expected recovery, I think the accounting nuance aspect of this is important.\nAnd you think about the strategic objectives of our business, which we are -- the team is working on may include things like continuing to develop our R&D portfolio, addressing some market adjacencies and other wind capture in the marketplace. We expect to get this business to a better level in the future. However, those sort of strategic objectives You're really not able to count much of those or perhaps any of those in the accounting model test. So we know this is a business that's been impacted by the pandemic. That is the big driver as we look forward in our future expectations of the business, That base business is challenged. That's going to be a lower type of recovery, but we expect that we're going to deliver on strategic objectives to get this business to a different place. But " ]

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[ "hen roughly over 20% from developed world, including US, Europe, Korea and Japan. In terms of future strategies, BIGO Live will focus on, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, will focus on developed world, because we see that developed world users tend to have more social features and then high ARPU and monetization potential. So the US, European and Japan or Korean market will grow faster than the existing emerging markets. So that's about BIGO Live.\nFor the next product, Likee. Likee's key markets are in India, Indonesia, Russia, US and some of the Latin American countries. In terms of strategy, it will be more balanced. Likee, because it's very easy for user to access and create short-form videos so we will go parallel, both in terms of penetrating into emerging markets and developed world.\nAs we mentioned, we have organized -- Likee has organized some of the offline events in India and also, in July, we organized a very popular event in Russia, attracts thousands of users, young generations, to play Likee in the offline setting and make friends and do social interaction. So we do see a lot of potential for Likee to acquire both developed world and emerging markets traffic. That's the long answer to your first questions.\nSecondly, for HAGO business. HAGO's revenue is growing very rapidly. It's actually one of the main driver for YY's revenue growth. But again, in terms of percentage, it's still less than 10% of the total YY business. But again, we see very encouraging growth pattern. For the sales and marketing, we have spent, I would say, decent amount of spending in second quarter. But again, but right now, it's still not breaking even yet on a business stand-alone perspective, but we do see margin will improve and see a breakeven point coming in the foreseeable future. So that's the question to the HAGO -- the answers to the HAGO question.\nOperator\nYour next question comes from the line of Jialong Shi from Nomura. Please ask your question.\nJialong Shi -- Nomura -- Analyst\n[Foreign Speech]\n", "First of all, thanks you very much for the data points shared by management about overseas businesses. And we think this user engagement data about YY's overseas business are quite impressive. I have a few questions about your overseas businesses. And for the four overseas apps, IMO, Likee, BIGO Live and HAGO, so which of the apps may have the biggest financial potential in the long run in the real management? Also, just wondering if management can provide more colors on the competition landscape for the four overseas apps, such as who you guys are competing with in each of the four verticals.\nAnd finally, if we think the overseas expansion may require multiple years investment. So I just wonder where YY is now in that investment cycle and when will we see a positive earnings contribution from your overseas business based on management best estimates? Thank you.\nDavid Xueling Li -- Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer\n[Foreign Speech]\nThis is David. Let me address your questions. So firstly, if you have to ask me to pick up one of the favorable products in the future, especially in terms of my vision, so the choice definitely will be IMO. Because IMO, if you look at the nature of the platform, it's an instant messaging platform with a very -- with very strong growth potential in terms of the users, as well as future in my vision.\nAnd currently, since IMO is still in the very early stage, so we actually didn't put very aggressive actions in terms of true money as currency users. But since we already have over 200 million MAUs, which is a massive user base, so in the long run, definitely, we are more confident in terms of future's IMO's monetization.\n[Foreign Speech]\nWhen we look at the competitive conditions in terms of the instant messaging product in China, outside of China, which actually is quite different. So in China, in most of the cases, the company will allocate a large scale of the research development teams, which is even over 1,000 people to develop the different functionalities or other services into t" ]

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[ " ahead.\nMatt Cost -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nHi, everyone. It's Matt on for Brian. Thanks for taking my question. Can you just provide a quick update on Call of Duty Mobile and how we should think about growth vectors to the game in the second year now? And any early thoughts on the launch in China? Thanks.\nRob Kotick -- Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. Matt, it's Rob. Thanks for the question. Look, I'd say, overall, we see a ton of opportunity ahead on mobile.\nI think it's really important for us to step back and look at the fact that quality mobile in the West has only been live for about actually a little less than a year and a half. And in that time period, we shared this data, but we quickly scaled over 300 million downloads and Daniel had also mentioned, in the fourth quarter, we delivered our best quarter yet. And obviously, a clear sign that our teams focus on gameplay, new seasonal content and just driving engagement overall is driving strong results for us. But this is certainly just a point in time.\nAnd when you step back and look at the biggest games in the West, they continue to scale at the 3-year mark and well beyond in many cases. So we believe we have a lot of headroom in regions around the world to grow this business. And the beauty of COD Mobile that allows us to reach new players in markets where console and PC may not be as well developed. And we've seen tens of millions of new players in regions like Latin America, India and beyond, where we're seeing potential for a lot more upside.\nAnd looking ahead for this global community, of course, we're going to take our endgame seasons and content in advance to another level for our community. And I also see a lot of opportunity press at the local market level to drive local initiatives to make Call of Duty even more relevant in those local markets. And I want to go back and mention one another thing, which I think I mentioned on a previous call, which is it's really important to note that all of this right now is accretive to our overall franchise success. When we look at registered players who play both on mobile and on console or PC, these players show significantly higher engagement and player investment than other groups.\n", "And so again, it's just proof that I think the ecosystem is working really, really well together. Now you also asked about the recent release in China by Tencent, and it is early, right? But the game is off to a great start. We've seen tens of millions of downloads in the first month, a lot of good reception early on. And we do think this is going to be a meaningful contributor to our overall mobile results as we move forward.\nAnd as I step back, I'm just really excited about our ability to now grow our brand further on a global basis by being in such a massive, massive market. And so what I -- the way I'd sum it up is that it's been a great start on mobile, but it's just that. It's a great start. Mobile is a critical long-term growth driver for Activision.\nAnd we are definitely taking a long-term view of the platform and the opportunity. We're hiring aggressively to make sure we're well-positioned to create the best possible mobile experiences for our community and I think importantly, as we project even further out, making sure we have the ability to expand to mobile, the very best of what's working in the quality ecosystem, which I think presents yet another layer of opportunity for us in the years ahead. Thanks for the question.\nBobby Kotick -- Chief Executive Officer\nAll right. Thank you, everyone. We really appreciate your interest and participation today, and we look forward to hopefully seeing you either at BlizzConline in a few weeks or in-game somewhere. Thanks, and have a great day.\nOperator\n[Operator signoff]\nDuration: 67 minutes\nCall participants:\nChris Hickey -- Senior Vice President of Investor Relations\nBobby Kotick -- Chief Executive Officer\nDaniel Alegre -- President and Chief Operating Officer\nDennis Durkin -- Chief Financial Officer\nTyler Parker -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst\nRob Kotick -- Chief Executive Off" ]

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[ "The tabloid-friendly tale of the so-called California \"Octomom\" continues to stir debate -- this time 2,000 miles away in the Georgia state capitol, where lawmakers say they're trying to prevent a repeat. Proposed legislation regulating in-vitro practices came after Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets. A Georgia state senator introduced legislation to limit the number of embryos that can be implanted in a woman's uterus during in-vitro fertilization procedures. Sen. Ralph Hudgens, a Republican from near Athens, Georgia, said his legislation was inspired by Nadya Suleman, the woman who said she gave birth to octuplets after being fertilized with six embryos -- an unusually high number. \"She is not married,\" said Hudgens. \"She is unemployed, she is on government assistance and now she is going to put those 14 children on the back of the taxpayers in the state of California.\" Suleman, 33, had six children before the procedure. Hudgens' plan, which was co-sponsored by several other senators, would limit the number of embryos a doctor could implant to two for women under 40 years old and three for women 40 or older. Those numbers are slightly less than what's considered the norm in medical circles. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine recommends no more than two embryos for women under 35 years old and no more than five for women over 40. The reason for allowing more embryos in women over 40 is that it is more difficult for them to get pregnant. State lawmakers in Missouri are considering a similar bill. And England and Italy have had similar limits on the books for years. At least some fertility doctors say the limits in Hudgens' bill would hurt chances for women to get pregnant. They say that while three embryos are usually enough, there are special cases when they need more. \"What this bill will effectively do is shut us down,\" said Dr. Daniel Shapiro, a fertility doctor in Atlanta. \"Patients seeking reproductive care in Georgia will go to Tennessee or South Carolina or Alabama. They will just leave.\" Breaking the law would carry a fine of up to $1,000 under the legislation. Some critics of the plan also see another problem, calling it a backdoor effort to outlaw abortions in the state. ", "The bill, which Hudgens titled the \"Ethical Treatment of Human Embryos Act,\" contains language that says \"a living in vitro human embryo is a biological human being who is not the property of any person or entity.\" The anti-abortion group Georgia Right to Life issued a news release in support of the bill on the day it was introduced. \"Georgia Right to Life supports Sen. Hudgens in this legislation and wants to see strong protections in place to stop the dangerous practice of implanting more embryos than is medically recommended,\" the group said, saying the plan would help avoid premature births and low birth weight in in-vitro fertilization cases. Realistically, the bill faces long odds of passing -- at least in the near future. Tuesday was Day 25 of the Georgia legislature's 40-day session. Legislators will meet 10 more days, then take a break until June, when lawmakers will consider how money flowing to the state from the federal economic-stimulus plan may help their ongoing budget woes. According the the Georgia legislature's Web site on Tuesday, Hudgens' bill had been read and assigned to a committee, but no other action had taken place. Some Georgians from the lawmaker's part of the state say they hope he has to keep waiting for a long time. \"Unless the senator is a physician, ethicist or other informed professional, he should step aside and let the medical professionals determine what is best in individual cases,\" Dorothy West wrote in a letter to the editor of the Athens Banner-Herald, Hudgens' hometown paper. \"There are other issues more important to the citizens of Georgia that should be addressed.\" CNN's Elizabeth Cohen and Doug Gross contributed to this report." ]

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[ "Turn back time, more than 90 years, to a cold case that won't gather dust. It's a classic whodunit, starting with the rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl and ending in a lynching. It was grist for a prosecutor's political aspirations, a case that was appealed all the way to the country's highest court and a story hotly debated in the national press. At the center of it all was Leo Frank, a northern Jew who'd moved to Atlanta to supervise the National Pencil Company factory. When the body of Mary Phagan, a white child laborer, was found in the basement, law enforcement homed in on Frank. He was tried and convicted, based on what most historians say was the perjured testimony of a black man, and sentenced to death. But when the governor commuted his sentence in 1915, about 25 men abducted Frank, 31, from the state prison and hung him from a tree in Marietta, Georgia. Considered one of the most sensational trials of the early 20th century, the Frank case seemed to press every hot-button issue of the time: North vs. South, black vs. white, Jew vs. Christian, industrial vs. agrarian. In the years since, it has inspired numerous books and films, TV programs, plays, musicals and songs. It has fueled legal discussions, spawned a traveling exhibition and driven public forums. Who murdered Mary Phagan? What forces were behind the lynching of Frank? Why should we still care? Answers to these questions, or theories, keep coming. \"Leo Frank was not a good ole Southern boy. He was different and not ashamed of being different,\" said Ben Loeterman, whose new documentary, \"The People v. Leo Frank,\" will air Monday on PBS. \"The test of us as a society is not necessarily how we treat the best among us but how we treat the most questionable.\" Mixed in with ongoing analysis of the Phagan-Frank story are the descendants of those involved, people who learned of their connections differently and carry these legacies forward in unique ways. The accused \"The story goes that no one in my family talked about it,\" said Cathee Smithline, a 62-year-old great-niece of Frank. Frank was the one who handed Mary Phagan her check when she stopped by the factory on April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day. ", "The night watchman, Newt Lee, would find the body and call police early the next day. Smithline, of Wyckoff, New Jersey, was 16 when she first heard about the case. Her mother sat her down, told her a story about what a man in the South had been through, said it was based on her uncle and handed over a book: \"A Little Girl is Dead.\" It turns out Smithline's mother got the news in her teens, too, when her boyfriend turned to her after seeing \"They Won't Forget,\" a 1937 Hollywood film. \"You know that's about your uncle,\" he said. She'd grown up hearing Uncle Leo died of pneumonia, and after asking family about it, the truth was revealed, followed by the words, \"We will never talk about this again,\" Smithline said. \"I think it was a family embarrassment,\" she said. \"My grandmother [who died when Smithline was 1] was very close to her brother. It cannot be easy to tell someone your brother was lynched and why.\" The first victim Mary Phagan Kean was 13 when the story hit her. She was in a South Carolina classroom, and her name stopped short a teacher taking attendance. \"Mary Phagan, you say?\" she recalled the teacher asking, peering up from his list. He wanted to know if she was related to a girl with that name who died in 1913. Confidently, she told him she wasn't. But the boys on the playground taunted her anyway, telling her she was reincarnated from a dead girl" ]

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[ " by the ongoing investments in 5G and 400 gig, 800 gig Ethernet solutions for data centers. As 5G progresses and deployments drive sustained investment, we are uniquely positioned to capture the opportunities ahead as the ecosystem scales. Recent engagements include a broadening set of new customers, as well as key industry players such as NEC, Fujitsu, and MediaTek.\nWe continue to maximize the 5G life cycle opportunity and lead the industry with differentiated 5G solutions. In addition, the success of our application layer strategy is reflected in the strong demand for new technologies such as O-RAN and business expansion in new end-to-end verticals. Our ability to provide complete solutions for network protocol test, security, and visibility is enabling us to solve many challenges across the industry. In another area of disruption, we continue to advance our long-term initiative to enable the quantum revolution.\nWe are growing our quantum engagements with key customers worldwide. We also expanded our quantum solutions portfolio this quarter with the acquisition of Quantum Benchmark, which brings deep expertise in the performance validation software for quantum computing. Keysight's software-centric solutions in higher-value services continue to drive differentiation and recurring revenue growth. For the second quarter in a row, software and services each delivered double-digit order and revenue growth.\nBeyond innovation, execution, and financial discipline, Keysight's culture has long embraced corporate social responsibility. We believe our focus on climate and diversity provides us with a competitive advantage. We recently published our annual CSR report, which includes progress toward our prior goals and the announcement of our commitment to achieving net-zero emissions in the company operations by 2040. We are working to set interim science-based targets to ensure our progress toward this goal.\nDiversity and inclusion are also embodied in our Keysight leadership model. As a CEO priority, we have specific goals and actions that will be tracked by our leadership team and the Board of Directors. Diversity and inclusion brief will be published this month that describes our long-standing D&I philosophy, as well as the details of our strategies and goals. While there is more work to do, Keysight remains steadfast in our commitment to CSR and building a better planet.\n", "As we look ahead, we are encouraged by the strong demand for our differentiated solutions while managing the longer lead times and component availability constraints. Our in-house high-performance semiconductor fab and the strength of our order fulfillment team are helping us manage these near-term supply challenges and give us confidence in our ability to navigate them entering the second half of this year. In summary, Keysight is enabling disruptive innovation across multiple waves of technology with a decades-long runway ahead of us. Our execution in the face of many dynamic challenges this past year is a testament to the Keysight leadership model, our employees, and the breadth and depth of our customers.\nNow I would like to turn it over to Neil to discuss our financial performance and outlook in more detail.\nNeil Dougherty -- Chief Financial Officer\nThank you, Ron, and hello, everyone. As Ron mentioned, the Keysight team delivered another outstanding quarter and better-than-expected results as robust demand for our differentiated solutions and continued macro recovery resulted in strong growth across all regions. Second-quarter revenue of $1.22 billion was above the high end of our guidance range and grew 36% or 33% on a core basis versus a soft compare due to COVID-related disruption. Q2 revenue growth was driven by broad strength across all markets and geographies as the Keysight team navigated macro-dynamics and supply chain constraints.\nWe achieved second-quarter orders of $1.332 billion, up 22% or 19% on a core basis. Turning to our operational results for Q2. We reported gross margin of 64%, which increased 170 basis points. Operating expenses of $" ]

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[ "support our customers' growth and deliver long-term profitable growth for our shareholders.\nNow I will talk about N5 and N4P and N4X status. As our N5 enter its third year of ramp, demand continues to be very strong, driven by smartphone and HPC applications. Our N5 has proven to be the industry's most competitive leading-edge technology. To further enhance our N5 family's performance, power, and density improvement for next-wave 5-nanometer products, we also introduced the N4P and N4X technologies.\nN4P offers 11% performance boost as compared to the N5 with 22% improvement in power efficiency and 6% density gain. N4P is designed for easy migration from N5 with its products taking our schedule for second half 2022. We also introduced N4X as an offering especially optimized for workload-intensive HPC applications. N4X will offer much more circuit performance boost over N5 and we expect it to enter its production in first half 2023.\nWith our continuous enhancement of our N5 process technologies, we expect demand for our N5 family to continue to grow in the next several years, and for N5 family to be a large and long-lasting node for TSMC. Next, let me talk about the N3 and N3E status, our N3 technology wide-use FinFET transistor structure to deliver the best technology maturity, performance and cost for our customers. Our N3 technology development is on track. We have developed complete performance support for both HPC and the smartphone applications.\nN3 production will start in second half of 2022. We continue to see a high level of customer engagement at N3, and expect the more new tape-outs for N3 for the fourth year as compared with N5. N3E will further extend our N3E family with the enhanced performance, power, and yield. We also observed a high level of customer engagement at N3E, and volume production is scheduled for one year after N3.\n", "Our 3-nanometer technology will be the most advanced foundry technology in both PPA and transistor technology when it is introduced. With our technology leadership and strong customer demand, we are confident that our N3E family will be another large and long-last node for TSMC. Finally, let me talk about our mature node capacity strategy. TSMC's strategy at a mature node is to work closely with our customers to develop a specialty technology solutions to meet customers' requirement and create differentiated and long-lasting value to customers.\nWe expect the multiyear industry makeup trend of 5G and HPC and the higher silicon content in many end devices, to drive increasing demand and mature node for certain specialty technologies. We forecast 28-nanometer will be the sweet spot for our embedded memory applications and our long-term structural demand at 28-nanometer to be supported by multiple specialty technologies. In support of our specialty technology strategies, we are expanding our 28-nanometer manufacturing capacity and size in China, Japan, and Taiwan. Our capacity expansion is based on customers' need, business opportunities, operating efficiency, and cost economic considerations.\nWe believe the expansion of our mature node capacity will enable us to better serve our customers' needs and reach global talents, and our differentiated specialty technology will enable us to capture the demand generated from the industry mega trend and deliver long-term profitable growth for our shareholders. This concluding our key message. Thank you for your attention.\nJeff Su\nThank you, C.C. This concludes our prepared remarks. [Operator instructions] Should you wish to raise your question in Chinese, I will translate it to English before our management answers your question. [Operator instructions] Now we will proceed to the Q&A session.\nOur chairman, Dr. Mark Liu, will be the host.\nMark Liu -- Chairman\nHello, everyone. This is Mark Liu. I want to send my regards to every one of you during this pandemic and wish we have a happy and a successful 2022. Thank you.\nJeff Su\nThank you, Chairman. Let's begin the Q&A session now. Operator, can we please proceed with the first caller on the line?\nQues" ]

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[ "Adults who were exposed to large amounts of secondhand smoke during childhood have lungs that look different on CT scans from those of people who grew up in a smoke-free environment, a new study suggests. The harmful short-term effects of secondhand smoke are well known; the long-term consequences aren't as clear. Specifically, their lungs have slightly more, and larger, emphysema-like \"holes\" than those with less smoke exposure, says Gina Lovasi, M.P.H., Ph.D., of Columbia University, and her colleagues. Although breathing tests showed that the smoke-exposed lungs were functioning just fine, Lovasi said the changes could signal an increased vulnerability to developing emphysema and other lung problems down the road. Health.com: Should smoking around kids be illegal? Emphysema is a progressive lung disease characterized by shortness of breath, coughing, fatigue, and weight loss. About 24 million people in the United States have emphysema and/or chronic bronchitis, which together are known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); however about half of those people don't realize they have COPD. The lung condition is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States, and smoking is a major cause of COPD. Health.com: I'm a nonsmoker, but I have emphysema due to a rare genetic condition \"The interesting part about this is that we don't know a lot about how the lungs change over time and whether they heal completely after being exposed to tobacco,\" says Lovasi, who is scheduled to present her findings on Tuesday at the American Thoracic Society's 105th International Conference in San Diego. \"We can still see a difference even decades later.\" The harmful short-term effects of breathing other people's cigarette smoke are well known, but the long-term consequences aren't as clear. To investigate, Lovasi and her team looked at CT scans of the lungs of 1,781 nonsmoking 45- to 84-year-olds taking part in the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA) trial. Health.com: 5 celebrities who had -- or are at risk of -- the lung disease COPD About half of the study participants said that no one with whom they lived during childhood smoked cigarettes at home, 31 percent lived with one person who smoked at home, and 17 percent lived with two or more smokers. ", "Lovasi and her team checked the lung CT scans for large areas where the density was similar to air (lung tissue is naturally denser than air), and also calculated what percentage of their lungs was made up of these \"holes.\" Health.com: My smoker's cough turned out to be emphysema \"The lungs are supposed to have air in them, but it's important that the air is interspersed with blood vessels so that we can get the oxygen out of the air,\" she says. \"Small holes can expand over time and merge to form larger holes.\" For people who hadn't grown up with smokers, 17 percent of their lung tissue had this air-like density, while \"holes\" made up 20 percent of the lung area of people who had lived with at least two smokers during childhood. The more heavily smoke-exposed study participants also had more relatively large holes in their lungs. In comparison, \"someone with emphysema would typically have between 30 percent and 60 percent of the lungs classified as air-like (or emphysema-like) using the threshold we used for our study,\" says Lovasi. Health.com: 1 in 3 smokers would kick habit to protect pet Lovasi says she and her colleagues will be following the MESA participants over time to see how their lungs change, and whether people with more early smoke exposure are indeed more vulnerable to lung problems later on. Enter to win a monthly Room Makeover Giveaway from MyHomeIdeas.com" ]

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[ "Components\nBelow are some of the components and processes involved in the digital supply chain, in roughly sequential order, to bring raw content to a format available to a consumer via personal computer or set-top box:\n\nContent Provider\nThe content provider provides the actual content that will ultimately be consumed by the end-user. The content provider provides the content in a variety of formats - including film, tape, CD, DVD, hard disks and digital files.\n\nCapture\nIf the content provided by the content provider is not already in a digital format, it must first be converted to a digital format. In the case of film or tape, this is often called the “capture” process in which hardware will play back the original medium and “capture” its contents and convert it into a digital format. This captured file is often captured at the highest feasible quality as it is expected to undergo various processes that could degrade the quality. Therefore, the highest possible capture is always desired.\n\nCompression\nThe captured digital file is often extremely large, requiring a large amount of digital storage space and impossible to deliver to the consumer via broadband methods. Therefore, it must be compressed in a process called encoding or transcoding.\n\nIn this process, a codec is used to compress the captured digital file into a format which is small enough to be delivered to the end-user, usually via broadband methods. This encoding process entails consideration of many variables as to how the file is to be compressed. For audio, this usually consists of bit-rate and sample rate. Additional variables for video include resolution, frame rate and also has its own bit-rate that needs to be specified.\n\nThese variables are determined by how a particular file is to be consumed; download, streaming to a PC, streaming to a mobile device, etc.\n\nQuality, however, often becomes an issue at this stage and great care is taken to ensure the quality of the medium is of the highest possible quality for its intended deliver method. For example, a video encoded for streaming to mobile devices requires a much higher level of compression than would for a PC download, so the quality of the video will not be nearly as good.\n\nQuality Control\nQuality control is required to ensure that a file that has been encoded properly, with desired results and free of corruption. The degree to which a file is considered acceptable is based either on the discretion of the party charged with encoding the content, or a specific standard defined by the content owner for which the encoding party must comply.\n\n", "Quality control need not only take place at this juncture. Most companies dealing with the digital supply chain process will subject the media to scrutiny of the quality control process at various stages including: original capture, post-compression, post-ingest and post-publish, thus ensuring the media has not become corrupt or has not been degraded undesirably during any stage along the digital supply chain process.\n\nDigital Asset Management\nThe digital asset management system handles the metadata, content and their related assets such as album cover and movie poster art. It is often the digital asset management systems which also handles the publishing of the content itself to a digital storefront. Some digital asset management systems specifically built for the digital supply chain and the delivery of electronic media will track the progress of content as it goes through the digital supply chain. A good digital asset management system should also include reporting tools which can report back on the status of various aspects of the digital supply chain itself.\n\nMetadata Entry\nMetadata is the information that identifies and describes the contents of a medium. This information can include media-specific information such as: Title, artist(s), production company, seasonal/episodic description, original release date, etc. Metadata can also include business-related information such as: pricing and availability.\n\nDigital Rights Management\nAn important aspect of the digital supply chain is the process of encrypting the content so that it cannot be played back without the proper license which is often acquired via purchase of content or subscription. This reduces the possibility of media being pirated.\n\nIngest\nIngest is the stage in which the compressed file and metadata are put into the digital asset management system. It is not necessary for the metadata and the compressed media file to be ingested into the system at the same time, however, there will be a point in the process in which both have been ingested into the system and the metadata can reference the media file.\n\nContent Delivery Network\nWhen media files are ingested they are hosted and delivered from a content delivery network (CDN) capable of delivering the media to the end-user. The CDN should be able to support the expected number of consumers.\n\nMerchant/Storefront/Digital Retailer/Digital Service Provider\nThe content will ultimately display on a digital storefront where the consumer can view a catalog listing of the content and access the content via purchase, subscription or other method a merchant has elected to make the content available." ]

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[ " by the ongoing investments in 5G and 400 gig, 800 gig Ethernet solutions for data centers. As 5G progresses and deployments drive sustained investment, we are uniquely positioned to capture the opportunities ahead as the ecosystem scales. Recent engagements include a broadening set of new customers, as well as key industry players such as NEC, Fujitsu, and MediaTek.\nWe continue to maximize the 5G life cycle opportunity and lead the industry with differentiated 5G solutions. In addition, the success of our application layer strategy is reflected in the strong demand for new technologies such as O-RAN and business expansion in new end-to-end verticals. Our ability to provide complete solutions for network protocol test, security, and visibility is enabling us to solve many challenges across the industry. In another area of disruption, we continue to advance our long-term initiative to enable the quantum revolution.\nWe are growing our quantum engagements with key customers worldwide. We also expanded our quantum solutions portfolio this quarter with the acquisition of Quantum Benchmark, which brings deep expertise in the performance validation software for quantum computing. Keysight's software-centric solutions in higher-value services continue to drive differentiation and recurring revenue growth. For the second quarter in a row, software and services each delivered double-digit order and revenue growth.\nBeyond innovation, execution, and financial discipline, Keysight's culture has long embraced corporate social responsibility. We believe our focus on climate and diversity provides us with a competitive advantage. We recently published our annual CSR report, which includes progress toward our prior goals and the announcement of our commitment to achieving net-zero emissions in the company operations by 2040. We are working to set interim science-based targets to ensure our progress toward this goal.\nDiversity and inclusion are also embodied in our Keysight leadership model. As a CEO priority, we have specific goals and actions that will be tracked by our leadership team and the Board of Directors. Diversity and inclusion brief will be published this month that describes our long-standing D&I philosophy, as well as the details of our strategies and goals. While there is more work to do, Keysight remains steadfast in our commitment to CSR and building a better planet.\n", "As we look ahead, we are encouraged by the strong demand for our differentiated solutions while managing the longer lead times and component availability constraints. Our in-house high-performance semiconductor fab and the strength of our order fulfillment team are helping us manage these near-term supply challenges and give us confidence in our ability to navigate them entering the second half of this year. In summary, Keysight is enabling disruptive innovation across multiple waves of technology with a decades-long runway ahead of us. Our execution in the face of many dynamic challenges this past year is a testament to the Keysight leadership model, our employees, and the breadth and depth of our customers.\nNow I would like to turn it over to Neil to discuss our financial performance and outlook in more detail.\nNeil Dougherty -- Chief Financial Officer\nThank you, Ron, and hello, everyone. As Ron mentioned, the Keysight team delivered another outstanding quarter and better-than-expected results as robust demand for our differentiated solutions and continued macro recovery resulted in strong growth across all regions. Second-quarter revenue of $1.22 billion was above the high end of our guidance range and grew 36% or 33% on a core basis versus a soft compare due to COVID-related disruption. Q2 revenue growth was driven by broad strength across all markets and geographies as the Keysight team navigated macro-dynamics and supply chain constraints.\nWe achieved second-quarter orders of $1.332 billion, up 22% or 19% on a core basis. Turning to our operational results for Q2. We reported gross margin of 64%, which increased 170 basis points. Operating expenses of $" ]

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[ "u view 5G capability in a handset? And what's your view as to what the killer app will be from a consumer perspective?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nWe don't comment on future products. And so, I'll try to sidestep a bit. With respect to 5G, I think it's -- we're in the early innings of its deployment on a global basis. We obviously couldn't be prouder of our lineup and is -- and are very excited about our pipeline as well and wouldn't trade our position for anybody.\nTejas Gala -- Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations\nThanks, Katy. Can we have the next question please?\nOperator\nWe'll hear from Kyle McNealy with Jefferies.\nKyle McNealy -- Jefferies -- Analyst\nHi, thanks a lot. So we're seeing some signs of new spectrum being deployed for 5G deployments and even additional 4G capacity, and it's already having a positive impact for handset upgrades to use that new capacity. Do you get the sense that wireless carriers are getting more incentivized to upgrade handsets to get leverage out of these new network investments? How much might this be helping and do you think it will continue to accelerate?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI think that we've had some great partners, not only in the US, but also around the world that was really helpful this quarter as partners. And so, I think probably a part of that is the level of investments they have and then a part of it is probably making sure that those customers stick with them in an environment where there's a lot of trading back and forth. So I'm optimistic that it will continue.\nKyle McNealy -- Jefferies -- Analyst\nOkay, great. And then the comment that you made about capacity in your Wearables division with AirPods Pro and Apple Watch 3, what should we think about the timeline of when there is capacity constraints might be alleviated and will they come from capacity additions or the natural work out of kind of unit shipments and something on the demand side?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI'm hopeful that the Series 3 will come into balance during this quarter on AirPods Pro. I don't have an estimate for that for you. I just can't predict when at this point. We seem to be fairly substantially off there, and we're working very hard to put in additional capacity.\nTejas Gala -- Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations\n", "Thanks, Kyle. Can we have the next question please?\nOperator\nYes, Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America.\nWamsi Mohan -- Bank of America -- Analyst\nYes. Thank you. Tim, Apple has a very valuable installed base of users. Can you see a future where Apple can become larger in the advertising market as you build out TV+ given you could have the unique position and ability to drive targeted ads to users without compromising on privacy?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI think it's -- I think it is possible to have advertising in a straightforward manner that doesn't encroach on people's privacy. I wouldn't want to conjecture about us in that business. I think for the TV+ business, we feel strongly that what that customer wants is an ad free product. And so, that's not our aversion to ads. It's what we believe that the customer wants.\nWamsi Mohan -- Bank of America -- Analyst\nOkay, thank you. And Luca, can you just clarify if the Services revenue this quarter had any impact of deferrals associated with TV+ at all and how can you help us maybe size the impact of the amortization of the content cost associated with TV+ as we think about the next couple of years? Thank you.\nLuca Maestri -- Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer\nYeah. So yes, of course, we launched the service. And so, there was a very small contribution to revenue from the deferral, and there was also contribution to revenue from the people, the subscribers that are actually paying for the service. When you think about what goes into the Apple TV+ revenue at this point, there are two components, the paid subscribers. These are customers that pay for the service. And we recognize revenue over the subscription period. And then, we've got the, what we call," ]

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[ "g demand for our advanced technologies in the next several years. We expect global smartphone units to grow 10% year-over-year in 2021. We forecast the penetration rate for 5G smartphone of the total smartphone market to rise from 18% in 2020 to more than 35% in 2021.\nWe expect the silicon content of a 5G smartphone to continue to increase as compared to a 4G smartphone. We continue to expect faster penetration of 5G smartphone as compared to 4G over the next several years as 5G smartphone benefit from the significant performance and with a latency improvement of 5G network to drive more AI applications and more cloud services. We believe 5G is a multi-year megatrend that will enable a world where digital computation is increasingly ubiquitous, which will fuel the growth of all four of our growth platforms in the next several years.\nAs we enter the 5G era, a smarter and more intelligent world will require massive increases in computation power and greater need for energy-efficient computing, and therefore, require leading-edge technologies. Thus, HPC is an increasingly important driver of TSMC's long-term growth and the largest contributor in terms of our incremental revenue growth. With our technology leadership, we are well positioned to capture the growth from the favorable industry megatrend. We now expect our long-term revenue growth to be 10% to 15% CAGR from 2020 to 2025 in US dollar terms.\nNow, I will talk about the N3 status. N3 will be another full node stride from our N5 with up to 70% logic density gain, up to 15% performance gain and up to 30% power reduction as compared with 5-nanometer. Our N3 technology will use FinFET transistor structure to deliver the best technology maturity, performance and cost for our customers. Our N3 technology development is on track with good progress. We are seeing a much higher level of customer engagement for both HPC and smartphone application at N3 as compared with N5 and N7 at a similar stage. Risk production is scheduled in 2021 and volume production is targeted in second half of 2022. Our 3-nanometer technology will be the most advanced foundry technology in both PPA and transistor technology when it is introduced. Thus, we are confident our 3-nanometer will be another large and long-lasting node for TSMC.\n", "Finally, I will talk about TSMC's 3D fabric. TSMC has developed an industry-leading and comprehensive wafer-level 3DIC technology roadmap to enhance system-level performance. Our differentiated chiplet and heterogeneous integration technologies drive better power efficiency, as smaller form factor benefit for our customer, while shortening their time to market. This technology, including CHIPS stake in solution, such as SoIC, as well as our advanced packaging solutions, such as InFO and CoWoS. We observe chiplets are becoming an industry trend. We are working with several customers on 3D fabric to enable chiplet architecture. SoIC's full volume production is targeted in 2022. SoIC is expected to be first adopted by HPC applications, where bandwidth performance, power efficiency and form factor are aggressively pursued. We expect revenue from our back-end services, which include InFO's advanced packaging and testing to grow at a rate higher than corporate average in the next few years.\nThis concluding our key message. Thank you for your attention.\nJeff Su -- Director of Investor Relations\nThank you, C.C. This concludes our prepared statements. Before we start the Q&A session, I would like to remind everybody to please limit your questions to two at a time to allow all the participants an opportunity to ask their questions. Should you raise to -- wish to raise your question in Chinese, I will translate into English before our management answers your question.\n[Operator Instructions] Now, let's begin the Q&A session. Operator, please proceed with the first caller on the line.\nQuestions and Answers:\nOperator\nYes. The first one to ask question, Gokul Hariharan from J.P. Morgan.\nGokul Hariharan -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst\nThank you for taking my question. Happy New Year and f" ]

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[ "The honors were late but still well-received Wednesday for members of the first all-African-American, all-female unit to serve overseas in World War II. Mary Crawford Ragland said when they came home from service, there were no parades for them. During the war, nearly 1,000 women from the \"Six-Triple Eight\" Central Postal Battalion moved mountains of mail for millions of American service members and civilians that clogged warehouses in England and France. Their service to their country had been overlooked for years, starting with when they returned to the United States from assignments overseas. \"There was no parade,\" said Mary Crawford Ragland. \"We just came home.\" The 82-year old was among those gathered Wednesday at the Women's Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, where a U.S. Army support group called the Freedom Team Salute presented them with certificates of appreciation, timed with Black History Month. Watch women receive their honors » The group also gives a letter of appreciation signed by the Army Chief of Staff and the Secretary of the Army, an Army lapel pin and an Army decal. For Alyce Dixon, 101, it was worth the wait. \"They asked me because I'm one of the oldest survivors, and I can still talk,\" she said with a smile. Nearly 800 women that were part of the 6888th were first stationed in Birmingham, England, for three months, moved to Rouen, France, and finally settled in Paris, according to the Army's Web site. They were responsible for redirecting mail to more than seven million people -- all U.S. armed forces in the European Theater of Operations, including Army, Navy, Marine Corps, civilians and Red Cross workers. As Army units quickly moved throughout Western Europe and into Germany, a massive mail snag occurred because of a manpower shortage. Soldiers continued to move, fighting battles across the continent, but weren't getting their mail. Morale began to drop. That's when the Army turned to the \"Six-Triple-Eight\" When Dixon and the other women arrived at a warehouse in early 1945, they found the building had no heat. Inside the warehouse, the windows were painted black to keep the light from coming out at night against bombing raids. Because there was no heat, the women donned long johns and anything else they could layer on. But the temperature was nothing compared with the daunting challenge of sorting the mail. ", "When they walked inside the warehouse, it was stacked to the ceiling with undelivered packages and letters. \"They had 90 billion pieces of mail,\" Dixon told CNN, some of it from hometown friends and family addressed only to \"Junior, U.S. Army or Buster, U.S. Army,\" she said. \"We had to figure it out,\" she said. Even when there were complete names, it wasn't easy. There were 7,500 soldiers named Robert Smith in the European Theater of Operations, according to the Museum of Black WWII History Web site, and the women had to keep them straight. Because all undeliverable mail passed through them, they were charged with keeping information cards on everyone in the European Theater of Operations, according to the Army site. Because frontline soldiers were often moved frequently, the women often had to update information several times a month. While it was an arduous task, the women knew the importance of their job. For soldiers in the field, letters from loved ones brought important personal connections that kept their morale going. So they kept on sorting. Eight hours at a time, three shifts per day, seven days a week, they kept on sorting. And because of them, 65,000 letters went out each shift to soldiers across Europe. On Wednesday, the favor was finally returned." ]

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[ " and IP networking, where there are opportunities for significant share growth and a favorable competitive environment with the global pressure on Huawei and other Chinese suppliers. Establishing Ribbon as a provider of new disruptive technologies, such as 400G ZR+, 5G network slicing and disaggregated IP networking to contrast with incumbent legacy suppliers, and leveraging the broader ribbon presence and trusted partner status with large and small service providers, to gain share in our target addressable markets. There's also clearly an opportunity for us to gain more share of the higher-growth enterprise unified communications market.\nTo that end, we have recently restructured our enterprise go-to-market team and created a dedicated organization focused on this mission. We plan to expand both technology and product partnerships, as well as channel and distribution partners, to address this opportunity more effectively. We believe we have the strongest SBC portfolio in the industry, and we want to see better results. From a macro perspective, there are two significant issues that are impacting many companies in the technology and telecommunications industry.\nFirst, the recent resurgence in COVID cases in many regions is highly concerning. And specifically, our plans for growth this year in India are impacted. Deployment rates in the second half of the second quarter dropped significantly with our key customers in the region. And while we have seen some recovery in July, we're not yet back to the levels we saw earlier in the year and certainly not back to pre-COVID levels.\nAs a result, I think it's prudent to adjust our expectations until it becomes more clear that the region has stabilized. Demand for capacity remains strong, and we're winning share. But operationally, the country is still struggling. Secondly, availability of semiconductors and other components has become increasingly challenging in recent months, especially for core silicon in our IP networking products.\nWhile we have good mitigation strategies for supply disruptions in place, we don't anticipate the situation improving materially this year, limiting our ability to respond rapidly to changes in demand. Despite these near-term macro issues, the strength of our diversified portfolio is really highlighted this year. We have proven our ability to generate very strong earnings and improved profitability, even while revenue growth has been limited primarily by the situation in India. For the full year, we are reaffirming our earnings guidance with projections for higher gross margins and lower operating expenses.\n", "The revenue target is more challenging to achieve without a significant recovery in India, and we're now anticipating revenue modestly below the previous guidance. For the third quarter, our expectations are for revenue in a range of $215 million to $225 million, non-GAAP gross margins of 57% to 58%, non-GAAP adjusted EBITDA of $32 million to $36 million, and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.11 to $0.13. As I look further out into 2022, we have a growing number of tailwinds as we begin to see the results from our new customer wins and the benefit of a broader global base. We're in a great spot to grow share in a very large total addressable market and have a proven strategy that we plan to repeat.\nI couldn't be more excited about our path ahead. Operator, that concludes our prepared remarks. And now we can take a few questions.\nQuestions & Answers:\nOperator\n[Operator instructions] Our first question is from Dave Kang with B. Riley. Please proceed.\nDave Kang -- B. Riley Financial -- Analyst\nYes. Thank you. Good afternoon. First question is regarding your concerns about macro issues.\nHow much revenue was impacted in second quarter? And what about third-quarter revenue impact? What would the guidance have been if there were no component shortages, as well as COVID remained mild?\nBruce McClelland -- Chief Executive Officer\nYes. Hey, Dave. Bruce here. So in the second quarter, just to kind of give you a perspective, we've been running in Indi" ]

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[ "Cheryl Reed's morning routine starts like that of millions of other mothers around the country. She makes breakfast for her 8-year-old son and 6-year-old daughter, piles them into a minivan and drops them off at school. Cheryl Reed has a rare form of breast cancer that mostly affects young African-American women. It's the next stop that sets Reed apart from other women. Three weeks a month, she heads to the infusion center at the Emory Winship Cancer Institute in Atlanta, Georgia, for chemotherapy treatments. Reed, 40, has breast cancer; not just any form of the disease, but a rare, aggressive and difficult to treat version called triple negative. Of the estimated 180,000 women who learn they have invasive breast cancer this year in the United States, about 15 percent will have triple negative. Like Reed, the majority of triple negative patients will be young African-American women. \"It never occurred to me that I'm going to die from this,\" Reed said. \"I was like, 'I've got breast cancer, let's take care of it.' \" Reed did take care of it. For eight months during 2006, she endured chemotherapy and radiation treatments. She thought the cancer was in remission, but it returned last November. This time, it had spread to her liver, lungs and chest wall. \"Triple negative cancers do tend to be aggressive in their natural histories, so they have a very high rate of recurrence or relapsing,\" explained Dr. Ruth O'Regan, Reed's oncologist at the Winship Institute. She's one of several breast cancer experts around the country who are trying to learn more about what causes triple negative and how to treat it more effectively. Dr. Funmi Olopade, a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago, was at the forefront of identifying triple negative and the trend among African-American women. She said what makes it different from other types of breast cancer is that women with the disease lack three hormone receptors known to fuel most breast cancer tumors: estrogen, progesterone and HER2. Health Minute: More on triple negative breast cancer » \"When you have triple negative, it means that we cannot use hormone therapy. ... The only way we can treat that type of breast cancer is to use chemotherapy,\" Olopade said. Tamoxifen and Herceptin, two of the most effective medications for treating breast cancer, don't work for triple negative breast cancer patients. ", "But if a patient responds well to chemotherapy, Olopade said, there's a very good chance of curing the disease. \"The challenge we have is when the cancer comes back,\" she added. \"Right now, we don't have any effective way to treat it, and that's why when it comes back, it tends to be deadly.\" Reed is enrolled in a clinical trial at the Winship center where she's receiving chemotherapy along with a drug called Avastin, which cuts the blood supply to cancer cells. Olopade is hoping better drugs will be available in the next two to five years that will help eradicate triple negative cancer cells. In the meantime, she stressed, early detection is the key to recovery, especially for women at highest risk. \"In this country, what we have found was young African-American women have a rate that is higher than young white women, and we don't know if that is because of a gene or other risk factors,\" Olopade said. \"We know that women with a family history of breast cancer who have a BRCA1 mutation are most at risk,\" she said. BRCA1 is a major breast cancer-causing gene that was identified 14 years ago. Olopade said women born with the defective gene have a higher chance of getting breast cancer and at a younger age. Olopade also wants to explore further whether triple negative rates are higher among women who do not breastfeed their children. \"It's that first pregnancy and first breastfeeding that really allows the breast to become" ]

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[ "ndly, post the pandemic there is a permanent shift in how people perceive travel with a propensity to travel being much higher, and experiences becoming even more important. Thirdly, there is also a secular uptick in the online buying behavior, which bodes very well for us as most segments of the Indian travel industries have traditionally had low online penetration.\nLastly, and most importantly, India is still an under penetrated travel market with a huge scope of growth. Some of the factors favoring these growth trends are expansion of infrastructure, increasing per capita income, increasing disposable incomes, and higher willingness to travel and book online among the young working population. As per the Ministry of Civil Aviation estimates, Indian aviation will become world's third largest aviation market by 2024. Development of new airports, highways, and addition of hotels will help grow domestic tourism many fold in coming years.\nAlmost all the airlines are placed orders for new planes over the years. On the other hand, few hospitality chains have also announced their expansion plans which should add to capacity and fuel domestic travel growth. As a comprehensive travel service provider, we hope to leverage these macro growth trends. Let me now talk about the performance in the key travel segments.\nAnd I would then share the prospects on some of the future growth areas both on the supply side and demand side. Coming to business segments. In our air business, we continue to maintain our leadership position and market share. We are recovering faster than the market.\nDuring the quarter we witnessed over 90% recovery as compared to pre-pandemic levels. This is majorly on account of travel demand opening and more people traveling during the summer holiday season. I talked about high air fares earlier. This has affected recovery momentum to some extent, leisure destinations like Srinagar, Deheradun, Leh have shown more than 100% recovery, while business in metro destinations like Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, etc.\nhave lagged a bit due to high fares and corporate demand still short of full recovery.On international travel short haul destinations like Southeast Asia, Maldives, UAE, and Nepal witness strong recovery. In the next few months as the visa backlog gets cleared, and new visa issuances for European and American destination get streamline, we expect to see stronger demand recovery in these long haul destinations as well. Coming to our hotels packages and alternative accommodation business. We witnessed a strong recovery driven by leisure travel.\n", "Supply side services have now stabilized. In the top selling hotels 90% of the rooms are open and almost all chain hotels are now fully functioning. In many of the leisure destinations we are now seeing growth over pre-pandemic levels, which have helped taking the overall volumes recovery in the segment to around 87% of the pre-pandemic volumes. Accommodations are focused on building home stay supply has helped us improve supply leisure cities such as Rishikesh, Srinagar, Shimla, Manali, Missouri McLeodGanj, and Leh, which has helped us get past pre-pandemic volumes in this category.\nWe also launched Home stay Awards, which are one of its kind in the country, and we'll help popularize this category further. The awards attracted nominations for up to 2,500 plus home stays across the country, consumer voting is going on, and more than 4,60,000 votes have already been cast by the users. We continue to add more properties on our platform and increase our supply mode. It is encouraging to see that more and more properties in smaller towns are keen to come on our platform and sell online.\nIn Q1 we sold rooms in over 43,000 properties spread over 1,900 plus cities which reflects the extensive support being provided to small accommodation service providers, particularly in the remote towns and building deeper engagement with suppliers and customers in larger part. Coming to our bus ticketing business, we maintained our recovery momentum in the seasonally strong quarter. Demand and su" ]

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[ "all over to Tyson.\nTyson Tuttle -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nThank you, John. We are pleased to report record first quarter revenue. The pandemic has led to an accelerated digital transformation creating market opportunities we've been able to seize through organic growth despite unprecedented global supply chain constraints. The revival of economic activity stemming from the recovery signals greater market growth ahead and we are well positioned to continue to capture share in 2021. Our opportunity pipeline continues to be robust at $15 billion and our design win lifetime revenue achievement in Q1 was up 8% year-on-year. Bookings have been very strong in recent months with the semiconductor industry poised to deliver an excellent 2021.\nTurning to our IoT business. Wireless connectivity products continue to see surging momentum posting greater than 40% year-over-year growth in first quarter revenue. In Q1, we saw strength across our entire wireless portfolio with robust and consistent growth in all of our major wireless connectivity protocol. Security continues to be critical for the IoTs expansion and Silicon Labs has established a clear and unique leadership position in protecting IoT devices against bad actors.\nIn March, Silicon Labs became the world's first Silicon innovator to achieve PSA certified highest level of IoT hardware and software security. Our Secure Vault technology sets the standard for IoT security, effectively protecting against hardware and software attack. We've made strategic investments to ensure security as a core strength. Becoming the first company to achieve PSA level 3 certification is strong validation of our leadership role in securing the IoT.\nIn addition to delivering superior security in our high performance parts, we provide strong security in our battery optimized devices like the xG22, which just became the world's first wireless SoC to earn CCEF Level 3 Certification using the Diabetes Technology Society's DTSec security protection profile. DTSec sets the security standard for protecting personal and confidential healthcare data transmitted through connected devices.\nIn addition to becoming more secure the IoT is becoming more intelligent in areas such as motion detection, sound recognition, image classification and preventative maintenance. Developers innovating for these solutions faced obstacles and linking their machine learning models to real-world information. To help overcome these challenges, we have partnered with Edge Impulse to enable the integration of their tiny ML solution into our SoCs and MCUs. This is just one example of the ways that we are bringing the power of machine learning to developers of wireless edge devices.\n", "Smart lighting continues to be a key growth driver for IoT business and we have a strong position in the lighting market, to enlarge part to our unique combination of best-in-class SoCs, and industry-leading portfolio. Our 15.4 mesh and bluetooth low energy products are deployed throughout the smart lighting industry, which is growing at a CAGR of 30%. A great example of this is our work with Yeelight, we recently launched a new smart LED light bulb with our BG21 Bluetooth SoC. This smart lighting products enables users to connect and control smart home devices directly from the Google Home app without the need for any other apps or software.\nThe exceptional user experiences our technology helps deliver are influencing the broader IoT ecosystem which will help more and more IoT products become mainstream. We are world leader in providing wireless connectivity solutions for the smart home, pushing the envelope to improve simplicity and ease of use. We recently collaborated with Allterco, to create the Shelly Motion, a new WiFi motion sensor with the world's lowest power consumption in mass production today.\nShelly Motion features up to 3-year battery life before recharging and is ideal for a wide range of motion sensing applications like lighting and security. Shelly Motion is another great example of our relentless focus on designing produc" ]

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[ "It's the middle of the night and Steven Ford is wide awake. Insomniac Steven Ford says he needs to find a better way to wind down after a long day on the job. \"I toss and turn and watch the clock, sometimes at 3 in the morning, 2 in the morning,\" lamented Ford, 44, a commercial sign installer in Atlanta, Georgia. Valerie McCloskey, a 42-year-old mother of two from Grand Rapids, Michigan, complained of a similar problem. \"My husband is sound asleep next to me and I'm thinking about everything that I'm worried about.\" McCloskey and Ford are among a huge group of Americans who suffer from some type of insomnia. \"Sleep problems are very, very common,\" explained Dr. David Schulman, director of the Sleep Laboratory at Emory University in Atlanta. \"They affect more than a third of Americans in a given year.\" Health Minute: Watch more on sleep disorders » Sleep problems may be common, but Schulman stressed that insomnia is not normal if it lasts more than a month or two. He said most adults need about eight hours of sleep a night. In reality \"the average American sleeps just under seven hours,\" he said. \"That's a problem.\" A persistent lack of sleep or poor quality sleep can leave you feeling exhausted when you wake up. \"These folks are walking zombies,\" Schulman said. \"They are out there with four or five hours of sleep a night.\" Long-term sleep problems also may exacerbate other chronic medical conditions such as diabetes or hypertension, experts say. Before you can treat the problem, you probably need to figure out what kind of insomnia you're dealing with. The condition is classified as primary or secondary. The latter means that a patient may be having trouble sleeping because of a health condition or medication. Primary insomnia is not related to any side effects. It is considered its own disorder that can be broken down into two groups: sleep-onset insomnia and sleep-maintenance insomnia. Like its name, the sleep-onset version occurs in the beginning of the night when someone tries to fall asleep and can't. \"Sleep-maintenance insomnia is much less common,\" Schulman said. \"It occurs when somebody can go to sleep, but wakes up once or several times throughout the night and has difficulty resuming sleep.\" Stress, anxiety and depression may be some of the causes of chronic insomnia. ", "Before he prescribes medications, Schulman typically suggests that his patients try a number of things to regain control of their sleep cycle. First, he said, don't stay in bed for longer than 20 to 30 minutes if you can't fall asleep or fall back asleep. \"If you accustom your body to being in bed for hours at a time unable to fall asleep, that behavior to some degree becomes subconsciously ingrained,\" he said. Avoid caffeine within 8-10 hours of bedtime. Studies show that \"if you take caffeine at noon it's still in your system at 8 or 10 at night,\" Schulman said. Don't eat or exercise within three hours of bedtime. Schulman said both detract from sleep. He also suggested avoiding alcohol before bedtime because it might trigger a lighter sleep and make it more likely you'll wake up in the middle of the night. Finally, he recommended finding light, relaxing activities that will induce sleep, such as reading or listening to soft music. He cautioned insomniacs to avoid bright light before bedtime. He also warned against watching television and using video games and computers before turning out the lights. Cooling off might help. \"One of the ways you can fool your body into thinking it is cooling off is to heat it up just before bedtime,\" Schulman said. \"Take a warm bath or shower 30 to 45 minutes before going to sleep. As your body cools off afterwards, it is very sleep-inducing.\" Steven" ]

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[ "ects that we are actively working on today that are getting some preferential positioning as far as some European funding is concerned as well. Those will then move from 50 units of two megawatts, which you can imagine on the most efficient structure, to maybe five units or 20 units of five megawatts or five units of 20 megawatts as scale-up happens along the way. So the fact that, that scale up is happening, the fact that the technology road map is providing that capital efficiency and economies of scale is happening right now and preparing us for what's likely to happen in the next five years. I don't want to speculate at this stage as to what that likely backlog might look like five years down the road, but clearly, I'm encouraged by the developments I see.\nP.J. Juvekar -- Citi -- Analyst\nGreat. Thank you for the detailed answer. As you look at this technology road map and green hydrogen costs coming down, where do you see that? I know Steve had commented on some numbers maybe a year ago. And what about this production tax credit of $3 for green hydrogen? How would that play out?\nSanjiv Lamba -- Chief Operating Officer\nP.J., that production tax credit is actually very, it will be a very good supporting mechanism. We talked earlier on about in the previous question about how we see the incentives support the development, that $3 per kg will be a good support mechanism. We obviously have to read the rules and it hasn't yet come through. So I'm looking with some eagerness to that coming through and getting an understanding of how that, how those rules come into play. But that would be encouraging. Clearly, we believe that there is an opportunity here for us to move forward. Steve mentioned to you in the past that if we get hydrogen, blue or green, green, obviously more challenged in this reference, at about between $1 to $2 per kg, it's at that point that you see an inflection point and you see widespread adoption of technologies utilizing hydrogen and really hydrogen becoming a reasonable fuel in the portfolio fuels we'll have. We'll always have fossil fuel, at least for many decades ahead. But it will be a more important part of that portfolio of fuels and energy basket as it will. Steve, do you want to add something?\nStephen F. Angel -- Chief Executive Officer and Director\n", "Okay, Sanjiv, I'll add something. So yes, just to build on that, I mean, if you were to look at the cost of hydrogen today and you were to use the U.S. Gulf Coast, which obviously, we produce a lot of hydrogen, we use a lot of hydrogen in the U.S. Gulf Coast. Gray hydrogen is about $1.30 a kilogram, and that's at $5.50 natural gas. Carbon capture would add another $0.40, $0.50, maybe you're in the $1.7 range sort. And if you think about green, it's like about $4.5 a kilogram. And out of that, probably $2.50, you call it, is the renewable power cost. And so if renewable power was free, then you would still have $2. And we all know renewable power isn't free. So we have some work to do to bring those costs down in terms of capital costs, operating costs. And as you were to work that down below that $2 number, then you've got a chance to have something competitive. So you need the combination of low cost renewable, low cost capital, lower cost, operate low cost capital and better efficiencies and then you can drive that number lower. And I would say ideally below $2, but certainly in that range would be is what's needed.\nOperator\nAnd our last question comes from Vincent Andrews with Morgan Stanley.\nJuan Pelaez -- Head of Investor Relations\nDavid, it looks like he has an issue. I think with that, we can wrap it up. For everyone on the line, thank you so much for attending today's call. For your reference, a copy of our transcript will be posted on our website within the next 24 hours. Thank you for listening. And anything else, let me know. Take care.\nOperator\n[Operator Closing Remarks]\nDuration: 64 minutes\nCall participants:\nJuan Pelaez -- Head of Investor Relations\nStephen F. Angel -- Chief Executive Officer and Director\nSanjiv Lamba -- Chief Operatin" ]

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[ "easier-to-use robots that help scale tasks safely and transform workforces.\nWell, turning now to our communications business. 5G is beginning to broaden globally, especially in North America, as carriers look to deploy newly acquired C-band spectrum and ORAN continues to gain momentum also, with several of the largest European carriers setting ambitious 2025 ORAN deployment targets. This includes Vodafone, where our technologies are very well represented.\nThis quarter, we extended our market-leading position in 5G radio solutions with the introduction of the industry's first software-defined transceiver that includes a fully integrated digital front end. Our innovative radio architecture greatly improves power efficiency, thereby reducing radio weight, size and carrier expenses. This high level of integration eliminates FPGAs to simplify implementation and facilitate the proliferation of these emerging ORAN networks. Our next-generation transceiver platform is already designed in at a major Tier 1 global supplier that is gaining share in these 5G and ORAN deployments across North America as well as Europe.\nStepping back, we expect our communications business to return to growth in 2022. We have strong design momentum and our geographic mix has shifted with North America, Europe and Korea representing our largest sources of revenue.\nMoving now on to automotive. Over the last two years, we've realigned our business to focus on electrification and in-cabin human experience. We're seeing the benefits of this strategy, as we continue to scale our market leadership in battery management, power management, audio systems and connectivity.\nStarting firstly with our battery management systems, or BMS. Our wired and wireless portfolios provide unmatched accuracy to deliver market-leading vehicle range and can measure all key battery chemistries, including zero-cobalt LFP. Additionally, our solutions incorporate ASIL D functional safety and an ultra-low power continuous monitoring feature that ensures the battery remains stable even while parked, which is the first in the market.\nIn addition, this quarter marked the first time we recognized revenue for our wireless BMS solution, as General Motors prepares to ship its first of 30 EV models powered by the Ultium battery platform. And this is just the beginning for this groundbreaking BMS technology, as OEMs realized the power of wireless data in scaling their fleets.\n", "Turning to audio systems and connectivity, as complexity continues to increase. There is very strong demand for our market-leading audio systems with signal processing, A2B connectivity, and active road noise cancellation. Our solutions offer the highest fidelity performance in the market, while reducing vehicle weight, removing nearly 100 pounds per vehicle. During the quarter, two leading OEMs adopted A2B and a Top 3 European vehicle manufacturer implemented A2B as its audio connectivity standard across its entire fleet.\nIn total, A2B is now designed in over 30 OEMs, including 18 of the Top 20 global automotive companies. Furthermore, interest in our active road noise cancellation feature continues to intensify. We are designed in at nine OEMs, up from five just a year ago, including Hyundai and a leading EV manufacturer. This added capability can more than double the value of our A2B solution.\nIn all, these are just a few of the countless examples of the tremendous work underway at ADI. We remain focused on delivering breakthrough innovations to stay ahead of our customers' needs.\nSo in closing, I have never been more confident about ADI's future. Over the last decade, we've built an industry-leading portfolio with unparalleled breadth and depth of capabilities that's aligned with more profitable end markets and our portfolio and leadership position will only get stronger with the acquisition of Maxim, enabling us to deliver strong returns in the years to come.\nAnd so with that, I'll hand you over to Prashanth.\nPrashanth Mahendra-Rajah -- Senior Vice President, Finance and Chief Financial Officer\nThank you, Vince. Good" ]

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[ "es back 10 years. I haven't looked at it, but it was significant.\nAnd I think it's a combination of what we talked about. You know, for three years on these calls, we talked about when's 5G going to be real, right? And so we see it real now. And so you sell site routers that are backhaul. Routers are a big deal.\nPacket Core is a big deal. You get into the cloud providers and you have, you know, either stand-alone -- silicon stand-alone software or integrated systems. And increasingly, it's -- we're getting more integrated systems work, which has been helpful. The Edge with the ASR 9000, the Cisco 8000 has been obviously super successful in the NCS product line.\nOptical, acacia is doing very well. And so all those technologies just line up. And I think that when you look at the -- I'd say, I'd summarize it with three major trends, just us getting into the 400-gig build-out in the cloud, plus the 5G build-out in the service provider space and then a rearchitecture that's happening in the service provider space to just basically flatten and simplify the whole routed optical network strategy that our teams have talked about. Those are the drivers.\nAnd you had a second question, Rod.\nRod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nYeah. I wanted to come back to the backlog and maybe see if Scott, if you have aged that at all? I mean, could you give us any idea? I know it's, you know, within the RPO, but could you give us any idea on aging on that just so we could try to reconcile? I mean, obviously, the talks down. Reason it's probably down is because the growth rate here just doesn't match the order growth, and people are going to try to reconcile that. And I thought, well, maybe you could give us some kind of aging that would help us to, you know, make some progress on that.\nSo I'm just curious if you can help with that. Thanks.\nScott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer\n", "You know, Rod, thanks for that question. This is something that our supply chain team is working day and night to try to resolve. We obviously can look at that and understand what's in the backlog quite well. What I'd say is what we're working through is really a prioritization mechanism on how we can get things shipped out that are going to make sense to our customers and get those out there as quickly as possible.\nSo there is some aging inside there, Rod. Rather than try to quantify that for you, what I'd say instead is it's something that we are -- our team is working night and day to try to resolve.\nRod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nOK. Great. Thank you.\nScott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer\nAnd by the way, If it's sitting in the backlog, obviously, it's not an RPO yet. It's not in RPO, so it's incremental to RPO. \nChuck Robbins -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer\nRight.\nRod Hall -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nOh, sorry, yes, I misspoke. Sorry about that. \nThank you.\nMarilyn Mora -- Head of Investor Relations\nAll right. Thanks, Rod. Next question. \nOperator\nMatthew Niknam from Deutsche Bank. You may go ahead.\nMatthew Niknam -- Deutsche Bank -- Analyst\nHey, guys. Thank you for taking the questions. Just two, if I could. First, on gross margins.\nI think the guide for next quarter implies you're going to be down about 50 bps at the midpoint despite some of the seasonal lift you've typically seen in fiscal 2Q. So I'm just wondering, is it entirely worsening supply chain constraints? Or are there other factors to consider? And then secondly, I guess more broadly, a question on capital allocation. At the Analyst Day, you talked about using the buyback to continue to use it to offset dilution for stock options, but you're also sitting on $23 billion in cash. Wondering if there are any updates you can share in terms of strategy here? And on a related point, what you're seeing on the M&A front in terms of larger scale, more transformational opportunities? Thanks.\nScott Herren -- Chief Financial Officer\nOK. You snuck in three there, Matthew, but I'll start with the gross margin question. The guide that we gave for the quarter at 63.5 to 64.5 is exactly the same guide tha" ]

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[ "experiences for customers such as Tencent. We also announced the gold release of one API, our cross-industry open standards-based unified programming model that delivers a common developer experience across architectures.\nSecond, we've made strong progress extending our reach to accelerate our growth. Over the past several years, we have been making investments that have positioned us to lead key technology inflections such as AI, 5G network transformation, and the intelligent autonomous edge. We infuse AI capabilities into everything we make from the cloud to PCs and we see tremendous growth prospects as we build our position in data center training to complement the strength of our Intel Xeon for inference. We made a significant step in AI this quarter when Amazon announced EC2 instances that will leverage up to eight of our Habana Gaudi AI training accelerators, and deliver up to 40% better price-performance than current GPU-based EC2 instances for machine learning workloads.\nWe've also invested to drive networking workload convergence on Intel silicon. In 2020, we expanded our footprint into the Radio Access Network delivering Xeon SoCs, FPGAs, and custom solutions for 5G base station designs and reaching our goal of 40% share, two years ahead of our original target. Today, we are the leading network silicon provider winning in the wireless, enterprise, and cloud networks, and delivering $6 billion in revenue this year, up approximately 20% versus 2019. Finally, we have enviable assets to lead the explosive growth of intelligent and autonomous edge computing.\nOur IOTG and Mobileye businesses have combined annual revenue of $4 billion. Mobileye delivered a record fourth quarter and had an explosive start to 2021 with a number of exciting CES announcements. Third, we've maintained our discipline in thoughtfully allocating our shareholders' capital. Since 2015, we have grown revenue by more than $22 billion and more than doubled EPS.\n", "We've driven spending from 36% of revenue to 25% of revenue while investing in manufacturing capacity expansion, adding more than $1 billion of R&D targeted to higher growth initiatives, and focusing our product portfolio. As a result, we anticipate approximately $12 billion in proceeds from our NAND and McAfee exits over time. At the same time, we've been delivering substantial capital returns to shareholders, including $19.8 billion in 2020 alone through dividends and share buybacks, the latter of which included a $10 billion accelerated share repurchase announced in August. Building on this, today, we announced that we are increasing our annual dividend by $0.07, or 5% from $1.32 to $1.39 per share.\nBefore I pass it to George for more details on our fourth-quarter results, I want to reiterate that I couldn't be more proud of the team at Intel and I cherish the time I've spent here. I look forward to watching Pat and the team's continued progress as they build on Intel's purpose to deliver breakthrough technology that enriches the lives of everyone on the planet. I also thank our investors and analysts on the line today for their continued support of Intel and for our valued engagements over the years.\nGeorge Davis -- Chief Financial Officer\nThanks, Bob, and good afternoon everyone. Q4 marked a much stronger than expected finish to a record year. Both Mobileye and our PC-centric segment achieved record quarters. Q4 revenue was $20 billion, exceeding our guidance by $2.6 billion.\nThe revenue beat was broad-based led by stronger than expected notebook and cloud demand, along with contributions from desktop and enterprise and government. Datacenter related demand also led to stronger revenues in NAND. The gross margin for the quarter was 58.4%, exceeding the guide by 3 points due to flow through on higher revenue, and the benefit of Ice Lake server achieving production qualification prior to year-end. Q4 EPS was $1.52, $0.42 above our guide due to strong operational performance, and further boosted by gains from our ICAP portfolio.\nExcluding a one-time tax adjustment, about two-thirds of our" ]

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[ "ndars.\nTo conclude, we've had a strong start to the year and look forward with confidence despite the continued uncertainty on the operating environment due to COVID. This is the same concluding slide I presented at Investor Day in February, as I believe our start to 2021 demonstrates all of the key elements of our longer-term trajectory. Through IQOS we are building a business with multiple levers to deliver superior and sustainable growth over the coming year through improved volume dynamic, excellent topline growth, strong margin expansion and fast-growing earnings. Moreover, while every adult smoker who switches to IQOS is good for our business, it is also a clear positive for our impact on society and public health. We manage our transformation with care and responsibility for our stakeholders, guided by our sustainability materiality framework to maximize our positive impact across our Tier one ESG and product areas. This is essential for the sustainability of our business, and for delivering superior returns for shareholders over the long term. The increase in our organic growth outlook for 2021 is another step on this journey, also putting us nicely on track to achieve our 2023 financial and HTU shipment targets.\nThank you. I am now more than happy to answer your questions.\nQuestions and Answers:\nOperator\n[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Vivien Azer of Cowen.\nVivien Azer -- Cowen -- Analyst\nGood morning.\nEmmanuel Babeau -- Chief Financial Officer\nGood morning, Vivien.\nVivien Azer -- Cowen -- Analyst\nSo given some of the headlines coming out of the US yesterday, it might be helpful, please, for my first question, if you could just level-set on IQOS's designation in your international markets in terms of the type of tobacco product from the tax perspective. Thanks.\nEmmanuel Babeau -- Chief Financial Officer\nSo, I guess Vivien, if I understand, well, your question is, how is our heat-not-burn offer and product classified versus combustible cigarette in our non-US geographies. Correct?\nVivien Azer -- Cowen -- Analyst\nThat's correct. Yes, please.\nEmmanuel Babeau -- Chief Financial Officer\n", "Right. So I'm not sure that I'm going to be able to give one general answer because the classification can be different from one country to the other. I would say, today, probably the fact that the excise duty applied to our IQOS product is differentiated in the vast majority of the markets show that the treatment is differentiated, so the product is addressed already in a distinct manner on that particular element recognizing that it's a different product with a different feature than the combustible cigarettes. So we are, of course, going to see some situation that can be different from one market to the other, we are certainly welcoming a regulation that will further clarify the fact that these heat-not-burn products are clearly different and a better alternative to combustible in the future and as I think I mentioned, we see the regulation progressing nicely country after country to take that into account, have been taking a few example during my previous speech and we expect that to continue.\nSo, we expect more and more government regulated to further clarify distinction between heat-not-burn and other reduced risk products and combustible cigarettes and come as well with different regulation and as you know, we are calling for a differentiated approach on two items, certainly on the way we can communicate on these better alternatives and better product than the combustible cigarette. And also of course on taxation to make sure that we have an incentive to push the smokers to this better alternative for their health.\nVivien Azer -- Cowen -- Analyst\nCertainly. That's helpful. Thank you very much. And then my follow-up, if you could just provide your assessment of the risk, other countries potentially implementing a nicotine cap on combustible cigarettes. Thank you.\nEmmanuel Babeau -- Chief Financial Officer\nWell, I think that is something that as you rightly say, Vivien, is not implemented anywhere today, and" ]

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[ "t?\nRui Chen -- Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer\n[Foreign Speech] So as regards the overall video industry, actually it's a fast-growing and a very big market. According to third-party research data that the current video user has already reached 750 million in China, and we think as the adoption of 5G technology and the revolution of hardware and infrastructures, I'm projecting that overall video users can grow to 800 million or 900 million in the next few years.\n[Foreign Speech] So as a matter of fact, video as an industry vertical on the Internet space is actually one of the largest verticals. And for the past few years, you can -- you must have witnessed many new players -- many players in the video industry grow quite significantly. And that has also a very direct relation to the expansion of the market. And we don't believe one or two new additional players entering this market will make a material impact or difference from this growth trajectory.\n[Foreign Speech] Okay. So a lot of people have asked that for the past two years, how do it will impact the overall industry? But as a matter of fact, we are able to maintain a fast growth [Indecipherable] gaining there market share. Many people would probably will argue that it's the different -- there's a different of lens in terms of short video and long-form video, but we believe we are actually the player who gives definition of PUGVs, and we have the most experience in terms of PUGV.\n[Foreign Speech] So we are -- we have been putting PUGC as our primary business model for at least five years. And for the past five years, we have gained a lot of experience. And actually, we kind of feel alone in this track, and now we have more players starting to pay more attention on this business model. We believe this is another test -- a different perspective on another side of the story, which means this track has great potential to grow.\n[Foreign Speech] And this business model requires unique expertise in terms of operation as well as running a platform. So for the newcomers, I think there's going to be a learning -- at least a learning curve for them and won't yield result in short terms.\n", "[Foreign Speech] So, as for your question about the competitive cost related to more player joining in these verticals, we believe for this industry, we have long passed the phase that people have to burn cash to fiber content or KOLs. This is -- we have already entered a phase that we compete with each other in terms of the overall industry layout, the business operation capabilities, as well as whether content creators are able to achieve their career goals on our platform to able to grow their traffic on our platform. So, it won't have a significant impact in terms of single cost, whether it's content or sales and marketing.\nOperator\nAnd that concludes the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to management for any additional or closing remarks.\nJuliet Yang -- Senior Director of Investor Relations\nWell, thank you once again for joining us today. If you have any further questions, please contact myself, Juliet Yang, Bilibili's Senior IR Director or TPG Investor Relations. Our contact information for IR in both China and US can be found on today's press release. Have a great day.\nDuration: 69 minutes\nCall participants:\nJuliet Yang -- Senior Director of Investor Relations\nNi Li -- Vice Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Operating Officer\nXin Fan -- Chief Financial Officer\nRui Chen -- Chairman of the Board & Chief Executive Officer\nLei Zhang -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst\nWendy Chen -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nAlex Liu -- China Renaissance -- Analyst\nThomas Chong -- Jefferies -- Analyst\nJialong Shi -- Nomura Securities -- Analyst\nMore BILI analysis\nAll earnings call transcripts\n\n\n\n\n" ]

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[ "aphy for you. Can you give us some color there on what you're seeing in terms of the order book and pull through? And how do you see those trends evolving post-NMPA approval here?\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. I think it's too early to say post-approval. I think we'll wait and see and talk to Barry. That's pretty fresh news.\nBut I think in China, we're seeing the business continue to be strong. Hopefully, it continues to be decent.\nSusan Kim -- Chief Financial Officer\nIt still continues to be strong, improving since COVID every quarter.\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. It continues to improve. And so I think we're really bullish on China. I think there's macro factors that are completely outside of our control between the U.S.\nand China that maybe I start to lose sleep over a little bit, but they're completely out of our control. But based on what we control and what we can see and what customers are actually doing with our technology, we're quite encouraged, and we think the opportunity is still in front of us, quite frankly.\nTejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nGot it. Really helpful. Thanks, guys.\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYup.\nOperator\nAnd for the next question, Dan Brennan of Cowen. Please go ahead, sir.\nDan Brennan -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGreat. Thanks. Thanks for taking the question. Hey, Christian.\nHey, Susan. Maybe just, Christian, you alluded to it a couple of times during the call, but just on the funnel itself, I don't know in the past kind of look on a clarity you provide on it. But just could you give a sense of what the funnel looks like today maybe like customer segment and kind of how it's evolved over the course of 2021?\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. First of all, Dan, congrats on your new role. We're going to miss Doug, but it's good to have you on the ball club. With respect to the funnel itself, let's state that we haven't given a lot of color, and I don't think we will give a lot of color because those processes internally are evolving and are being built and improving all the time.\n", "We've spent a ton of time this year defining the funnel more, creating a common language from which the sales force can communicate with each other and with executives so that we get much better about forecast accuracy, so that we can stand up in front of you and give you what we hope to be pretty reliable projections. One of the things we talked about for the first time, kind of some of the segment, market areas that we're focused on and our relative revenues. The reality is that the company didn't have any of those capabilities, and we had to come in and build that. And so at this time, I really -- it's probably not appropriate for me to give you more color on the specific funnel other than the general comment that often use.\nThis -- the increasing commercial footprint is directly impacting the quality and the size of the funnel, which does give us generally better visibility into the future than perhaps we've had in the past. But at any given quarter, since instruments are still such a significant part of our quarterly revenues and they're quite binary because they're large dollar numbers, they could have an impact on any given quarter. But if you look out over time, we're very encouraged what we see in the funnel that there is very strong demand for these products and platforms. This will help us grow.\nAs we grow, we will be able to improve our gross margins. As we improve our gross margins, we'll be able to get better leverage across the business and make that push toward ultimately getting to cash flow breakeven and better.\nDan Brennan -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGreat. No, that was helpful. Thanks, Christian. Maybe just a high-level one on kind of academic funding.\nObviously, it seems to be pretty robust from the headline figures and entering '22. Is that something -- clearly you've got a lot of growth levers at your disposal, which you've discussed, but is that something " ]

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[ "gment on track to have $80 billion in sales globally by 2025; and in which we're constantly expanding our product portfolio including our recently introduced Bio-Kult Brighten, which includes ingredients to reduce tiredness and fatigue.\nAnd then there is pet food, which is forecast to grow to more than $130 billion globally by 2025 and an area in which we launched our new premium cat food in Mexico, earlier this year. The list goes on. Renewable green diesel, pharmaceuticals and personal care, beverages all large high-growth opportunities powered by macro consumer trends like sustainability and health and wellbeing. And in each of those segments and more, our unparalleled global footprint, fully integrated value chain, customer insight, broad portfolio and speed to market are setting us ahead of the competition and fueling our growth. That's why, we are so optimistic about our path forward. Of course, there are always going to be short-term factors for us to navigate. But those are not things that will impact our long-term success.\nOur confidence is rooted in the transformation we began a decade ago and which continues with our work in productivity and innovation, as well as our expanding participation in large and fast-growing market opportunities. So to conclude, we have a great start of the year and we expect to continue our momentum, in the second half to deliver very strong 2021 earnings. As we've discussed, we are moving to a new phase of our strategic growth plan. With what we have accomplished over the years on capital discipline targeted cost reductions and cash generation and moving through our portfolio transformation and our efforts to optimize business performance, drive efficiencies and expand strategically. I believe we have successfully increased our base earnings power from $3 a share back in 2015 to a range of $4 to $4.50 this year.\nAnd now, as we enter the next stage of our growth leveraging the key macro trends of food security health and well-being and sustainability with our continued focus on productivity and innovation and with future targeted investments, we believe our medium-term,annual earnings trend growth rate will be in the high single-digit percentages from these $4 to $4.50 per share baseline.\nWith that, operator please open the line for questions.\nQuestions and Answers:\nOperator\n[Operator Instructions] Your first question is from Adam Samuelson of Goldman Sachs.\nAdam Samuelson -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nYes. Thank you, and good morning, everyone.\nJuan Luciano -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer\nGood morning, Adam.\nRay Young -- Chief Financial Officer\n", "Good morning.\nAdam Samuelson -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nI want -- maybe just something you just mentioned in the prepared remarks the $4 to $4.50 baseline of EPS this year and the high single-digit growth thereafter just to be clear is that -- should we take that as a reasonably formal EPS range for 2021 just given the performance year-to-date? I just want to clarify just, how we're framing that.\nJuan Luciano -- Chairman & Chief Executive Officer\nYes, Adam. Listen, when we were -- when we put together the previous phase of the strategy, we were looking at growing as I said before from $3 to land in the $4 to $4.50 area and achieve 10% ROIC. As we started to see those goals in sight, we started on the development of the new phase of the strategy. So, we took that base of $4 to $4.50 and we created a five-year plan. When we put together that plan, with all these opportunities that I highlighted and focused on productivity and innovation, that plan shows that from that base of $4 to $4.50 will grow over the next five years at the rate of high single-digit growth per year. So that's what we said in the -- at the outlook. Hello? Are we still on the line?\nAdam Samuelson -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nI'm sorry. And then, just a market macro question, if I may. Just, we've seen some volatility in oilseed crush margins around the world of late. It seems like, especially, in China, the soy meal demand has waned a little bit, with the wheat substitut" ]

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[ "Tyler Perry is known today as the first African-American to own a major film and TV studio. He's a pioneer whose own life story is a rags-to-riches tale that reads like a screenplay. Tyler Perry is the first African-American to own a major film and TV studio. Now a writer, actor, director and producer -- Perry's success grew out of a troubled home in a poor neighborhood in New Orleans, Louisiana. Strong on faith, Perry named his first play \"I Know I've Been Changed,\" after an old Negro spiritual. It was a gospel musical about two adult survivors of child abuse. In 1991, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where he worked as a bill collector and eventually scraped together enough money to rent a small theatre and stage the play. With only 30 people in the audience, the play was a flop. For the next several years, he struggled and was often broke and sometimes lived in his car. But Perry refused to give up. He finally got a second chance in 1998, when a promoter booked the show in the Tabernacle, a former church turned concert hall in downtown Atlanta. It was a sold out hit and the little boy from inner-city New Orleans was well on his way. Perry then took his plays on the road and traveled the so-called \"chitlin' circuit\" to theaters in Memphis, Tennessee, Detroit, Michigan, and Baltimore, Maryland -- where black entertainers historically performed for predominantly black audiences. He began making a name for himself with African-Americans. In 2004, he started looking for backers for his first movie project \"Diary of Mad Black Woman,\" a story about a devoted wife in a bad marriage. He said he faced a wall of ignorance when he pitched white executives in Hollywood. One told him the project was doomed to fail at the box office because the core audience for Perry's stage plays -- black churchgoers -- wouldn't go to the movies. Another said the dialogue for his characters was unrealistic. Though he was largely unknown to white audiences, Perry refused to play by Hollywood's rules and demanded creative control of his projects. Tour of Tyler Perry's back lot » He was resigned to bankrolling the project himself and selling it as a DVD when he got a call from the independent studio Lionsgate. They struck a deal and he made \"Diary\" for about $5 million. The movie earned 10 times that at the box office. ", "Since then, Perry's movies have grossed nearly $400 million and he's developed a loyal following. He now demands not only creative control but also ownership of the finished product. Still, it's just the beginning, he said. \"I don't necessarily feel like I've arrived.\" Even so, Perry has a prolific output of stories, including his movies \"Why Did I Get Married,\" \"Meet the Browns,\" \"The Family that Preys,\" and \"Madea's Family Reunion.\" He signed a $200 million deal with TBS (owned by Time Warner, the same company that owns CNN) for 100 episodes of \"House of Payne,\" one of television's most popular shows among black adults. The sitcom is now in syndication, making even more money for Perry. Perry said ownership of the finished product is key to building wealth, a principle he hopes other African-Americans will embrace. How are entertainment heavyweights changing black stereotypes? \"If you want to think about longevity,\" he said, \"if you want to think about your family and generations down the line, then you have to own it.\" And own it he does. Tyler Perry Studios, on 30 acres in Atlanta, is his black Hollywood. But he is quick to acknowledge his debt to the legendary black actors from an earlier generation by naming two of his soundstages after Sidney Poitier and Cicely Tyson. He has also helped introduce them to a new generation by casting Tyson, 76" ]

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[ " for EPAM to play in the broad application development and cloud integration services market, which leading analysts are projecting to be resurging in the post-pandemic environment.\nIn comparison -- in combination of custom software development, cloud-native integration work, technology consulting and training services, and which represents a total over $700 billion in 2021 alone or about 60% of the total global IT services market. While thinking about this in context of near-term demand for EPAM and the lagging effect of the pandemic on our customers, we still anticipate some continued disruption in a few of our customers and markets and probably longer-term damage for certain industries. However, today, when 2020 is already in the past and while we are obviously still not being out of post-pandemic time zone and specific geopolitical risks, we do believe that 2021 will be a year of return to 20-plus-percent growth organically. With that, let me hand the call over to Jason to provide more specifics in our 2020 results and our annual business outlook, which we are resuming for fiscal 2021.\nJason Peterson -- Chief Financial Officer\nThank you, Ark and good morning, everyone. We are pleased with our 2020 fiscal year performance, especially given the dynamic environment. Our results demonstrate the durability of our portfolio, adaptability of our people and highlight EPAM's ability to meet the needs of clients even during challenging times. In the fourth quarter, EPAM generated revenue of $723.5 million, a year-over-year increase of 14.3% on a reported basis and 13.7% in constant-currency terms, reflecting a positive foreign exchange impact of approximately 60 basis points.\nRevenue came in higher than previously guided due to our ability to expand our delivery capacity in response to a stronger-than-anticipated demand environment. Revenues also benefited somewhat from the beforementioned foreign exchange contribution. Our industry vertical performance in Q4 produced very strong sequential improvement, driven by a higher level of growth from both new work and existing clients and revenue from new customer relationships established over the last 12 months. Looking at year-over-year performance across this group.\n", "Life Sciences & Healthcare grew 24%. Growth in the quarter was driven by data and analytics, platform development to support new business models and client investments to improve R&D efficiency. Business information and media delivered 16.2% growth in the quarter. Financial services grew 16.1% with growth coming from traditional banking, insurance and, to a lesser degree, wealth management.\nSoftware and hi-tech grew 14.3% in the quarter. Travel and Consumer returned to growth and increased 5.4% yaer over year. In Q4, we saw strong growth from our consumer clients, along with solid and improving performance within retail as clients made investments in response to the dramatic changes in their operating environments. Finally, our emerging vertical delivered 13.1% growth, driven by clients in telecommunications, automotive and materials.\nFrom a geographic perspective, North America, our largest region, representing 59.9% of our Q4 revenues, grew 14% yaer over year or 13.7% in constant currency. Europe, representing 32% of our Q4 revenues, grew 11.8% yaer over year or 7.5% in constant currency. CIS, representing 5.2% of our Q4 revenues, grew 22.9% yaer over year and 45.2% in constant currency. Similar to Q3, growth in the CIS region was driven primarily by clients in financial services and materials.\nAnd finally, APAC grew 39.4% yaer over year or 35.7% in constant-currency terms and now represents 2.9% of our revenues. APAC growth in the quarter was primarily driven by clients in financial services. In the fourth quarter, year-over-year growth in our top 20 clients was 16.6%, and growth outside our top 20 clients was 12.8%. And moving down the income statement.\nAs mentioned last quarter, we continue to run the business with a cost base that is lower than previous levels. While the lower cost base is driven by operational e" ]

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[ "Greece's opposition Socialist party on Sunday defeated the incumbent center-right government of Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis, as Socialist leader George Papandreou promised to chart a new course for an economic comeback. Socialist George Papandreou is set to become Greece's next prime minister. \"On this course, nothing is going to be easy -- it will take work, hard work,\" Papandreou said in his victory address. \"And I will always be honest with the Greek people so that we may better solve the problems of the state.\" Sunday's national elections were held two years before originally scheduled. Karamanlis called the elections in response to pressure from Papandreou's Panhellenic Socialist Movement of Greece, which threatened to block the election of a president in February if no general election was held. The Greek constitution requires the two major parties to agree on the election of a president, giving either party an effective veto. Karamanlis' term was not due to expire until September 2011. But Papandreou insisted on new elections before the end of President Karolos Papoulias' term as president. The country's ailing economy was the focus in the run up to the elections, as both candidates offered conflicting prescriptions to revive it. While Karamanlis called for cuts in spending, Papandreou proposed a massive stimulus. Karamanlis, of the New Democracy party, congratulated Papandreou in a nationally televised concession speech. \"And like every Greek, I hope that he succeeds at the big challenge of facing up to the economic situation,\" Karamanlis said. \"Because this challenge, I have said many times, is a national issue.\" It was unclear whether Karamanlis would step down as New Democracy party leader, as the elections marked the worst defeat the party has seen in more than 20 years. According to figures posted on the Interior Ministry's Web site, the Socialist party received 44 percent of the vote, compared wotj New Democracy's 34 percent, with 87 percent of votes counted. The margin is the largest seen in a Greek vote in decades. The Socialist party will receive an estimated 160 seats in Greece's 300-seat Parliament, officials said, compared with New Democracy's 93 seats. Greek state television ERT showed cheering, flag-waving crowds surrounding Papandreou as he made his way to party headquarters. ", "\"All of the opinion polls are suggesting that Greek voters are becoming more frustrated with (Karamanlis') governance, more frustrated that after two parliamentary terms some of the objectives which he'd set have not been achieved,\" Kevin Featherstone, director of the London School of Economics' Hellenic Observatory, told CNN. However, Papandreou's stimulus plan is also under scrutiny, with critics wanting to know more details, such as how it would be funded. In addition, problems such as corruption have long plagued the Greek government, Featherstone noted. \"These are systemic problems. These are problems which have been in Greece for generations. Over the last 20 years, we've had a succession of governments coming into power promising to clean up, promising to tackle waste, promising to reform the public administration, promising to be more transparent and clean,\" he said. \"By and large, voters have been disappointed or there has been some fair degree of frustration and disappointment.\" \"Tackling the problem, these endemic problems, really requires major efforts to reform public administration to tackle corruption and to change the culture of expectations,\" he said. Karamanlis' conservative New Democracy party suffered a sharp setback in European elections in June, when the Socialists matched New Democracy's tally of eight seats, with 36 percent of the vote. That election was seen as a litmus test for Karamanlis at a time of political and economic uncertainty with the economy shrinking and the country staring at a recession after nearly 15 years of high-profile growth. Nearly 10 million Greeks are registered to vote. CNN's Christine Theodorou and Journalist Anthee Carrasava contributed to this report." ]

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[ "G. So there is devices and equipment that hasn't even been invented yet. That will be taken advantage of the Internet of Things and a lot of that's going to take place in the lab. So we see this future unfolding of 5G as a balanced business opportunity for us in the lab and in the field. Hopefully that explains it a little bit more clearly.\nScott Schneeberger -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst\nThat's good. That's helpful. I'd just ask one more and then I'll turn it over. In adware, it sounds like things are going well there. Utilization flattish year-over-year but good rate I believe I saw. Could you speak to industry capacity conditions, because I think that's an interesting dynamic there. And then also how is your visibility across the end markets you serve. If you wouldn't mind going around the hone a little bit on that? Thank you.\nJoseph F. Hanna -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nSure. Industry capacity I mean, we're seeing from our competitors that utilization is improving and ours is improving also. It's not where we want it to be at this point but it is improving and we're very happy about that. So we think the demand picture is healthier than it was a year ago and we're very glad to see that.\nFrom a regional perspective, all five of our regions actually grew on a year-over-year basis so we are very happy about that and four of six of the industry verticals that we serve also were growing. And that was really strength -- the strength that we saw there was in oil and gas and both upstream and downstream. So that's kind of a brief recap for you.\nKeith E. Pratt -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nAnd Scott, if I could just add while Adler's utilization on average for the quarter was down very slightly, we did have period and utilization that was up nicely compared to a year ago and higher than the average for the quarter. That was at 59.2%.\nScott Schneeberger -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst\nThanks. And then just following up on that. It seems like you guys are quite disciplined on price and the industry is improving there. So going forward, should we look to anticipate all your -- operating metrics aligning in that segment to the positive or is that not something you'd feel comfortable stating at this point?\nJoseph F. Hanna -- President and Chief Executive Officer\n", "Yeah. Scott I think that challenge on this business and it's similar to our electronics business with these shorter transactions, shorter rental term transactions a lot can change every few months. So I think you've got a sense of the disciplines that our teams apply in pursuit of the business. But again, we're going to ride the wave of general overall market conditions and competitor behavior and then try and do well in that context. So if the industry is healthy, if the market demand is there, we'll keep working on the things we've been working on, disciplined pricing looking to utilize more of the equipment we already own.\nScott Schneeberger -- Oppenheimer and Company -- Analyst\nAll right, great. Thanks, Keith appreciate that.\nKeith E. Pratt -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nThanks, Scott.\nOperator\nOur next question comes from the line of Marc Riddick with Sidoti. Your line is now open.\nMarc Riddick -- Sidoti & Company -- Analyst\nHi. Good afternoon.\nJoseph F. Hanna -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nHi, Marc.\nKeith E. Pratt -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nHi, Marc.\nMarc Riddick -- Sidoti & Company -- Analyst\nI was wondered -- I was wondering if you could spend a little more time on the comments that you made around education and the order patterns being maybe a little head of what you've seen in the past. And why don't if you just sort of give us a little bit more color there. And maybe from a sense of -- was there anything about locales that were a little ahead of where you've seen in the past and maybe what that might do for visibility and how you then make get the benefit from that?\nKeith E. Pratt -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nSure. Well f" ]

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[ "ly high-speed connection in over a short distance that's unimpeded by any objects, it's possible. But there is some challenge. Now over time that could evolve and it may be just a way for the technology to evolve and make it cost-effective and also performance-effective. But right now it's a little bit out of the aperture. A lot of our customers are not looking at it right now. Some are. We do have some small incremental bets on millimeter wave. And as we've talked about, we have our own fab. So we can run some of the technologies that we need to, if that starts to blossom. But we talk to our customers and that's where we get our cues. And we share information about technology [Indecipherable] to help them. But at this point, I don't think it's going to be a significant element in 5G, at least for the next year.\nHarsh Kumar -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst\nUnderstood. And very helpful. Thank you, Liam. And then I think at the beginning of the call I think Vivek had asked a question on content increases. And I believe you answered a lot of stuff, but I think you might have skipped that part. I was curious what ex Wi-Fi upgrades and other kind of things like Bluetooth upgrades that might be happening on the RF side, just pure cellular content increase in 5G over 4G? What are you guys seeing? Would you put that as in line with historical or greater than that or even if you want to give a number and be generous with us, we will take that.\nLiam K. Griffin -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nIt's going to be more than -- OK. I'll tell you, it's not -- it's going to be higher than the 3G to 4G upgrade, that I definitely believe. And again it's because the content, the physical content and the specific devices that are necessary to build the 5G solution that incremental value is bigger than the incremental value that went from 3G to 4G. That's an absolute fact.\n", "Now the question is who is best positioned to capitalize. We have an incredibly broad reach. We have engagements with all the customers, we have the unique technologies that we've noted, not just with capacity, but as Kris said, technology. So we love that. So we think there is going to be a meaningful multi-dollar opportunity. We talked about in our presentations, maybe $5 to $7 or more incremental from 4G. And then the capture on that is all about how do you execute, how do you provide the best solution to your customer and how you bring that to market on time. So those are the factors and that's the stuff we love to do. I mean, that's the strength of our Company.\nOperator\nLadies and gentlemen, that concludes today's question-and-answer session. I'll now turn the call back over to Mr. Griffin for any closing remarks.\nLiam K. Griffin -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nThank you all for participating on today's call. We look forward to seeing you at upcoming investor conferences during the quarter. Thank you.\nOperator\n[Operator Closing Remarks]\nDuration: 47 minutes\nCall participants:\nMitch Haws -- Investor Relations\nLiam K. Griffin -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nKris Sennesael -- Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nVivek Arya -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst\nTimothy Arcuri -- UBS -- Analyst\nToshiya Hari -- Goldman Sachs -- Analyst\nTom O'Malley -- Barclays Capital -- Analyst\nAmbrish Srivastava -- BMO -- Analyst\nBill Peterson -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst\nEdward Snyder -- Charter Equity Research -- Analyst\nCraig Ellis -- B. Riley FBR -- Analyst\nChris Caso -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nKarl Ackerman -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nHarsh Kumar -- Piper Jaffray -- Analyst\nMore SWKS analysis\nAll earnings call transcripts\n\n\n\n\n" ]

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[ " to enable sustainable, flexible film packaging with recycled content. Our actions to advance plastic circularity are value-accretive to Dow. And our differentiated product slate, downstream knowledge, intimacy with consumer brands and strategic partnerships give us a leading-edge to capture this growth.\nTurning to Slide 9. As Howard mentioned, Dow remains well-positioned to benefit from improving industry and market conditions. We see several positive leading indicators, including momentum and job growth, consumer spending, a return to air travel and expanding manufacturing and industrial activity for global manufacturing PMIs at a 15-year high in March. These trends are further supported by government stimulus measures and accelerating vaccine rollouts globally.\nThe spending elements of the U.S. infrastructure plan, if passed, will further support growth in our downstream markets. Similarly, incentives aligned to more sustainable energy solutions should be beneficial to our business and to attaining our own sustainability targets. These programs are not currently included in our assumptions, but could drive additional growth if enacted in a manner that supports manufacturing competitiveness.\nThese macro trends translate into a one to two times GDP growth across key end markets, including packaging, infrastructure, mobility, consumer durables and industrials and home and personal care. Given this backdrop, we see demand in our key value chains continuing to outpace supply throughout 2021 and staying balanced in the near-term across ethylene, polyethylene, polyurethanes, acrylics and silicones chains. Some industry views call for softening conditions in the near term, largely based on their view of planned capacity additions. However, these views do not account for industry project delays or cancellations nor do they account for the maintenance activity or reliability impact from weather-related events like the winter storm.\n", "Industry delays and cancellations of planned capacity additions, along with elevated demand growth as the global economy continues to reopen will likely lead to tighter than predicted market conditions, all of which will result in continued earnings, margin and cash flow growth for our core businesses and joint ventures in the near term. And while we capture these improved earnings over the next several years in our core businesses, our current slate of lower capital, faster payback and higher return capacity expansions will add nearly $1 billion of accretive earnings to our bottom line. Dow's points of distinction continue to raise our earnings and cash flow potential relative to peers. The market growth we expect in our business, combined with our industry-leading feedstock flexibility, global scale and advantaged cost positions, our top quartile cash generation and our innovation and leadership in high-growth end markets enable Dow to continue to deliver value for our owners through 2021 and over the foreseeable future.\nWith that, I'll turn it back to Pankaj to open the Q&A.\nPankaj Gupta -- Director, Investor Relations\nThank you, Jim. Now let's move on to your questions. I would like to remind you that our forward-looking statements apply to both our prepared remarks and the following Q&A. Operator, please provide the Q&A instructions.\nQuestions & Answers:\nOperator\n[Operator instructions] And we'll move to our first question from David Begleiter with Deutsche Bank.\nDavid Begleiter -- Deutsche Bank -- Analyst\nThank you. Good morning. Jim and Howard, in plastics, how are you thinking about sequential earnings improvement here? Given the price margin growth we are seeing, can you get to $2 billion of EBITDA in Q2? Is that possible?\nJim Fitterling -- Chairman and Chief Executive Chairman\nGood morning, David. As you noted, obviously, we continue to see strong demand growth in plastics. And if you look at our sales, we're looking at 3% to 7% higher sales in the quarter. And obviously, operating rates should be much improved given that we won't have the impact of Winter Storm Uri.\nWe do have some turnaro" ]

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[ "Three U.S. soldiers were killed and 31 others wounded in two rocket attacks Sunday afternoon in Baghdad, the U.S. military said. Mehdi Army militiamen celebrate after attacking an Iraqi Army vehicle in Baghdad's Sadr City on Sunday. Earlier Sunday, fighting between U.S. troops and the Mehdi Army militia loyal to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr left at least 20 dead and 52 wounded in Baghdad's Sadr City, according to an Iraqi Interior Ministry official. The U.S. military said it had no information about the Sadr City fighting. Sunday's violence came as Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki demanded al-Sadr disband his Mehdi Army and threatened to bar al-Sadr's followers from the political process if the cleric refused. Watch a report from the front line in Sadr City » \"A decision was taken yesterday that they no longer have a right to participate in the political process or take part in the upcoming elections unless they end the Mehdi Army,\" al-Maliki said. Sunday's American fatalities bring the death toll of U.S. troops in the Iraq war to 4,022; that toll includes eight civilian contractors working for the Pentagon. Nearly 30,000 others have been wounded in action. An attack involving a \"couple of rounds\" of fire on the International Zone, also known as the Green Zone, killed two soldiers and wounded 17 others about 3:30 p.m., a military official said, declining to give the specific location of the attack for security reasons. A separate attack about 30 minutes earlier killed one soldier and wounded 14 at a U.S. military outpost in Rustamiya in southeastern Baghdad, the military said. Responding to al-Maliki's comments, a spokesman for al-Sadr, Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, said that any effort to bar Sadrists from participation in politics would be unconstitutional -- and that any decision to disband the Mehdi Army is not the government's to make. \"It is up to the side that established it,\" he said. Al-Maliki spoke in an exclusive interview with CNN after a weeklong military offensive against what Iraqi officials called gangs and militia members in the southern Iraqi city of Basra. Hundreds were killed or wounded in the fighting across Iraq, which reportedly ended when Iranian and Iraqi Shiite officials held talks in Iran with al-Sadr. ", "Asked about Iran's role in ending the Basra conflict, al-Maliki attributed the cease-fire to the work of his security forces. Haidar al-Abadi, an Iraqi lawmaker who belongs to al-Maliki's Dawa Party, said last week that Iranian officials participated in the discussions, and another source close to the talks said the Iranians pressured al-Sadr to craft an agreement. \"I am not aware of such an attempt,\" al-Maliki said Sunday. \"What happened on the ground and the breakdown in the structure of this militia is what made Muqtada al-Sadr issue his statement to withdraw his militants from the streets. What happened was something to save Muqtada, not to help us.\" Watch al-Maliki talk about issues that concern Iraq » In northern Iraq, security forces detained a suspect Sunday and were searching for others in connection with the kidnapping of 42 college students, authorities said. Gunmen seized the male students in northern Iraq before releasing them several hours later, according to a military spokesman and police in Nineveh province. None was harmed, according to the U.S. military. Gunmen stopped two buses loaded with students who were on their way to college, but one bus managed to escape, police said. Four students on the bus that escaped were wounded by gunfire, police said. Students on the other bus were released Sunday afternoon after coalition military forces spotted the bus during an air patrol on the western outskirts of Mosul, according to a U.S. military news release. The kidnappers fled the vehicle after it was stopped, according to a military press release. Other developments • A Christian priest was shot and killed in eastern Baghdad's Wihda neighborhood around noon Saturday, according to an Iraqi Interior Ministry official. The priest" ]

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[ "f of the year.\nAnd we have some other iron in the fire, so to speak. So I think to distinguish indium phosphide, let's say, back in 2014 and '15, we have very nice growth, but that was the main growth engine was PON's business. And then we have the silicon photonics coming on strong. But now we're seeing multi-prong multi-point of growth.\nThey are not necessarily related with each other, but they also are connected to the benefit of using indium phosphide either for the wavelengths they produce, which can transfer data very quickly within a fiber optic transmission line, or their specific wavelengths can monitor health parameters in a specific application. So I think those are very exciting fields. I think we should see continued growth for many years to come.\nGary Fischer -- Chief Financial Officer\nYes. Let me just link that to one of the comments I made in my prepared comments, that we didn't have any 10% customers for the second quarter in a row. So that's another way to illustrate the diversity of the applications for indium phosphide. It's kind of a renaissance for indium phosphide, just lots of interesting things happening.\nAnd one of the benefits, the things that we like about the business model is once you get into an application, it can have a long trajectory in terms of the useful life. It can last a long time.\nRichard Shannon -- Craig-Hallum Capital Group -- Analyst\nGreat. I appreciate that.\nGary Fischer -- Chief Financial Officer\nThank you.\nRichard Shannon -- Craig-Hallum Capital Group -- Analyst\nThank you guys.\nOperator\n[Operator instructions] And your next question comes from the line of Hamed Khorsand from BWS Financial. Please go ahead.\nHamed Khorsand -- BWS Financial -- Analyst\nHi Gary, could you just talk about the inventory going up so much and your accounts receivable going up so much the last quarter? Is there something you're planning from your customers that your inventory has soared so much versus revenue? And the same thing with receivables, I guess, are you providing extending out credit terms? Or is revenue just coming in toward the very end of the quarter?\nGary Fischer -- Chief Financial Officer\nYes. Well, let's stick on AR for a second. The AR it expanded for two reasons. One is increased revenue, that's fine, of course.\n", "But the second is that the day sales outstanding shifted in the wrong direction. So for the previous quarters, from the last previous four quarters, if you average the DSOs by quarter, it comes to 81.75 days, which it's not a great DSO. It's never been a strength for us. Part of that is because we have so many sales in Greater Asia.\nAnd just frankly, in case people don't know, but there's a lot longer time to pay in China, Korea, Japan. So the DSO went up by eight days to 90 days, which would be worth about $3 million into the accounts receivable. So if we had stayed with the previous four-quarter average, the AR would would not have gone up as much. It would have still gone up because of sales, but it would have been $3 million less.\nAs regards so there's no extended terms. There's no special deals. We're not aware of anyone that is going to become bad debt. We don't have any of those kind of problems, generally.\nIt's stretched. And it's probably also, and I didn't have time to do the analysis. But if we ship in the second half of the quarter, then we're not going to collect in the same quarter. So in the case of Greater Asia, if we ship any time after the first 20 days, we probably won't collect it in the same quarter.\nSo as for inventory, there's a couple of things going on there. Number one is we're growing and our production and management people and schedulers tend to stock up when they see growth on the horizon, which they are. We have a weekly production control meeting, which Morris attends. And so everyone's tied into what's happening in the company and the opportunities and the things that we're addressing.\nThe second thing that's happening is we did buy ahead on raw materials because we have visibility about raw material. That's one of the benefits of owning all t" ]

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[ ". But you still have a lot of runway at the Korean and Chinese customers where you've been kind of underearning last year.\nThat seems to be coming back. So, can you maybe help characterize revenue growth maybe to '21? You've got a very strong one with the domestic suppliers. What should we expect for the -- for the Koreans and China? Thanks.\nLiam Griffin -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nSure. Ed, I'll take this for -- for the first question. And if you have a follow-up, I'll throw it to Kris. Yes.\nI mean great question for you there. And I think one of the things that you know very well is the complexity in 5G and the nuances around that technology. And really, all key elements need to come together. So we were able to put that forward with, of course, our largest customer, but we're also gaining in China with key players, the Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi.\nWe've got great attachment with MediaTek as well. It's still so early. If you look at units in 5G versus where they could be in a couple of years, right? You've got 6.6 -- 6.5 billion to 7 billion mobile subscribers and we're talking about a couple of hundred million units of 5G phones in 2020. It'll probably double in 2021, but there's still a great opportunity for us at Skyworks.\nAnd the other thing that we do well is we are an under-the-hood player. We get in there with those customers and help them stitch together the necessary technologies to make it work in 5G. When you look at the Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, I mean the people support that we provide is very unique. The Sky5 platform is highly integrated and really puts them on a fast, fast timeline to market, which is ideal.\nWe're also seeing our large customer perform extremely well, extremely well, and taking share globally, in our view. So, there's a lot of positives there, and it's sustainable. 5G, again, still early innings. We believe this is a multiyear thematic cycle for us and others.\nAnd then the inflection toward other markets, automotive, IoT, so many other markets that will consume these technologies. I think it just comes together for a good long-term thesis here.\nEdward Snyder -- Charter Equity Research -- Analyst\n", "So maybe my follow-up then kind of hits on that issue. I mean it was only, what, 18 months ago, two years ago that people were frightened about Chinese OEM -- component guys replacing the U.S. suppliers after the Huawei ban, which seems ridiculous on its base, and it's clearly not the case now. So, what I'm trying to -- I guess the question really is, is that the complexity that we've already seen into your largest customers and is now being designed into some of the Chinese phones to acquire some of these more elaborate modules with all the system design, et cetera, that's also kind of porting into WiFi 6E and almost every wireless solution in the current standard at this point.\nAre you seeing -- is the competitive dynamic changing much at all? I mean do you, Qorvo, less -- to much lesser extent, Avago, because they don't play in a lot of these things, outside of that group, are you seeing anybody else? Or is it the reverse, the content that they were providing, especially some of the quasi dispute phones is now accruing to the -- to you and the other leader?\nLiam Griffin -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. Ed, it was even in the prepared remarks. We are seeing a consolidation. I mean this stuff is it's great technology.\nIt's wonderful. It's amazing for the consumer, but it's really, really hard. And for those companies that have the ability to invest in scale and technology are going to win. And that's not for everybody.\nI mean it's not for everybody. And it's -- we're not the only game -- and I think we've done a great job of advancing in that area and developing the technology. And we build our stuff in-house, which has been strategically advantageous for us. But when you look at China, we provide the perfect recipe.\nWe can scale. We can provide content. We can provide coaching and flexibility in the architectures and bring them to market in a technology that is just incredible toda" ]

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[ "There's a bit of a trend brewing this summer concert season -- put together a couple of big-name acts for a nationwide tour, then record a song together to promote the event. Members of Styx, REO Speedwagon and Journey in 2003. Styx and REO have teamed up for a song and tour. It started with classic rockers REO Speedwagon and Styx, with their \"Can't Stop Rockin' \" tour and single of the same name. Now Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire are getting on the bandwagon. The two horn-heavy bands have recorded three songs especially for their joint 30-city summer tour. It's part of a charity campaign to benefit food banks across the country -- \"Three Songs for Three Cans or Three Dollars.\" Chicago and Earth, Wind & Fire team up on the new song \"You.\" The bands also take a stab at each other's material, with Chicago recording Earth, Wind & Fire's \"I Can't Let You Go\" and Earth, Wind & Fire covering Chicago's \"Wishing You Were Here.\" \"The fact that the artists and bands, in this case, are touring together builds excitement with the possibility of the live performance that is exclusive to the tour,\" said Bruce Burch of the University of Georgia's Music Business School. It's \"sort of a 'once in a lifetime' type of attraction that helps to sell concert tickets, merchandise and, hopefully, CDs and downloads.\" Concertgoers who contribute three cans of food or donate at least $3 will get a download card to access the tunes. People who don't make the shows will be able to donate online and download the songs at www.ewfandchicago.com. The Web site is expected to launch in early June. \"This is a dream come true,\" said Earth, Wind & Fire's Philip Bailey, who came up with the three-songs promotion. \"We want to invite everyone to help us do our small part to help feed America,\" added Chicago's trumpeter Lee Loughnane. Artists jamming together on stage is nothing new, and occasionally the songs are released as singles -- U2 and B.B. King's \"When Love Comes to Town,\" from the 1988 album and film \"Rattle and Hum,\" for example. Of course, duets promoting two hot artists or bands are hardly new either. ", "Remember Josh Groban and Charlotte Church on \"The Prayer\" or \"Almost Paradise\" by Ann Wilson of Heart and Mike Reno of Loverboy from the \"Footloose\" soundtrack? \"Hip-hop artists have been using duets for some time to reach audiences of both artists,\" Burch said. In some cases, more than two artists collaborate. \"Even before that, country artists used this means to reach a larger audience for both artists,\" he said, noting the collaborations between George Jones and Tammy Wynette, and Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn. The new songs for the 2009 tours flip conventional wisdom. For decades, groups have recorded albums, then gone on tour to promote them. Specifically recording songs to promote a tour featuring a pairing of acts is a new idea -- and possibly one whose time has come, given the re-emergence of singles in the digital download age. Of course, it all depends on the success of the song. In the case of REO Speedwagon and Styx, they've scored a hit with their new tune. It's been riding near the top of the classic rock charts -- the biggest original hit by either band in years. \"The jam ... is just plain, old-school, rock 'n' roll fun,\" REO Speedwagon's Kevin Cronin said on the band's Web site. Should other bands follow suit and score hits, it might prompt other classic pop artists to join forces not only on tour, but in the studio as well." ]

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[ "y over many years to design in our products into next-generation systems and networks, be they 5G or otherwise. And I think we start to see kind of some early progress with that here in the first quarter. And to the extent that operators are expanding their investment, we would hope to benefit from that.\nIt may not always be in a perfect quarter-to-quarter correlation. We don't have a position with absolutely every operator with the exact same degree of success. But we have a very strong position on the equipment, that is really going to enable 5G for the long term. And so to the extent that 5G creates incremental capital spending, which, again, has yet to be perfectly articulated, then, for sure, we would feel like we would be in a good position to be able to benefit from that in the medium and long term.\nOperator\nThank you. Our next question is from Luke Junk from Baird.\nLuke Junk -- Baird -- Analyst\nHi, good afternoon. Adam, you mentioned hybrids and electric vehicles especially as a growth driver in your end market discussion of both auto and industrial trends this afternoon. Could you help us better understand the span of EV-related products, especially across those two segments? And in particular, I'm wondering how might differentiate the company's opportunity set versus some of your connector peers that have a more auto-based focus.\nR. Adam Norwitt -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nThanks very much, Luke. Yes. No, you picked up on that very astutely. We participate in the electrification of vehicles, whether those are passenger vehicles or commercial vehicles, and both have been really great drivers for us in recent quarters and years. And in the industrial, we talk about that industrial battery and the heavy vehicles. There's a wide range of vehicles that are undergoing electrification right now from big trucks, and there's plenty of news media around that, to postal vehicles and trash trucks and buses and goods vehicles, delivery vans, you name it.\n", "And so all of that is what we classify really in our industrial business or industrial market as that battery heavy vehicle. And then when we talk about automotive, the hybrid EV, that's really passenger cars and the related products. In addition, we think about the charging infrastructure for electrification as really an infrastructure piece and that we think about in our industrial business as well. And that's all -- those are all components of areas where we've seen strong performance in -- certainly in the first quarter and over a number of years and look forward to that.\nBecause I think if you confine your view of electrification just to passenger vehicles, you're missing a really exciting area of the electronics revolution, which is that electrification more broadly. By the way, I mean, we're working as well with the Department of Defense in certain countries on the electrification of military vehicles, which, I think, is going to be a long process. But over the long term, we see that as an area that can also be another benefit and another growth lever along this just real kind of, call it, a megatrend, if you will, of electrification across kind of all things that move.\nOperator\nThank you. Now our next question is from Steven Fox from Fox Advisors.\nSteven Fox -- Fox Advisors -- Analyst\nHi. Good afternoon. Craig, I just wanted to talk a little bit more about your extra costs in the coming quarter. If I applied your analysis for Q1 to Q2, it looks like the pressure is about $20 million or so, similar to Q1. I imagine there's some M&A impacting your incrementals. But can you talk about whether that's in the ballpark and what you guys are doing to sort of reduce that $20 million nut going forward?\nCraig A. Lampo -- Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nYes. Thanks, Steve. Yes. No, actually, your math probably isn't so far off. It's certainly in the range of what we'd probably quantify that as. And if you look sequentially going from Q1 to Q2, essentially, a lot of that growth is our acquisitions that we just announced. So as you can imagine, the " ]

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[ "Water fluoridation is the controlled adjustment of fluoride to a public water supply solely to reduce tooth decay. Fluoridated water contains fluoride at a level that is effective for preventing cavities; this can occur naturally or by adding fluoride. Fluoridated water operates on tooth surfaces: in the mouth, it creates low levels of fluoride in saliva, which reduces the rate at which tooth enamel demineralizes and increases the rate at which it remineralizes in the early stages of cavities. Typically a fluoridated compound is added to drinking water, a process that in the U.S. costs an average of about $1.17 per person-year. Defluoridation is needed when the naturally occurring fluoride level exceeds recommended limits. In 2011, the World Health Organization suggested a level of fluoride from 0.5 to 1.5 mg/L (milligrams per litre), depending on climate, local environment, and other sources of fluoride. Bottled water typically has unknown fluoride levels.\n\nTooth decay remains a major public health concern in most industrialized countries, affecting 60–90% of schoolchildren and the vast majority of adults. Water fluoridation reduces cavities in children, while efficacy in adults is less clear. A Cochrane review estimates a reduction in cavities when water fluoridation was used by children who had no access to other sources of fluoride to be 35% in baby teeth and 26% in permanent teeth. However, this was based on older studies which failed to control for numerous variables, such as increasing sugar consumption as well as other dental strategies. Most European countries have experienced substantial declines in tooth decay, though milk and salt fluoridation is widespread in lieu of water fluoridation. Recent studies suggest that water fluoridation, particularly in industrialized nations, may be unnecessary because topical fluorides (such as in toothpaste) are widely used, and caries rates have become low.\n\n", "Although fluoridation can cause dental fluorosis, which can alter the appearance of developing teeth or enamel fluorosis, the differences are mild and usually not an aesthetic or public health concern. There is no clear evidence of other side effects from water fluoridation. Fluoride's effects depend on the total daily intake of fluoride from all sources. Drinking water is typically the largest source; other methods of fluoride therapy include fluoridation of toothpaste, salt, and milk. The views on the most efficient method for community prevention of tooth decay are mixed. The Australian government states that water fluoridation is the most effective way to achieve fluoride exposure that is community-wide. The World Health Organization reports that water fluoridation, when feasible and culturally acceptable, has substantial advantages, especially for subgroups at high risk, while the European Commission finds no benefit to water fluoridation compared with topical use.\n\nPublic water fluoridation was first practiced in the U.S. As of 2012, 25 countries have artificial water fluoridation to varying degrees, 11 of them have more than 50% of their population drinking fluoridated water. A further 28 countries have water that is naturally fluoridated, though in many of them the fluoride is above the optimal level. As of 2012, about 435 million people worldwide received water fluoridated at the recommended level (i.e., about 5.4% of the global population).: 56  About 214 million of them live in the United States. Major health organizations such as the World Health Organization and FDI World Dental Federation supported water fluoridation as safe and effective. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lists water fluoridation as one of the ten great public health achievements of the 20th century in the U.S. Despite this, the practice is controversial as a public health measure. Some countries and communities have discontinued fluoridation, while others have expanded it. Opponents of the practice argue that neither the benefits nor the risks have been studied adequately, and debate the conflict between what might be considered mass medication and individual liberties." ]

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[ "ad time. But you've got to have the infrastructure in place, especially in the core network. While we can always add cell sites to deliver 5G in a local market, the first starting point is inside the core, which is what we're spending on right now.\nRichard Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nAnd people have been debating if this 2020 will be a year for a \"super cycle\" with 5G iconic devices coming out. How is your view in the guidance right now and also your view of what's actually going to transpire with the switching pool?\nKenneth R. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer of US Cellular\nWow, too soon for me to tell. Yeah, a lot of talk about it. But I think that we're still early in the 5G deployment. And in fact, if 5G deployment isn't far enough along, we actually run the risk of a dissatisfaction with consumers if we get the super cycle change and the network isn't there because people will expect something that isn't being delivered. So something I want to be very careful with.\nRichard Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nOkay, thanks Ken.\nKenneth R. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer of US Cellular\nThank you. Have a great weekend.\nOperator\nYour next question comes from Philip Cusick from JP Morgan. Your line is open.\nReed Kern -- JP Morgan -- Analyst\nHi, this is Reed for Phil. Thanks for taking my question. It's just the fall of tower multiples have increased anywhere from a few turns to as much as five times. So especially in the context of your capex guidance in the upcoming spectrum auctions, could you share your thoughts on taking on a partner or changing your stance on monetizing those towers? Thanks.\nKenneth R. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer of US Cellular\nI'm sorry, Reed, I didn't hear the very beginning part of your question.\nReed Kern -- JP Morgan -- Analyst\nJust talking about how tower multiples have really expanded anywhere from a few turns to five times since the fall of 2019.\nKenneth R. Meyers -- President and Chief Executive Officer of US Cellular\n", "Okay. Yes, I think my stance on towers has been pretty consistent, maybe paying full lease out. And that is their strategic assets, and they continue to be strategic. They continue to be important as we change our network configuration with 5G, just like it has with every other technology change. But what I also said was that spectrum is a strategic asset also. And it's -- I could justify. I could use a trade of one strategic asset if it allowed me to get another strategic asset. So towers for spectrum is something that we consider. But just towers for tower's sake isn't something that was in my current plan.\nReed Kern -- JP Morgan -- Analyst\nGreat, thanks. And then maybe a second one separately. We've seen solid growth in cable, particularly broadband over the past year. Can you kind of estimate what the portion of out-of-territory build accounts for when you're looking at the total subscriber and revenue growth in cable? Like or in footprint markets less attractive as kind of the capex spending guidance makes it appear?\nVicki L. Villacrez -- Senior Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer\nSo let me make sure I answer your question. And if I don't, please follow back up. But Reed, this is Vicki Villacrez. As you're looking at cable, we are expecting strong broadband growth, similar to the trends you've seen all this year into 2020. And that's really separate from our out-of-territory broadband growth, which is in our wireline segment. And that growth is really offsetting some of the secular declines that we have in our wireline base, including the commercial declines that we're seeing from our CLEC business.\nReed Kern -- JP Morgan -- Analyst\nGreat, thank you.\nOperator\nYour next question comes from Zack Silver from B. Riley, your line is open.\nZack Silver -- B. Riley -- Analyst\nOkay, great. Thanks for taking the question. On the US Cellular side, you guys are emphasizing this idea of expanding addressable markets as a priority this year. Is this just a reference to the edge out expansions you guys are doi" ]

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[ "closer to our systemwide sales growth. However, in 2020, we saw increased volatility related to the impacts of the pandemic as well as the steps we've taken to reinforce our plans by investing behind our people. More specifically, in the fourth quarter, there were several factors that contributed to the difference in our consolidated growth rates.\nFirst, our year-over-year performance across all three brands reflected proactive G&A investments in our digital and technology initiatives as well as adding strong new hires in key areas of the business like marketing, field operations and technology. As we've discussed, building out best-in-class technology assets is a top strategic priority, which we believe will unlock exciting new avenues for growth over time. Together, these investments, combined with some year-over-year timing shifts in G&A, affected our growth rate by about negative 3% in the fourth quarter.\nLooking ahead, we expect to continue investing across these key areas of our business in 2021, including the important technology initiatives Josh just mentioned. And while there were some timing impacts in Q4 that will roll off, we think that overall, the annualized level for the quarter is fairly representative of capturing the investments we plan to make this year.\nSecond, beyond the year-over-year sales decline, there were a few other moving pieces in our supply chain results that impacted our EBITDA growth by approximately negative 2% in the quarter. In addition to some normal fluctuations in product mix and commodities, our operating costs were higher in the quarter as we work through the final go-live transition of our distribution center project and continued to see some effects of fixed cost deleveraging, though to a lesser extent than in Q3.\nAdditionally, there were a few benefits from the fourth quarter of 2019 that we lapped, including our fresh brewer rollout and the timing of certain vendor discounts. Overall, these effects resulted in a slightly lower margin for the quarter. However, we expect that as the business improves and return to historical volume levels, our margins will start to recover as well.\nThird, we saw a year-over-year decline in EBITDA of about negative 2% related to noncore income streams that have also been displaced by the pandemic, including our decision with our partners to pause cash dividends from our joint ventures, which have historically been concentrated in the fourth quarter as we focus our efforts on reinvesting for growth. In addition, there were also some market-specific challenges that caused a small year-over-year decline in our income from company-operated stores.\n", "And finally, ad fund expenses exceeded revenues by approximately $6 million more than they did in the fourth quarter of last year, resulting in an impact of approximately negative 1% to our EBITDA growth. As we've mentioned in the past, there may be mismatches from quarter-to-quarter based on marketing calendars, timing of activations and trends in the underlying business. The remainder of the gap between our systemwide sales growth and adjusted EBITDA growth primarily stemmed from the shift in sales mix that we saw across brands, similar to last quarter, reflecting a more pronounced decline in sales at Tims, where in addition to franchise royalties, we also generate EBITDA from property and supply chain activities.\nMoving on to segment level performance. At Tim Hortons, fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $229 million, which represents a decrease of approximately 24% on an organic basis. This decrease was driven by a decline of approximately 13% in systemwide sales, which included an 11% decrease in global comparable sales and the continued effects of COVID-related temporary closures, which impacted about 7% of restaurants over the quarter, as well as the supply chain impacts I just mentioned. At Burger King, fourth quarter adjusted EBITDA was $218 million, representing a year-over-year organic decrease of approximately 18%, driven primarily by a decrease of nearly 8% in systemwide sales.\nThe change in syst" ]

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[ "that, that number is sustainable. I think it will come back to the 55% area that we're at for this quarter. And we'll use those couple of points as some pricing leverage to really start dialing up the revenue growth.\nBill Peterson -- Analyst\nYes thanks for that. Maybe just from the final segment you talked about in the wireless space. I guess, at this stage, it really feels that you're very reaching your run rate as of now. Trying to get a better understanding of how we should think about the growth of that segment from here? And what will be driving that growth between Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, any particular commentary on some of the end markets? You talked about some of the design wins. And I guess, finally, related to that, are there any areas you're focusing your investments on, I guess, organically or as you really feel you need to maybe try to augment your portfolio inorganically?\nMichael Hurlston -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYes. I think that our strength right now is in products that transfer video. So where we've done really well is in streaming devices, in security cameras, in drones. Anything that's moving video is where we've done very well. And those segments, obviously, are growing rapidly. We're coming from a very, very small base. And so we've been able to pick up outside traction. That's mostly Wi-Fi. It's Wi-Fi leading. But for the most part, our products are WiFi-Bluetooth combos. We've also done well, as we talked briefly about in the prepared remarks, in watches. We have that GPS asset, with it, it's just relatively unique. And so in the sort of wearable market, we've also done relatively well. I think as we think about it going forward, we've got these roadmap products that are coming from Broadcom, and I think those do open up additional segments for us. We think we can go into industrial. We can go into some more low power type applications and we're pretty excited about that. I think it opens up -- it strengthens our current field of use, but then opens up some additional fields of use. And we really, really feel good about this business and think it can be a grower for us -- outsized grower for us over the next couple of years, frankly.\nBill Peterson -- Analyst\nAppreciate the color there. Thank you.\nOperator\nNext question from Kevin Cassidy. Your line is now open.\n", "Kevin Cassidy -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst\nThanks and congratulations on the great results. You mentioned that your backlog is more than 100% of your guidance. Can you talk about how the customers are reacting? How far out are they placing orders? And do you see a time when you can catch up to the backlog?\nDean Butler -- Chief Financial Officer\nYes. Good question, Kevin. I think probably every semiconductor team has probably been asked a similar question. And our answer is probably similar to most, which is, it's really challenge out there. Lead times are expanding from our suppliers. We, in turn, are encouraging customers to place -- extended lead times on us so that we can get the wafer starts and supply lined up for them. And so we do have actually probably more visibility than we would normally have at this point in the cycle. We don't have an exact time frame on when we might be able to service and fully catch up to all customers' needs. It does seem like the supply constraint is likely to last all of 2021, if not a little beyond. So it's just -- it's hard for all of the supply chain, I think, to respond. In turn, if you think about all the moving pieces to put a semiconductor product together with the lead times and the fabs and cycle time, it's just -- it's really challenging to respond all at once.\nKevin Cassidy -- Rosenblatt Securities -- Analyst\nOkay. Understood. Congratulations on the continued momentum on your set-top box designs. And maybe also, if you could help out with the dynamics there. Are those service providers concerned about supply? And I know you're expecting to announce the design wins, but would they start giving you orders earlier than what would be a normal cycle for a set-top box?\nMichael Hurlst" ]

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[ "in the wireless space with content, gives a lot more transparency. So as costs go up, it's much easier for those to flow through to the end user.\nMichael Rollins -- Citigroup -- Analyst\nThanks.\nBrady Connor -- Senior Vice President, Investor Relations\nYeah. Thanks, Mike. Brad, we're ready for the next question.\nOperator\nThe next question is from Colby Synesael of Cowen. Your line is open.\nColby Synesael -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGreat. Thank you. Two if I may. First, you're starting to talk more about or let's just say disclose more on fixed wireless, which we appreciate. But you've also talked about the other 5G growth opportunity being Mobile Edge Compute or MEC. When will we start to see that show up in the numbers and actually start positively contributing to growth? And where -- what line items would you point to where we'll be able to see that?\nAnd then secondly, Hans, you mentioned that next quarter we should expect to see 2022 guidance. Just curious, if your views on the metrics that you're focusing on might change. You're going to be seeing incremental headwinds, particularly to EPS, purchase and accounting, I believe on the spectrum. Just curious if you believe guiding to EBITDA and/or free cash flow is something that might become more important when we see that guidance for next year? Thank you.\nHans Vestberg -- Chairman and Chief Executive Officer\nGreat question, Colby. First, on the Mobile Edge Compute. We are -- first of all, we're doing a great progress in Mobile Edge Compute. And you have seen that we have made announcements in the quarter with the biggest cloud providers in the market both on the private 5G Mobile Edge Compute. And as you remember, there are basically three use cases. One is the public Mobile Edge Compute and then it's a private Mobile Edge Compute and then it's private 5G networks. All of them sort of are in execution right now and we're working with customers. We have announced a couple of commercial contracts already, like Corning, British Ports, etc. So that's already happening. And of course, it takes some time because we are actually creating a totally new market and we are actually alone in this market. Nobody else in the world has launched Mobile Edge Compute at this moment.\n", "So of course, we feel really good about that. And the team is working through the funnel all the way from proof of context to new applications, and that's how it works when you create new markets, etc. So we will come back as soon as we feel it's time to start reporting it as we're done with 5G fixed wireless access. But I'm even more sort of excited about the Mobile Edge Compute what I've seen in the last year here with the technology solutions we have and also the customer interaction we have together with the main partners. I mean, we have the biggest partners you can everything about in this that are equally much invested as us because that was part of the strategy to bring different partners we have there.\nSo we will continue with that. And we will come back and report. And we will give you new deals and how is this progressing with partners over time. And ultimately of course it's going to be financials, and that's going to show up initially, of course, it's going to be on Verizon Business Group, that's going to have that as revenue. There is a B2B2C opportunity longer term, which can end up in Consumer. But predominantly, in the beginning, it's a Verizon Business Group opportunity.\nMatt, on guidance? Can we talk through what you're going to do next year? He hasn't told me yet.\nMatthew D. Ellis -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nSo Colby, great question. So obviously, we'll get into guidance at the next call. But as you mentioned, we always look at what year-over-year pressures may be in there, especially things that are accounting-related rather than cash flow-related. We'll make sure we have the appropriate level of transparency around that. The important thing for us to be able to demonstrate in that guidance is how our strategy is working, and it's going to show up in reve" ]

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[ "rld gears up for decarbonization to slow down climate change and create a path for a more sustainable world, so does the increased demand for renewable energy, semiconductors, and key materials for the new green economy, such as metals, mining, and chemicals. Our acquisition of Neeltran and NEPSI have allowed us to expand our business into the materials market. The materials market is fundamental to a sustainable energy shift.\nIf you're interested in reading some more about how materials are center stage to the energy transition, there was a 2022 McKinsey publication titled, the raw-materials challenge, how the metals and mining sector will be at the core of enabling the energy transition. If we look at this calendar year 2022, approximately 90 gigawatts of Wind capacity is projected to be added globally. The solar photovoltaic sector is projecting an annual global capacity, addition of over 175 gigawatts, and the worldwide semiconductor market is expected to grow and exceed $600 billion in annual sales, annual capital investments has trended at over $100 billion for the past few years. This transition to a low carbon economy raises demand for critical materials, semiconductors as well as spending on plant and equipment in the metals, mining, and chemical industries.\nWe are executing on our growth through Grid strategy, our Grid segment revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2021 broke a company record for the fourth consecutive quarter, we are growing. Grid revenue grew by nearly 50% versus the year-ago period and accounted for over 90% of AMSC's total revenue. This is a testament to our team's execution, particularly during these challenging times. Since the start of this fiscal year, our bookings momentum in the Grid business have been very strong, extending our Grid visibility into fiscal 2022.\nIn the third quarter of fiscal 2021, our Grid business was primarily driven by strong new energy power system shipments. We've already integrated NEPSI nicely into the business, and we're working to do the same with Neeltran. We are getting leverage across the product line, selling into a number of industrial markets, including mining and metals as well as chemicals. Our core markets for the new energy systems have expanded from two main ones, renewables and semiconductor to now three key markets: renewable semiconductor and materials, such as metals, mining, and chemicals.\n", "Our largest customer for the third quarter of fiscal 2021 was in the semiconductor industry. We see the emergence of additional demand in new energy power systems for the semiconductor and materials markets coming in the subsequent quarters. As you can see from our revenue guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, we are anticipating continued strength in our business. We see increasing demand in semiconductors for the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021.\nDuring our fourth-quarter revenue guidance -- pardon me, driving our fourth-quarter revenue guidance, as expected, new energy power system shipments to be very robust. In fiscal 2021, we continue to expect year-over-year revenue growth again in our Grid and our overall business. In the longer term, we continue to see a significant rise in quotations for new energy power systems for renewable semiconductors as well as materials and general industrial markets. Let's talk about the drivers of Grid.\nGrid is driving revenue growth for the company. Renewable semiconductors and materials are driving our new energy power system solutions. Our new energy power systems include our dynamic power correction platforms as well as our static power correction line of capacitor banks, our monic filter systems, rectifiers, and transformers. We're growing and diversifying revenues by geography and by market.\nWe are presenting more content to customers as we leverage the strong combination of our new energy power system solutions. This quarter, we supported renewable projects, both for wind developers and utility solar in the United States, Canada, Northern Ireland, and Spain. Over the last few years, we've seen the eco" ]

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[ "ash to shareholders this year.\nThe other major factor here is continuous innovation across our product and technology road maps. In Holland, VodafoneZiggo is rolling out a nationwide one gig network. They were the first to roll out 5G, and they've embraced our Horizon entertainment platform. And that sort of innovation is occurring across the European footprint. It all begins with network superiority in markets like the U.K., for example, where Project Lighting has been a resounding success. In fact, we've included the latest figures in the appendix of this deck, so check them out. And we continue to be bullish on continued expansion of Lightning. We're also working on a clear path to 10G or 10 gigabits per second using a combination of HSC and fiber to the home. The pace of innovation of 5G mobile is equally critical, with VodafoneZiggo and Sunrise and others leading the way in their markets.\nRobust and reliable network support innovation and connectivity, which is where this all began, and we've led the way with smart and intelligent WiFi and better, faster and cheaper CPE. And then finally, our entertainment platform continues to delight customers with the best user interface, seamless integration of apps, voice control and tons of other features. And importantly, Horizon has also laid the groundwork for our migration to an all IP video services platform with our Apollo Box. This is network agnostic, app centric, portable and low cost. This is where the entertainment business is headed. And we're leading the way again in Europe. Now our success in Holland and Belgium really underscore our excitement about the Sunrise acquisition, which we recap a bit for you on Slide seven.\n", "The main driver here is scale. UPC and Sunrise together create a clear number two to Swisscom, one of Europe's most attractive and stable markets, with around a 30% share across all services and a significant opportunity to grab meaningful share in B2B. Now like our other FMC deals, the combination is anchored in best-in-class networks. Right out of the gate, UPC Sunrise will reach 90% of the fixed market with one gig services. Now they'll have leadership in 4G mobile and the largest and fastest 5G network in the country. Now the synergies are also substantial. You'd expect that with an NPV of over CHF three billion, about 80% of which is attributable to opex and capex efficiencies. The real opportunity here is to deliver the sort of combined financial growth profile that we've seen in Holland.\nI'm not saying the numbers will be the exact same, but we're convinced that scale, market strength and synergies will deliver stable free cash flow for a very, very long time. It's also worth mentioning that both operations had a strong Q3. As you can see from the charts on the right, UPC continues to deliver improved subscriber trends with a record sales month for mobile in September and consistent improvement in broadband. Sunrise released their results earlier today, also a very strong quarter with positive service revenue growth despite roaming headwinds, positive EBITDA growth, which reflects strong cost management. They also delivered their best quarter of postpaid mobile ads in a decade and really strong broadband and TV customer growth. So far, the premerger integration work here has validated the synergy estimates and clearly establish the opportunity for Sunrise and UPC together to give Swisscom a run for its money.\nI'll end on Slide eight with a quick look at Liberty Global, what we look like pro forma for both the Swiss and the U.K. transactions. Now most of you know this, but it's really, really important to continually reinforce the narrative of how we've transformed this company. After spending over a decade, consolidating cable and chasing broadband market share, we saw the fixed mobile convergence story developing in Europe around five years ago. Around that time, the incumbent telcos started prioritizing their fixed networks and broadband growth together with wireless. And they left the other three to four mobile operators struggling to com" ]

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[ " combination will be immediately accretive to Lumentum's non-GAAP earnings per share following the closing, and we will deliver substantial run rate synergies contributing to continued best-in-class financial performance. Combining creates opportunities to increase efficiency and to benefit from economies of scale. We are confident that these compelling strategic merits will deliver significant long-term value to our stockholders.\nTurning to slide eight. As you know, photonics are increasingly becoming a critical and enabling technology for many applications that are shaping our future. Internet, cloud, 5G and broadband access network capacity requirements continue to grow at an unrelenting pace. These increasing requirements are driven by the digital transformation of work and life, high-bandwidth video, gaming and other bandwidth-intensive applications. Photonics technology is essential to the scaling of data center and telecom network capacity and meeting the requirements of the applications I mentioned earlier. Photonics are also increasingly playing a critical role in new approaches to manufacturing, industrial sensing, automobiles, delivery vehicles, safety, security, healthcare, life sciences as well as addressing climate change. These trends create a more than $20 billion and growing total addressable market for Lumentum today, as I mentioned earlier. Now turning to slide nine.\nAdding NeoPhotonics accelerates Lumentum's exposure to some of the fastest-growing portions of the more than $10 billion market for optical components for communication applications. The staggering 30% compound annual growth rate in Internet bandwidth is driving increasing data transmission speeds and rapid growth in the number of high-speed ports in optical networks. Shown on this slide is the anticipated growth of 400 gig and above telecom ports over the next five years. Growth is very robust with an expected compound annual growth rate of more than 75%. All of this highlights a significant opportunity to accelerate growth with the addition of NeoPhotonics. Turning to slide 10. The combined company will have a broad and comprehensive product portfolio and will be well positioned to serve the 400 gig and above market opportunity. Customers are looking for technology providers, like Lumentum, to offer a wider range of products.\n", "Customers are also looking for compelling, long-term product and technology road maps that they can count on and incorporate into their future product plans. NeoPhotonics has developed a product portfolio complementary to Lumentum's, and the combined company's product offerings will span next-generation data centers, access, metro and long-haul applications. Turning to slide 11. The combined company's technologies start at the material, wafer fabrication and device physics level. This allows innovation to start from the most fundamental level, which provides long-term differentiation and customer value proposition. It also gives the combination a high degree of vertical integration and scalable, low-cost manufacturing. In addition to the new technologies, NeoPhotonics also brings a talented team of engineers focused on Photonics, which increases our breadth and depth of technical resources. Turning to slide 12.\nThe combination's breadth of technology and vertical integration spans a wide range of photonics and electronic semiconductor materials and devices, advanced packaging and RF design as well as electronics and software. The relevance of these capabilities extend beyond optical communications. I highlighted earlier numerous other applications that are increasingly utilizing photonics. An important element of Lumentum's strategy is to leverage our capabilities into new markets and applications. We have successfully employed this strategy in developing 3D sensing solutions as well as creating compelling commercial laser solutions for our customers, as shown on this slide. The combined organization will be well positioned to pursue additional, attractive, new growth opportunities in new markets.\nWith that, I will " ]

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[ "ht to be a meaningful player in the space.\nMeanwhile on the international side. Most of our markets are at least five years behind the US, in terms of deployed network technology. As a result, the edge compute opportunity and other potential 5G enabled business models are further down the road. The strategic advantage that we expect to have in these areas similar to what we did with our core tower business is the ability to prove out these models in the United States first, and then export them internationally when the time is right.\nOver time, we believe that our global interconnected reach will be critical in the context of an ever more global, multinational customer base, and their need to support their customer's global needs. In the meantime, one of the main focus areas of our platform extension efforts today throughout Africa and India especially, is on developing power as a service, to drive operational efficiency and cost savings, while materially reducing the carbon footprint of the wireless industry. Throughout much of Africa, and India, the electric grid is inherently unreliable. It is part of our service offerings, we are responsible for providing onsite power for our tenants.\nIn the past, this was almost exclusively delivered through diesel generators with significant daily run times and diesel usage at considerable expense. More recently, as solar and lithium-ion battery technologies improve are becoming more cost-effective, we have accelerated our adoption of these technologies to make power provision in our sites more efficient, and environmentally friendly. In fact, at the end of 2019, we had 12.3 megawatts of solar capacity already online with more than 4,500 sites utilizing lithium-ion batteries. To date, we've invested nearly $135 million on fuel and power optimization solutions, and expect to continue to make these investments as we improve site reliability levels for our tenants.\nAs we disclosed in our latest sustainability report, our long term target is to reduce our scope on fossil fuel consumption in diesel related greenhouse gas emissions in Africa, and India by more than 60%, or 140 million liters of diesel annually by 2027. Already, we have made significant progress toward that objective having reduced annual diesel consumption by 65 million liters since 2017, after normalizing for site count growth. To give you a sense of what that translates to, it's essentially the equivalent of taking more than 35,000 cars off the road for a full year or preserving more than 65,000 acres of forest. In addition, we are currently exploring the development of science-based emissions targets consistent with the Paris Agreement goals.\n", "These initiatives are in their early stages. We are excited about the impact that we can make going forward. Just like in the United States where we are seeking to leverage our expanding platform to augment the value of our communication sites, we believe that we can translate our expertise and industry leadership in fuel and power internationally into tremendous added value. Reducing the total cost of ownership for our tenants further improving up times and developing more efficient, clean, renewable networks will benefit stakeholders across the value chain.\nWe're committed to making substantial additional progress over the long term. Just like in the United States where we are working on a number of other initiatives, we're continuing to look at things like fiber to the tower, fiber to the home, and other transport models. In many of our international markets as ways to further broaden our addressable market and add value. These valued propositions would all be predicated on long-term contractual commitments with multi-tenant and multi-service elements that mirror our existing tower model.\nin closing, on a global basis, we are in a time of tremendous technological digital transformation. Access to ubiquitous broadband connectivity has never been more important, particularly, in the context of the ongoing pandemic. There are new use cases emerging every day with modern wireless " ]

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[ "ernational business and the license segment. As you continue to grow there and your partners do, obviously, there's the near-term challenges with COVID. But is there a point in the longer term where you see density get to a point where you can actually have a step change in the level of development, particularly in markets where you have a lot of white space like China?\nRandy Garutti -- Chief Executive Officer and Director\nYes. We're obviously really excited about Asia generally, especially China. We've had just incredible starts there. I noted that Hangzhou, which is a new city, which is a smaller -- I mean smaller by China relative terms, but a very major city in the world outside of Shanghai, where we've had a tremendous start. And we have still just very few Shacks in China, but we're going to keep growing there. So look, we want to focus on the most important markets. And we're also really proud of our mature markets like the Middle East where we have a huge business, like the U.K. where we have a number of great restaurants that are still recovering. So look, we got our eyes on a big global license opportunity and domestic license opportunity that we noted. And we love this part of our business. It's really asset-light, cash accretive and brand exciting. So everything about it is an important and exciting piece of our business. We can't wait to keep growing it.\nPatrick -- Stifel -- Analyst\nGreat, thanks guys.\nOperator\nOur next question is from David Tarantino with Baird.\nDavid Tarantino -- Baird -- Analyst\nHi, good afternoon, Katie, just a quick clarification on the guidance for the fourth quarter comps. Can you give some perspective on what that would imply for a two year comp or, I guess, a comp versus 2019? I guess the number I would calculate would be different given the fiscal period shift. So just wondering what that would be.\nKatie Fogerty -- Chief Financial Officer\n", "Yes, we're not going to go into that again. 4Q '19 had a lot of different -- it had a lot of noise in it, and we have the 53rd week adjustment we've made here. So I feel very good about the guidance that we've given you, and that's as much detail as we're going to get into. On the back of that comment, though, I do want to clarify, the guidance that we're providing you for 4Q on Shack sales and on our same-store sales guidance, that is using the trends that we are seeing today and expecting that those trends will continue with normal historical seasonality patterns to help kind of address that point.\nDavid Tarantino -- Baird -- Analyst\nOkay. That essentially answers the question. And then, Randy, I just wanted to ask, what do you think the ultimate solution is for the staffing issues? Do you think it's just much higher wage rates? Or do you think, I guess, something else related to the employment proposition is necessary? I guess what -- as you think about your long history in the industry, I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that question.\nRandy Garutti -- Chief Executive Officer and Director\nThat is such a deep -- we're going to need a lot more time for that one. And I think I'm not sure I'm going to answer that for the world's challenges right now. Look, there's such a host of things that are causing this, and I think it's probably nine or 10 different things. I'm not going to name one or the other. They're all included, all leading toward, I believe, ultimately, we have to be the best employer in our industry. I do believe the restaurant business is an incredible occupation. I've lived it my whole life, and I have seen how many people we have lifted from entry-level jobs into leadership jobs across the country. And the restaurant business is not for everyone, but it is for a lot of people. And we've got to keep focusing on that. I do think time will be a heal for this as well. I do think we have to get people. I do think we'll continue to return to the workforce. I believe we've got to be leaders there. And we've got to give people reasons to join Shake Shack instead of somewhere else. Part of that is pay, part of that is leadership develo" ]

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[ " in the second half of this year and going into next year. So we're pleased with the performance on the internal workloads. We see that carrying over to Milan, and sort of the -- the -- let's call it the move from Rome to Milan is -- is -- is not too heavy a lift.\nAnd so we expect that that will continue going into 2021. And in terms of the external facing workloads, we've spent quite a bit of effort sort of building our let's call it sort of the business development engine that sort of let's call it sells along with the cloud vendors, as well as frankly enterprise OEMs. And so our conversation with large enterprises is -- is usually a hybrid conversation. It's -- if you want to buy on-prem, let me tell you what AMD EPYC can do.\nIf you want to use cloud instances, we have a wide variety of cloud instances across all of the largest cloud vendors. And -- and that's actually progressed very nicely. So I think, overall, that -- that's leading to some of our positive commentary in cloud is that we have seen both progress on internal as well as the external sell with motion.\nJoe Moore -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nGreat. Thank you. And then I wonder in terms of data center GPU, you've talked about some of the emerging applications. Because gaming has been an investment that some of your customers have made, what's the status of that and how -- how big a portion of your data center GPU business do you expect to be driven by cloud gaming in 2021?\nLisa Su -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nSure. So I think the cloud gaming portion of the business was a larger portion of the business in sort of past years for the data center GPU. In 2021, we -- we do have additional cloud gaming engagements that will ramp. But I would say it would be the smaller portion of the business and HPC would become let's call it the larger portion of the business in 2021.\nJoe Moore -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nGreat. Thank you very much.\nLisa Su -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nThanks, Joe.\nOperator\nThank you. Our final question today is coming from Timothy Arcuri from UBS. Your line is now live.\nTimothy Arcuri -- UBS -- Analyst\n", "Hi. Thanks -- thanks for fitting me in here. So I guess my first question, Lisa, based on your commentary on data center revenues and your splits and you answered the question before about ASPs in Q4. It sounds like server CPU share is running like 12.5% on your $20 million TAM-based that you use.\nSo you have Milan ramping and you're talking about a lot of visibility on that ramp this year. So I'm sort of wondering if maybe you can give us what your guidance implies or sort of what the next milepost to think of would be in terms of server CPU share as you sort of exit the year and maybe look into next year?\nLisa Su -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. So Tim, thanks for the question. What -- what I would say is I don't have a new market share target and I think just given all of the -- the variance in the market. But what I will say is we've given you a good view of the business through sort of the percent of -- of revenue it is.\nAnd as I said in the prepared remarks, the -- the -- the data center business was high-teens percentage of annual revenue and it was predominantly -- predominantly server. So the data center GPU was a very small piece of that, and it was predominantly server. As we go into 2021, again, we see significant growth. I would say it's one of the -- the key growth drivers for the company and we'll give you updates as we go along the way in -- in 2021 in -- in terms of how -- how it's growing as -- as a relative size of -- of the business.\nTimothy Arcuri -- UBS -- Analyst\nOK. Got it. And then just quickly on data center GPU. It looks like it was maybe flattish this year, year over year.\nAnd obviously, it's going to grow this year as Frontier -- Frontier comes in the year. Can you just sort of maybe give us some sense in terms of how much you think it could grow? I mean could it double year over year? I understand it's not big from a dollar point of view, but could it double year over year? M" ]

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[ " to semiconductor demand at some point this year. It's a fluid situation, and it is hard to predict exactly when this will happen. But with that in mind, forecasting beyond Q2 is challenging.\nConsequently, due to the evolving and uncertain impact of COVID-19 will have on the semiconductor industry, we are withdrawing the 2020 sales and EPS annual guidance, we gave in February. While it's unclear how the market will perform for all of 2020, the two other positive growth drivers, totaling 400 to 600 basis points of growth are still in place for us in 2020. The first one, as you remember, is the key technology node transitions to logic and memory we expected for 2020. And these are still on track, which means we continue to expect to outperform the market by approximately 200 to 300 basis points in 2020, driven by an increase in our served market and market shares as a result of a number of large customers transitioning to new technology nodes, both in logic and memory.\nThe second is that we continue to expect that as the acquisition we have already made will add approximately 200 to 300 basis points to our growth in 2020. Clearly, we are in unprecedented times, and we will be facing a high level of uncertainty for the balance of the year. But we feel very optimistic about the long-term fundamentals of the industry. And we feel confident in the things we can control, including our competitive and financial position.\nFirst, we believe that the secular semiconductor demand will continue to be very attractive. Our society will continue to need more and better chips. And in a strange way, COVID-19 could lead to an acceleration of the digitalization and automation of the economy, which will be favorable for the semiconductor industry. Second, we have confidence in our competitive position.\nAnd to further secure this position, we will maintain significant R&D and capital investment levels in 2020 despite the prevailing short-term uncertainty. These investments are essential to a number of critical joint development initiatives with several key customers. As you know, greater materials intensity and greater materials purity will be the primary defining factors of the next-generation of semiconductor performance, and we want to be in a position to capitalize on the many new opportunities in front of us. Finally, we feel very confident that our experience, disciplined execution and strong balance sheet will allow us to navigate this period of uncertainty, while continuing to invest in the future.\n", "Our team has very effectively managed challenging times in the past, and we will take the necessary steps to align our business to market conditions, as they evolve. Before turning over to Greg, I want to take a minute to thank the Entegris teams and our partners around the world for their dedication and their relentless efforts during this challenging period. And I also want to thank our customers for the trust they place in Entegris. Now let me turn the call to Greg.\nGreg?\nGreg Graves -- Chief Financial Officer\nThank you, Bertrand. In my section today, I'm going to cover our first-quarter financial performance and our second-quarter guidance. I'm also going to discuss how our liquidity and balance sheet strength provides a significant flexibility. As Bertrand said, in spite of all the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 crisis, the first quarter was solid for Entegris.\nQ1 sales of $412 million were slightly below the low end of our guidance and were up 5% year over year and down 3% sequentially. As Bertrand said, the negative impact of the coronavirus to our supply chain is not material. Q1 GAAP diluted EPS was $0.45 per share, up 88% year over year and up 7% sequentially. And non-GAAP EPS of $0.55 was at the high end of our guidance range, up 10% year over year and flat sequentially.\nMoving on to gross margin, GAAP and non-GAAP gross margin was approximately 45% in Q1. Gross margin was a bit below our original expectations, driven primarily by the modest manufacturing interruptions related to COVID-19 and lower-than-expected volume. We" ]

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[ "As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton continues high-level talks with Mexico's leaders this week, her comments about responsibility in the U.S.-Mexico drug trade have struck a chord with officials familiar with U.S. anti-drug efforts. Mexican federal police have been deployed openly in Ciudad Juarez, which borders El Paso, Texas. Clinton said the United States' \"inability to prevent weapons from being illegally smuggled across the border\" was a major contributor in Mexican violence along the border. She went on to say that the United States has \"a co-responsibility.\" In an interview Wednesday on \"American Morning\" with CNN anchor John Roberts, former Drug Enforcement Agency special agent Robert Strang talked about the three-pronged approach needed to curb drug use in America and the need to bust distribution rings. Strang is also CEO of Investigative Management Group. The following transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity: John Roberts, CNN anchor: Everybody's blaming Mexico for [the U.S. drug trade], but the secretary of state yesterday said, 'Hey, the United States shares a lot of the blame because of the pent-up demand here, the insatiable demand for drugs.' Do you agree with her? Watch Clinton say, \"We have to do a better job\" » Robert Strang, former DEA special agent: Let's face it, the average first drug use is 12 years old in our country. That means kids that are in the sixth grade are trying drugs for the first time. Marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, all these drugs are coming across the border because we demand them. We have the cash to pay for them, and we really are pretty much the No. 1 consumer in the world for these drugs. Roberts: Is the United States doing enough to try to curb demand? The Office of National Drug Control Policy, I don't remember much coming out of it during the Bush administration, and I haven't seen anything come out of it in the Obama administration. Strang: We're trying all the time. I'm on the board for D.A.R.E. America, and that is teaching kids about the dangers of drugs and violence in schools. And constantly, we're trying to get money federally for this program and police officers go into the school. They teach the kids. ", "It's a wonderful program in those trouble years, the fourth, fifth and sixth grade especially, and we need to have a little bit more money in this area. amFIX: React to Strang's comments about U.S. anti-drug effort There's three things, John: It's treatment, it's enforcement and it's education. And it's like a three-legged stool. If all three things don't work, it's going to fall down. So, we can send all of the agents in the world down to the border. We can seize all the coke, heroin, methamphetamine that we want. If we don't have treatment on demand, and if we're not educating our kids in our country about the dangers of drugs, the problem's going to grow. Roberts: When you see the Department of Homeland Security prepared to spend these hundreds of millions of dollars on border security, what do you think? Strang: I'm happy that they're doing something. This is a small piece of the enforcement operation. The best thing to do is like the case that we saw three weeks ago, when the DEA announced 750 arrests involving 250 cities between Mexico and the United States, mostly in the U.S., this huge distribution network. Because when you dismantle those networks that constantly are putting drugs from the cartels to the street, when you can put those guys in jail, when you take their assets, then you have an impact. Watch how drugs from Mexico enter U.S. » Roberts: But would you like to see them take some of that money, and you know, they take, I think, what, $700 million, and they throw it at the border. Would you like to see them" ]

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[ "w FPD measuring tools that will be installed during 2021. These will bring us additional capacity to serve our customers who manufacture advanced panels. These investments should provide us with sequential growth in capacity, and therefore, revenue during the second half of 2021. As stated before, we have entered into three multi-year purchase agreements that collectively represent a business commitment in excess of $40 million annually to support these investments.\nWe often comment that the display market is very dynamic. This includes development and adoption of new technologies. The increased penetration of AMOLED displays within smart phones is one example, as manufacturers compact -- combat rather plateauing sales by offering premium options such as upgraded displays. Similarly, introduction of 5G requires a premium display, consistent with 5G capability and feature set. The resulting transition from LTPS to AMOLED, requires masks with more layers. The most basic rigid AMOLED mask that has only 12 layers, while the most advanced can have up to 25. Not only does the number of layers increase, but there are more critical layers within each set, further enhancing the value we provide.\nSimilarly, high-end technologies are expanding into the large screen TV market. We are seeing the ramp of G10.5+ form factor, which has come to dominate the production of standard LCD panels for large screen TVs. With this transition largely behind us, we are currently seeing the commercialization of various OLED displays intended to capture the premium sector of the TV market. Our targeted approach combines a conventional LCD with a mini LED backlight to create a similar visual experience. These technologies are good for mass demand, as they require more mass layers and more critical layers per set, putting more complexity and higher value. As the display for the mass market and technology leader, we are well positioned to benefit from these trends.\n", "Shifting to the Chinese IC market. We're in the process of qualifying the final litho tool from our initial phase of investment in Xiamen. The installation of this tool was delayed six months because the supplier self-imposed travel restrictions in response to COVID-19. The tool is targeted at production of high-end photomasks. Our expectation is that we'll begin to generate revenue by the end of the second quarter, and ramp through the back half of the year. China remains a key region of expected growth for the semiconductor industry, and our presence there should position us well to grow with the market. Over the last three years, our IC revenue of products shipped to China has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 60%, and is currently running slightly above $100 million annually. We anticipate that our business there will continue to grow and we will remain the merchant photomask market leader in China.\nWe are off to a strong start, and I would like to thank all of our employees for your good work during the first quarter. Looking forward, I continue to believe that 2021 will be one of the best years ever for Photronics, as we invest to support growing end markets, expand our business in advanced display technologies, enable our global customers to meet their product roadmaps, and improve profitability and cash flow to facilitate continued investment in projects that improve our return on capital.\nAt this time, I will turn the call over to John.\nJohn P. Jordan -- Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer\nThank you, Peter. Good morning, everyone.\nThank you, Peter. Good morning, everyone. Revenue improved 2% compared with the fourth quarter, as growth in FPD was partially offset by a decline in IC. FPD growth was driven primarily by AMOLED displays for advanced smartphones. We've communicated over the last few quarters that the US ban on Huawei had an impact on our display supply chain, as design activity stopped while they reacted to the new restrictions. This affected our fourth quarter FPD results, as panel suppliers had not required new masks for Huawei phones. During the " ]

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[ "here that goes.\nDemand for slicing, again private networks is what I really call it. You can use your imagination, but I guess I'd answer it this way. There isn't a Fortune 500 company's CEO that I talked to that their Board of Directors haven't said what's your 5G strategy. And what they really mean by it is they don't really know what 5G means, but they really mean how do you use connectivity to improve your business, improve your product, to make it safer and you're going to have to have -- if you are a product company, you got a private network, you got advantages. If you're a retailer, you have a private network, you have an advantage because you know your sales, you know your security of your parking lots, whatever it is, the use cases are endless.\nAnd first of all, any field that call me, I'll take the call. Second, I [Indecipherable] and our team will. And we'll work with their people to make their business better. All right. And we will be tireless in that effort. And we don't have to get 100% of the profits. We actually share. So we'll see what happens. We are building something special. And we may fail, but we are building something special.\nJohn Hodulik -- UBS. -- Analyst\nGot it. Thanks.\nOperator\nWe'll take the next question. That comes from Jonathan Chaplin from New Street.\nJonathan Chaplin -- New Street -- Analyst\nThank you. Charlie, in the early days, you said that you weren't going to start building the network until you knew who you're building it for. But you would ultimately partner up with an anchor tenant that would be either sort of the first user of the network. Is that still the case? And if so, I think initially you had said you needed to get a commercial trial up and running before you sort of selected one of those anchor tenants. Is that something you would do after running a couple of small markets in the beginning of 2021 or is it something you have to wait until later in the year?\nCharlie Ergen -- Co-founder and Chairman of the Board\n", "Answer is I don't know the answer to those questions. We clearly will start with -- there is -- the Chinese philosopher said a journey of 1,000 miles start with the first step. So we'll clearly start with a first step. That was last month when we built our first tower. That was the that step. We will have -- we will have a -- we have consumers on the network.\nToday john is adding customers, today on T Mobile network, but through our Boost facility, so that's the step. And we will have anchor tenant. That will be a step. But we will have many, many private networks on what we are doing. And I don't know the exact timing on that. We don't -- all I can say is the way that we look at business is we look -- our definition of partnership is that somebody helps -- we help somebody make their business better and they help us make our business better and that is a fun way to do business and you can accomplish great things.\nIt's not just about we send you a check. It's not always about a zero-sum game. The thing that's always frustrated me about programing agreements in Erik's business is it's almost always a zero-sum game. If a programmer comes in, they want to tell a rate, they want more money. Our customers don't want to pay money more. So we fight for our customers. And you never have a discussion about how you can build a better product for the customer where maybe the programmer to make more money and we can give a better product to our customers. I think we're going to be able to do that in the wireless business and it's kind of a breath of fresh air.\nAnd the only reason I say that is the timing gets muddier in terms of we know where we have to be and if we can't get there with somebody we will at some point, we know that as we get better and better more and more companies will take a chance on us, because they are very successful, they are in the driver's seat. And now somebody has got -- the next guys has got a prime amount of driver's seat. And so they got to ask themselves do they bet on DISH or do they stay in the same lines and hope like he only fail. I got a" ]

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[ "ects that we are actively working on today that are getting some preferential positioning as far as some European funding is concerned as well. Those will then move from 50 units of two megawatts, which you can imagine on the most efficient structure, to maybe five units or 20 units of five megawatts or five units of 20 megawatts as scale-up happens along the way. So the fact that, that scale up is happening, the fact that the technology road map is providing that capital efficiency and economies of scale is happening right now and preparing us for what's likely to happen in the next five years. I don't want to speculate at this stage as to what that likely backlog might look like five years down the road, but clearly, I'm encouraged by the developments I see.\nP.J. Juvekar -- Citi -- Analyst\nGreat. Thank you for the detailed answer. As you look at this technology road map and green hydrogen costs coming down, where do you see that? I know Steve had commented on some numbers maybe a year ago. And what about this production tax credit of $3 for green hydrogen? How would that play out?\nSanjiv Lamba -- Chief Operating Officer\nP.J., that production tax credit is actually very, it will be a very good supporting mechanism. We talked earlier on about in the previous question about how we see the incentives support the development, that $3 per kg will be a good support mechanism. We obviously have to read the rules and it hasn't yet come through. So I'm looking with some eagerness to that coming through and getting an understanding of how that, how those rules come into play. But that would be encouraging. Clearly, we believe that there is an opportunity here for us to move forward. Steve mentioned to you in the past that if we get hydrogen, blue or green, green, obviously more challenged in this reference, at about between $1 to $2 per kg, it's at that point that you see an inflection point and you see widespread adoption of technologies utilizing hydrogen and really hydrogen becoming a reasonable fuel in the portfolio fuels we'll have. We'll always have fossil fuel, at least for many decades ahead. But it will be a more important part of that portfolio of fuels and energy basket as it will. Steve, do you want to add something?\nStephen F. Angel -- Chief Executive Officer and Director\n", "Okay, Sanjiv, I'll add something. So yes, just to build on that, I mean, if you were to look at the cost of hydrogen today and you were to use the U.S. Gulf Coast, which obviously, we produce a lot of hydrogen, we use a lot of hydrogen in the U.S. Gulf Coast. Gray hydrogen is about $1.30 a kilogram, and that's at $5.50 natural gas. Carbon capture would add another $0.40, $0.50, maybe you're in the $1.7 range sort. And if you think about green, it's like about $4.5 a kilogram. And out of that, probably $2.50, you call it, is the renewable power cost. And so if renewable power was free, then you would still have $2. And we all know renewable power isn't free. So we have some work to do to bring those costs down in terms of capital costs, operating costs. And as you were to work that down below that $2 number, then you've got a chance to have something competitive. So you need the combination of low cost renewable, low cost capital, lower cost, operate low cost capital and better efficiencies and then you can drive that number lower. And I would say ideally below $2, but certainly in that range would be is what's needed.\nOperator\nAnd our last question comes from Vincent Andrews with Morgan Stanley.\nJuan Pelaez -- Head of Investor Relations\nDavid, it looks like he has an issue. I think with that, we can wrap it up. For everyone on the line, thank you so much for attending today's call. For your reference, a copy of our transcript will be posted on our website within the next 24 hours. Thank you for listening. And anything else, let me know. Take care.\nOperator\n[Operator Closing Remarks]\nDuration: 64 minutes\nCall participants:\nJuan Pelaez -- Head of Investor Relations\nStephen F. Angel -- Chief Executive Officer and Director\nSanjiv Lamba -- Chief Operatin" ]

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[ "All Lyle Petersen wanted to do was get his mail. Lyle Petersen, a CDC expert who was infected with West Nile virus, says, \"it will ruin your summer.\" In the time it took him to walk down his driveway in Fort Collins, Colorado, chat briefly with a neighbor and return to his house, Petersen got infected with a potentially serious mosquito-borne illness called West Nile virus. Within hours of being bitten, he said, he began to feel symptoms he recognized. And how was he sure so quickly? Petersen, as director of the division of vector borne diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is one of the foremost experts in the world on the condition. A blood test confirmed his suspicion. \"From my own experience, I can tell you it's not a very mild illness,\" Petersen cautioned. \"It will ruin your summer.\" Experts are expecting another epidemic of the disease this summer. The incidence of West Nile virus has remained the same for the past four years, and Petersen says he doesn't expect this year to be any different. It should reach its peak between mid-July and mid-September. Health Minute: More on West Nile virus risk » \"People tend to discount this as a significant problem,\" Petersen said, \"but more than 1.5 million people have been infected so far in the United States, and about 300,000 have had West Nile fever.\" West Nile virus emerged in the U.S. nine years ago. The virus is spread by the bite of an infected mosquito. Mosquitoes contract the illness by feeding on infected birds. The CDC reported that in rare cases, West Nile virus has spread through blood transfusions, organ transplants and breastfeeding. The disease is not spread through casual contact. The symptoms range from mild to severe and typically develop between three and 14 days after a person is bitten. Explainer: West Nile 101 » Debbie Koma, a 50-year old hairdresser from Atlanta, Georgia, developed West Nile virus two years ago. She described it as \"unlike anything that I ever had before. I was sick as a dog.\" She recalled being hospitalized for three days with a high fever, a horrible headache and body aches. After 14 days, she was strong enough to get out of bed, but she says her strength didn't fully return for three months. Petersen had a similar experience when he was stricken five years ago. ", "\"I discovered I had West Nile virus because I am a long-distance runner,\" he said. \"About halfway through one of my runs, I felt terrible. Within a couple of hours, I was lying in bed with severe headaches, eye pain, muscle pain and fever, which lasted about a week. I basically couldn't get out of bed for a week.\" It wasn't just Petersen who became sick, but his daughter and the neighbor were complaining of West Nile virus symptoms hours after being swarmed by mosquitoes at the mailbox. A medical doctor, Petersen actually tested his own blood in the laboratory and diagnosed his own illness. Like Koma, he was sick for a couple of months. His chief symptom: severe fatigue. \"I could barely walk up the stairs,\" he said. \"This is not a mild illness, and people should try to avoid it.\" Petersen mentioned that some patients with West Nile virus can develop a severe neurological disease that can be fatal. There is no effective treatment for the virus. In more serious cases, the CDC recommends that patients be hospitalized so they can receive supportive care with intravenous fluids. Researchers are working to develop a vaccine, but Petersen notes that it will be years before it is available to humans. The best way to stop the spread of West Nile virus is through prevention, he said. \"Wear mosquito repellent, especially around dawn and dusk, which are peak mosquito biting times,\" Petersen suggests. He says bug sprays that" ]

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[ "hich we are well positioned. So we will continue to invest in these areas including Search, machine learning, and Google Cloud. Finally, with respect to capex, on the fourth quarter call, we shared our expectation that investments in both technical infrastructure and office facilities would increase compared to 2019. We now anticipate a modest decrease in the level of total capex in 2020 compared with last year. The biggest change in our outlook is a reduction in global office facility investments due to both the need to pause most of our ground-up construction and fit-outs in response to COVID-19 and our decision to slow down the pace at which we acquire office buildings. In terms of technical infrastructure, we expect a moderate reduction to our forecast relative to the beginning of the year given the impact of COVID-19 on data center construction delays as well as the benefit of our ongoing focus on server efficiency. Overall, we anticipate technical infrastructure investment to remain at roughly the same level as in 2019 with relatively more spend on servers than on data center construction. Thank you and Sundar and I will now take your questions.\nQuestions and Answers:\nOperator\nThank you. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Eric Sheridan from UBS. Your line is now open.\nEric Sheridan -- UBS -- Analyst\nThanks for taking the question and hope all is safe and well with everyone on the team there at Alphabet. Two questions if I can. One, on the comment with respect to direct response advertising on YouTube, would love to get a little more color on how direct response advertising as ad units continue to evolve and perform and how advertisers are using those ad units as part of their broader advertising goals. And then maybe, Ruth, for you, on the comment on expenses, just want to understand a little bit of how much of what your messaging on expenses is efficiency gains that you were aiming for in 2020 before we got to COVID-19 versus elements of the cost structure that you're reexamining as a result of the pandemic. Thanks so much.\nSundar Pichai -- Chief Executive Officer\n", "Eric, Thanks for the wishes. On YouTube direct response, we definitely are seeing traction there. I think an area where it really works well for example is app installs. That's a great example of it. Gaming is another good example of it and we are working on iterating and making the formats work better so that it applies to more context as well, but in general, I think businesses are learning to adapt. Obviously, we've had great success with Search and so we are bringing a lot of those learnings and we're sharing it with our customers and so we expect to see more traction there over time.\nRuth Porat -- Chief Financial Officer\nAnd on your second question, I like the way you framed it. Yes, we do have efficiency efforts that we started that we had going as we entered this year, but as a result of what we're seeing in the environment, our view was that we should really double down on those. And so when we go through the various areas that I mentioned, we had started the year with an expectation about really optimizing headcount around the various areas. What we've determined is we're going to, at this point, slow the pace of hiring. To be very clear, we are continuing to hire, but we are slowing the pace of hiring and that's helping as we're driving a deeper look into how do you optimize within each area. The same is true for example in some of the comments on marketing. We are continuing to invest in marketing. As you know well, sales and marketing line, the majority of it is headcount related and we do continue to invest here in ads and in particular in Cloud.\nAs it relates to the marketing component, namely ads and promo spend, we did reduce it relative to our plans in the beginning of the year and we continue to have a healthy budget for ads and promo particularly in digital to support many business areas, but as with the other areas of investment, we're really focused on optimizing across products and services and with physical event" ]

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[ "ighly invasive procedures. The reason we acquired Versatile Power was to accelerate our time to market, right.\nThey are a bona fide player supplying RF power supplies for one of the leading companies in the world in these procedures. And now as a result of this acquisition, they brought us the scope and we bring them the scale to accelerate the growth and to leverage on the global infrastructure that AE has.\nIn general, industrial, you should expect to see our business operating and growing at GDP plus. As we said earlier, we are pursuing a portfolio optimization strategy that is a combination of, in some areas, terminating end-of-lifing products; in some other areas, increase prices; in some other areas, shifting the focus to higher value-add products, so that the mix will result in shifting of the gross margin bell curve to the right. And we are making great progress.\nThe area that we mentioned earlier today in telecom and networking is an area that is more of a focus area in 2021, although our strategy is to grow across the board implementing a classical 80/20 process to weed out, as I call the, not-very-healthy products and continue to shift to high-value solutions. Did I miss anything, Tom?\nTom Diffely -- D.A. Davidson & Co. -- Analyst\nNo, that's helpful. Maybe just as a quick follow-up. Paul, can you give us a feeling for how much lingering costs there is from COVID, both in your OpEx and maybe even in your supply chain?\nPaul Oldham -- Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President\nYeah. We've talked about that kind of running in the 50 basis points range. And it bounces around a little bit more, a little bit less. As I mentioned in our prepared remarks, we are seeing some headwinds on supply chain costs, specifically related due to higher global demand and in part due to the fact that COVID still has many suppliers running below full capacity. So it continues to be a bit of a headwind for us in that range.\nTom Diffely -- D.A. Davidson & Co. -- Analyst\nOkay, thank you.\nYuval Wasserman -- Chief Executive Officer and President\nYeah.\nOperator\nYour next question is from the line of Quinn Bolton of Needham & Company.\nQuinn Bolton -- Needham & Co. LLC -- Analyst\n", "Thanks for taking my question, and Yuval, congratulations on your retirement and thanks for your leadership over the past several years. Paul, wanted to start with you on your comments about the costs in the supply chain, potentially some shortages. Wondering if those component shortages are limiting your ability to meet demand in the first quarter? Or is your operations team able to get all of the semiconductor components you need for the power supplies to meet customer demand? And then I've got a follow-up question.\nPaul Oldham -- Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President\nYeah. I think when we talked about the guidance, we tried to be pretty open that our demand continues to be strong. But we do see risks in the operations around the supply chain, just getting enough parts. Obviously, that's something you're always dealing with, and we continue to deal with. It's a daily battle. But we've tried to have our guidance reflect the environment we're operating in, which it's not us. It's a broad set of -- it's a broad problem across the microelectronics industry and electronics industry. And in the near-term, we think that will impact our ability to ship product. And that's contemplated in the numbers we put out.\nYuval Wasserman -- Chief Executive Officer and President\nSo the forecast and the guidance are risk-adjusted to reflect that, Quinn. And we have the benefit of reporting later in the month. So we have, I think, a better visibility in what's happening in the market. And it's not across everything in the supply chain. It's really a few components, just a few components, IC components that affect us, the automotive industry, and other industries. Obviously, you need all the bonds [Phonetic] to be able to build a product. So the good news, we have really strong demand. And as I said earlier, our semi demand is growing in Q1, and we expect it to a" ]

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[ " of that. But as you kind of look at I guess, the next couple of years, are there any gating factors that prevent you from growing faster? So the investments that need to be made either from a technology side or from a sales, marketing side, like, what's going to prevent you all from seeing even faster growth over the next couple of years?\nChip Paucek -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer\nArv, we want to grow smart, not just fast, and that's been a key focus for the company over the last three years. And I think, as I've said a couple of times on this call, we're starting to see the benefits of it. We continue to invest in each part of the 2UOS operating system that we provide to our schools to power this experience. That certainly includes marketing, it includes everything, from privacy to accessibility to core technology, under the leadership of our CTO, James Kenigsberg. So this is about a balanced agenda of ensuring that we're creating a long-term sustainable engine of social mobility, that is what the story is about. So we're excited to continue to prove it in the marketplace. I do think we have made some real headway here in terms of showing the sustainability of this business.\nArvind Ramnani -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nGreat. Thank you very much, and good luck for the year.\nChip Paucek -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer\nThank you, Arv.\nPaul S. Lalljie -- Chief Financial Officer\nThank you.\nOperator\nAnd I would now like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Chip Paucek for closing remarks.\nChip Paucek -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer\nOkay, thank you, everyone, for joining us today. Before I go, I would like to offer birthday wishes to a few folks. First of all, to my alma mater, George Washington University for their 200th birthday, and then to our Chief Operating Officer, Mark Chernis, and to our CFO, Paul Lalljie. One turned greater than 50, and one turned -- hasn't quite made it to 50, and I will let you have fun guessing who that is. Thanks, everybody. We will see you out on the road.\nOperator\n[Operator Closing Remarks]\nDuration: 64 minutes\nCall participants:\nKen Goff -- Senior Vice President, Investor Relations\nChip Paucek -- Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer\n", "Paul S. Lalljie -- Chief Financial Officer\nJeffrey Meuler -- Robert W. Baird & Co. -- Analyst\nStephen Sheldon -- William Blair & Company -- Analyst\nRyan MacDonald -- Needham & Company -- Analyst\nBrett Knoblauch -- Berenberg Capital Markets -- Analyst\nJoshua Baer -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nBrent Thill -- Jefferies -- Analyst\nThomas Singlehurst -- Citigroup -- Analyst\nArvind Ramnani -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nMore TWOU analysis\nAll earnings call transcripts\n\n\n\n\n" ]

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[ "ility, and we're reliable in bringing on supply. So we're an attractive partner for them in those dialogues, and we're in the middle of all those discussions now as we bring on this new capacity and look into the future to bring on future capacity, particularly as Kent referenced, as we look to localize capacity in North America and Europe.\nChristopher Parkinson -- Mizuho Securities -- Analyst\nThat's helpful. And just a quick follow-up. Just what would just be your latest thought process? On the demand front, you already hit on a few things. But just in terms of battery technologies, energy density.\nJust any color on what you've seen in terms of new model launches and potentially advancing high-nickel cathode chemistries? That would be very helpful.\nEric Norris -- President, Lithium\nYes. So on battery chemistry for electric vehicles, we still see over the five- and 10-year view -- or sorry, I'll put it another way, over the 2025 and 2030 view that we've characterized in our growth charts in the earnings deck. We still see nickel -- high nickel being the key to higher range. And we further see innovations on the anode side in prelithiation and new technologies that will further allow more energy density and cost-effectiveness of those nickel chemistries with that parity to internal combustion engines and coming in within that 18- to 24-month period.\nThat being said, it's pretty clear and our projections would show that LFP for lower energy density for lower-range vehicles, lower-cost vehicles is going to remain a segment of this market, not only now but through this 10-year period. And it's a double-digit percentage over that period of time, a low double-digit percentage but a double-digit percentage of the market. But most of the growth will be hydroxide.\nChristopher Parkinson -- Mizuho Securities -- Analyst\nThank you very much.\nOperator\nOur next question comes from Alex Yefremov with KeyBanc. Your line is open.\nAlex Yefremov -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst\nThank you. Good morning, everyone. I think as I look at your pricing guidance for lithium segment, it was a very strong. If I even assume some level of cost inflation, that cost number to get to your EBITDA and EPS guidance ends up being very high based on my model, at least, maybe as high as 40% or more per ton.\n", "Is there anything else beyond the spodumene and Talison dynamics that you already described in terms of cost that we should keep in mind for '22?\nKent Masters -- Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer\nSo I mean, I think you have to appreciate we're bringing on new plants. And when we bring them on, they're not loaded, right? So there's a lot of -- we're doing multiple facilities doing that. So there's high fixed costs associated with lower volumes. But other than that, I mean, the pricing movements are pretty aggressive and pretty consistent.\nWe've moved our portfolio quite a bit. We've been talking about that, and we've more or less done that. So we're more exposed to the market than we have been in the past. But I think you have to keep in mind that fixed cost piece about bringing on new facilities that are not loaded.\nAlex Yefremov -- KeyBanc Capital Markets -- Analyst\nOK. Appreciate it. And then I wanted to follow up on the pricing side. I guess, given the approximately 50% of your volume have these indices, would any of these indices reset during the year? And could you end up above the 45% sort of upper bound of your lithium guidance -- price guidance?\nEric Norris -- President, Lithium\nIt's Eric. I can answer that. It's -- they are all based on indices that continue to move. The recent movement has been upward in the past three months.\nAgain, sort of the tip of the spear being China prices, which are significantly higher. Where the market goes long term, we don't know. If there is a downward sort of correction in China prices, that will hit the China spot volumes we have. If however the spot -- these indices for the large part of our business is variable fixed ceiling floor, those are well below those spot prices.\nIt's very hard to say. " ]

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[ "unTrust. Your line is open.\nJim Sheehan -- SunTrust Robinson Humphrey -- Analyst\nThanks. Good morning. Could you provide a little more detail on how you're reviewing the 5G opportunity? Just how large is that addressable market? And how quickly do you expect it to ramp?\nBob Patterson -- Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer\nYes. So I think it's going to -- well, first of all, for -- 5G is going to take place -- there's going to be a global pull for it. I would say that -- I probably talked about this on our last call and my recent visit to China where you can just see towers going up on every other corner and block. So they're going to be a leader in terms of getting out there and actually getting an install base.\nI think that what you'll see is actually something that probably looks similar to how other generations have expanded. So even if you look at 4G right now or the predecessor technologies, they don't encompass the entire United States, if I pick the U.S., for example, right, there is still plenty of places that don't have access to the latest technology. So one of the things that I like most about 5G is that this is a multiyear growth opportunity for this business and for our segment. It's not something that's going to happen in one year.\nAnd I really believe it will take place over the course of 12 or 15 years. But be a very solid and steady double-digit grower for us. So that's how to put that in perspective. Notwithstanding just kind of all the noise around Huawei and all that stuff that's going on right now.\nTechnology is going to move forward, right? And people are going to put this in if they perceive it's better. And so I don't see that changing as time moves on.\nJim Sheehan -- SunTrust Robinson Humphrey -- Analyst\nAnd regarding performance, products and solutions. How are you evaluating your strategic options for that business at this point in time?\nBob Patterson -- Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer\nI don't think there is anything different to say about that with respect to how we think about our portfolio. So no new news.\nJim Sheehan -- SunTrust Robinson Humphrey -- Analyst\n", "And on that segment, would you say that second quarter represented just the catch up from maybe business that was lost due to weather in the first quarter? Or how sustainable are your second-quarter results in PP&S?\nBob Patterson -- Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer\nWell, I mean I think there is certainly -- first of all, yes, you're right in pointing out that the first quarter was very difficult just in terms of how things started off with -- from a weather impact in the construction space. So I think there is some pick up. Year over year, I'd still say construction is down. And as a result of that you see the PP&S segment impacted by it.\nBut much better than what we saw in the first quarter. And I believe that's sustainable. So my sense is that if you just want to put things into perspective here for the balance of the year, you'll see some traditional seasonality with respect to Q3 and Q4. But I'm not expecting anything else beyond that.\nSo my view of where we're at is quite sustainable.\nJim Sheehan -- SunTrust Robinson Humphrey -- Analyst\nThank you.\nOperator\nThank you. And our next question comes from Kevin Hocevar with Northcoast Research. Your line is open.\nKevin Hocevar -- Northcoast Research -- Analyst\nHey, good morning, everybody, and nice quarter.\nBob Patterson -- Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer\nHi, Kevin.\nKevin Hocevar -- Northcoast Research -- Analyst\nBrad, cash flow is pretty strong in the quarter, and in particular, looks like working capital did -- you controlled that quite well. So wondering what drove that, and what type of cash generation do you think you can realize this year?\nBrad Richardson -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nWell, Kevin, as you know, I mean, we continue to have laser line-of-sight focus on our working capital. I think we're best in class in terms of our working capital as a percent of revenue and the organization clear" ]

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[ "s.\nCristiano Amon -- President\nLook, if I can add one thing just real quick. Also, maybe it's the beginning of this process. But QCT is showing also other growth drivers, like the automotive growth driver, the IoT growth drivers. So over time, as the business gets more diversified, I think you're going to have probably less correlation between the two.\nTimothy Arcuri -- UBS -- Analyst\nThanks. Thanks for that. And I guess my last question is on millimeter-wave. So I guess, the first 100 megahertz of C-band is going to clear at the end of this year.\nAnd it seems like the big U.S. carrier that was kind of driving that is going to maybe shift some of their capex over to build out C-band the next two years. I know some of the other U.S. carriers are talking about building out a millimeter-wave in 2023 and beyond.\nCan you just talk about the pace of adoption for millimeter-wave? Obviously, you have a lot of leverage there. Do you think it's going to be lumpy? Or do you just see it growing from here? Thanks.\nCristiano Amon -- President\nHi. This is Cristiano. Look, we are very pleased with what we're seeing millimeter-wave. As we restate what we said, I think you need millimeter-wave for the full potential of 5G, and especially as you look at some of the more advanced applications beyond smartphones.\nMillimeter-wave continue to be a requirement for the premium devices in the United States. We're very pleased to see that one of our large customers had brought millimeter-wave across all price points of their devices. In this quarter, we saw Germany with the auction rules starting for millimeter-wave at 26 gigahertz. And we continue to see activity indicating that China, it's likely to have millimeter-wave for 2022.\nSo we're happy what we see. It's progressing as we plan. And as you said it correctly, millimeter-wave is probably an accelerator of our 1.5 multiplier in QCT.\nOperator\nThank you. That concludes today's question-and-answer session. Mr. Mollenkopf, do you have anything further to add before adjourning the call?\nSteven Mollenkopf -- Chief Executive Officer\n", "Yes. Thank you. First of all, I want to thank folks who gave the kind words on the call. I know Cristiano feels the same way.\nThis is actually, if I count correctly, my 50th earnings call. So I appreciate the hard work from the Qualcomm team making it a record. I look forward to seeing where the company goes. It's exceedingly well-positioned.\nAnd thank you all for joining us today. Thank you.\nOperator\n[Operator signoff]\nDuration: 59 minutes\nCall participants:\nMauricio Lopez-Hodoyan -- Vice President, Investor Relations\nSteven Mollenkopf -- Chief Executive Officer\nAkash Palkhiwala -- Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer\nSamik Chatterjee -- J.P. Morgan -- Analyst\nMike Walkley -- Canaccord Genuity -- Analyst\nChris Caso -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nCristiano Amon -- President\nJoe Moore -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nStacy Rasgon -- Bernstein Research -- Analyst\nBlayne Curtis -- Barclays -- Analyst\nTal Liani -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst\nRoss Seymore -- Deutsche Bank -- Analyst\nMatt Ramsay -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nMitch Steves -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst\nBrett Simpson -- Arete Research -- Analyst\nAlex Rogers -- Executive Vice President and President\nC.J. Muse -- Evercore ISI -- Analyst\nTimothy Arcuri -- UBS -- Analyst\nMore QCOM analysis\nAll earnings call transcripts" ]

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[ "en in the less number of days that they're sensing for.\nWe've got to continue to educate and create awareness around that potential. On the international side, I think of international, not as a significant driver of growth just yet. Obviously, the only place we're doing any meaningful business there right now is in the U.K., and that's still in a hyper-growth mode, but we're working through the scenario right now where we're trying to get put in place permanent reimbursement long term. We're still working underneath that AI award in that country.\nNow we have started to target the private sector as well, which will bring with it some nice growth. But I think it's more of a let's wait and see how that plays out versus get out ahead of ourselves with respect to those expectations. I think longer term, international is going to be a meaningful contributor to overall growth for the company. But the reality is most of that is going to be a market access effort opening up opportunities over the course of this year and revenue probably doesn't really start to come from those efforts until the back half of 2023 most likely as we start to target new additional countries that we're going to take the product into.\nI think for the year, international is going to be -- not going to be a huge driver of growth, but there will be a tremendous amount of opportunity going on there that sets it up for being a nice driver of growth into the future. \nDavid Rescott -- Truist Securities -- Analyst\nOK. That's helpful. I guess just to clarify, the 20% plus growth rate is total blended growth for volumes, not specifically to Zio XT?\nDoug Devine -- Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer\nThat's right.\nDavid Rescott -- Truist Securities -- Analyst\n", "OK. I guess just on the commercial front, I know you've always talked about in the past how there is the thought that commercial payors may ultimately adjust their rates based on what the NCD rate comes out to be. If we think about a rate in 2023 from NCD regardless of where that rate is or direction of where that rate goes, do you think the commercial payors at this point would shift their rates toward a national coverage decision, whether it's one and a half or 1.25 times that of CMS? Or do you think that commercial payors at this point likely have determined the rates at which they would continue to maintain on a go-forward basis and just after there is an NCD? \nQuentin Blackford -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. My view is, generally speaking, the commercial payers understand the value of this product. And they've consistently looked at this product differently than what CMS or the MACs had done historically. Now I do think CMS and the MACs are coming around to understand it differently than what they had historically, and you hear that now in those conversations with those parties where they will describe the Zio product for example as being very different than traditional Holter monitors.\nWe know that CMS and the MACs have come around to look at this a little bit differently. And I think the commercial payors have always sort of taken the position from the very beginning that they see us differently. And that's why you didn't see them make any drastic reaction to the CMS or the MAC rates in the past. They were clear that they thought that CMS and the MACs would come around to see this in a different light, and I think that's what we've seen.\nI believe commercial payors, again, they understand the value for what it is. I don't see a lot of significant concerns around getting a national rate locked in and then seeing pressure on the commercial business. That's just not the way the majority of those discussions are going. Are there a couple of commercial payors here there who might peg their rate directly to the CMS? There are, but those are not significant volumes and significant payors for the most part.\nAnd I feel like we've navigated that very well historically. The other thing that I think is interesting, and we'll spend more time talking about this into the future, but I'" ]

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[ " me address the first part of your question on COD Mobile specifically.\nAnd then maybe I'll invite Armin or someone else to chime in on a more macro view on China and any potential restrictions there. On mobile for us, we see three key opportunities kind of going forward. And I'd say those could be bucketed as geographic, operational and strategic, and let me touch on each of those. On the geographic front, for Call of Duty Mobile, we're seeing, obviously, great success in the U.S.\nand through Europe, and we're also continuing to optimize across those regions, but we're seeing also great growth in emerging markets such as Latin America, India and Southeast Asia. And where we're focusing execution and investment for local players. And so that's something they can still scale and help grow the business overall. On the operational side, Call of Duty Mobile is already a great game, and we see opportunity to make it even better.\nOur mobile team is continuing to do an incredible job of constantly improving the experience and adding content to players in the west. And the team just keeps getting better and better, which is a testament to their passion and commitment to the mobile community. And China is just another example there where the title itself is off to a strong start, but still has a lot of opportunity in front of it to be tailored and optimized for the local audience. And the team is also very focused on that as well.\nAnd then lastly is strategic. As we think about long term, where we see a compelling -- more compelling growth on the platform. And overall, I'd say we believe there's an opportunity to better connect mobile to the overall quality of the ecosystem, and we're aggressively hiring talent to help on this journey for us. We've created our own internal mobile studio and are driving a major recruiting effort across Beenox and Activision Shanghai to support as well.\nAnd together, I think as Daniel already mentioned on the call, these teams are living an unannounced new mobile project in the Call Duty franchise, which we're very excited about. So as I think about the business, as we start to approach the 2-year anniversary of the launch in the West, we think there's a lot of both near-term and long-term opportunities on the platform for us and to grow the audience and engage the audience on a broad basis. Armin, do you want to comment on the China piece?\nArmin Zerza -- Chief Financial Officer\n", "Yes. Thanks, Rob. Thanks for your question again. With respect to your question on China, as you know, the rules and regulations in the country do change over time.\nAnd we have been working with our partners for many years now in this changing environment. So what we're doing currently is working with them and our local teams on the ground to assess this latest situation. Now from a business perspective, China was less than 5% of our net bookings for us last year. And as you know, we have a long history of adapting and responding to changes in the regulatory environment there.\nAnd of course, we aim to continue to do so going forward. So thanks again for your question. \nOperator\nAnd that question is from Mario Lu with Barclays. Please go ahead. \nMario Lu -- Barclays -- Analyst\nGreat. Thanks for taking the question. So I just wanted to follow up on the question earlier on mobile advertising. A number of mobile gaming companies now have both a mobile gaming studio and an ad network, all under the same umbrella.\nSo curious to hear your thoughts of the strategy and if it's something that King can potentially implement going forward? Thanks. \nDaniel Alegre -- President and Chief Operating Officer\nThanks, Mario, this is Daniel again. Look, the good news is, we're actually already vertically integrated. And we have our own in-house ads business that supports in-game advertising across our mobile games, across all of Activision, Blizzard and King. The ads team have organically built our own advertising technology platform.\nAnd this is really made to enable both the demand and the supply management, which also leverages third-party t" ]

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[ "BEIJING, China (CNN) -- Every day, tens of thousands of fertilized hen eggs are delivered to Sinovac laboratories in Beijing. Each egg is infected with the H1N1 virus, then incubated for three days. White-coated employees examine every egg individually before the virus is extracted and used to make a vaccine. Vials of H1N1 vaccine before they are labeled and packaged. Sinovac Biotech Ltd. was the first company in the world to successfully complete clinical trials for an H1N1 vaccine. It was also the first company approved by the Chinese government to produce millions of doses for the public. China is set to become the first country to begin mass inoculations sometime around the beginning of October. According to Sinovac CEO Yin Weidong, the secret lies in years of vaccine research and development. Sinovac was the first and only company ever to create a vaccine for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), the worldwide pandemic that left almost 350 people in China dead. The SARS vaccine was never used. By the time it was discovered, the outbreak had subsided. However, the breakthrough has enabled Sinovac to stay ahead of the curve. Watch as the H1N1 vaccine is produced » \"The SARS vaccine helped us achieve the H5N1 (bird flu) vaccine, which helped us get the H1N1 vaccine,\" says CEO Yin Weidong. \"That's why we could be so fast and be the first.\" Since Sinovac's success, at least two other Chinese companies and several around the world have also produced H1N1 vaccines. China has reportedly ordered 3.3 million vaccines from Sinovac, 4 million from Hualan Biological and another 3 million from the Shanghai Institute of Biological Sciences. According to Yin, the main challenge for China will be providing enough vaccines for everyone. \"A country with 1.3 billion people needs 1.3 billion vaccines,\" he says. Watch report on China's inoculation preparations » The Chinese government has long warned an outbreak of H1N1 could be catastrophic in a massive country with an underdeveloped health system. In recent weeks, the instances of H1N1 infections have risen dramatically throughout the mainland. There have been more than 9,000 cases of the H1N1 virus in China so far, and more than half of them have happened in the last few weeks alone. ", "\"It's basically affected all provinces of China and we're worried because of the sheer number of people involved,\" says Vivian Tan, communications director for the World Health Organization in China. \"It's moving from the urban and coastal areas into more rural remote areas.\" According to the WHO, the rapid acceleration of H1N1 is occurring in part because flu season is starting, the weather is cooling down and school is back in session. More than 80 percent of China's swine flu cases have occurred in schools or due to school-related activities. China has had perhaps the most extreme and active response to the virus than any other country in the world. For months, masked Chinese officials have boarded international flights upon arrival, checking all passengers' temperatures and administered health surveys before granting entry. Thousands have been quarantined, including entire flights and school groups. Health authorities have heavily publicized the risks posed by the virus and rolled out a Traditional Chinese Medicine Treatment plan, as an alternative to the vaccines produced by Sinovac and others. Yet, some Chinese citizens remain skeptical that a vaccine is even necessary in the first place. \"It doesn't seem like my baby is going to catch the swine flu,\" says one mother at a hospital in central Beijing. \"And what if it affects his health in the future? I'm just going to avoid crowded areas.\" Like any vaccine, the WHO has warned the H1N1 vaccine may have negative side effects. Sinovac plans to track and test patients for several years after vaccinations are administered to determine if there are any dangers. Ultimately, in China, the central concern remains that the H1N1 virus itself could expand and spin out of control. According to Tan of the WHO, \"I think one of our biggest fears is that (the H1N1 virus) could re-assort with" ]

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[ "full spectrum coming to bear.\nAnd it really is that combination of world-class foundry, world-class IP, world-class assembly package and test that we think gives us a unique proposition in the industry. And so far, the enthusiasm is very high for that offering.\nGeorge Davis -- Chief Financial Officer\nYes. And, Pierre, I would add, as you talk about the two different alternatives, one of the things to remember is that if you look at our internal road map, people are used to seeing a highly differentiated and very specific to Intel set of IP capabilities. We've said over time that it's very clear that we're going to be adopting more and more of the industry ecosystem, IPs and libraries because it makes sense to do it, and it makes sense in terms of cycle time, in terms of taking advantage of capabilities that already exist out there. So we're closing -- we're not going to -- when we intercept on some of these windows, we're not going to be as far away, I think, as people might think in terms of being able to demonstrate a lot of knowledge around many of the IP blocks that our customers depend on today.\nPat Gelsinger -- Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. And let me just add to that. I think it's a great point, George, because every IP that I generate from the industry increases the IP available to my internal design teams. Every piece of IP I develop internally is going to be made available to the industry, right, for their use as well.\nThis becomes a powerful reinforcing cycle, right? Also, wherever we're being benchmarked against the industry for our process technology as we move to industry-standard PDKs, right, we're seeing strong embrace from the EDA suppliers. So we see all of this as it makes our process better. It makes our products better. It increases our efficiency and takes our clock rate of innovation up with the industry.\nIt's a powerful strategy.\nOperator\nOur next question will come from the line of Chris Danely from Citigroup. You may begin.\nChris Danely -- Citi -- Analyst\n", "Thanks, guys. So it seems like we're in the middle of this never-ending fuselage of ARM products out there, both from a merchant and a captive perspective. So Pat, I just appreciate your thoughts on, I guess, where you see things shaking out on an x86 versus ARM, both in the PC and the data center space. And would you guys ever consider maybe licensing the x86 technology to some of your hyper-scale customers and having them design their own products with the foundry?\nPat Gelsinger -- Chief Executive Officer\nThe simple answer to the last part of the question is, yes, that's what we just announced, right? x86 cores will be available on our foundry services and available for people to design with them. So that will include the cloud service providers to take advantage of that. So the simple answer is yes. And we do believe that the ability for our customers to take advantage of x86 this way will be a meaningful shift in how people think about ARM versus x86 because part of it was we weren't giving them the flexibility to design, to co-mingle IP as I've described it.\nSo they really -- if they were trying to do unique design work, they didn't have a good x86 choice. We gave them our standard products, which have lots of capabilities. But in some of -- particularly for the cloud guy, I'd say, \"Boy, I don't use those particular features. I really could optimize with a few of these other things in the network and the memory hierarchy.\" And now we're saying, \"Absolutely.\nCome on in.\" And we're opening the doors of our IP, the doors of our leading process and packaging technology to be able to say let's do this together or let them do their own designs in our foundry as well. It's a very powerful strategy that I think will be a meaningful shift in the exact question that you asked. Overall, we do think that making the x86 available this way is powerful. There are trillion lines of code that have been optimized for the x86.\nThis is a powerful ecosystem that continues to have very great innovation and capabilities associated with it. And we're enhancing th" ]

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[ "est reports, Wireless Backhaul Evolution and ABI Research, 5G mobile subscriptions are expected to grow by more than 41% CAGR in the next six years, increasing from 378 million subscribers to 4.2 billion. Traffic is estimated to increase above 6,000 exabytes annually by 2027 with 5G accounting for more than 80% of the total traffic. Thus, higher-capacity backhaul bands, millimeter wave and microwave will be vital in meeting 5G traffic demands.\nThey will account for more than 55% of the links in 2027. Fiber will be next with only 42%. The need to further densify the network to support 5G will result in additional macro cell and small cells, in particular, being deployed in urban areas to handle the traffic. While fiber will be deployed, not all urban cell sites can be supported by fiber.\nInstead, microwave and millimeter wave backhaul links will be used, which are versatile and can handle significant data links. Now 5G comes with diverse use cases and requirements. The growing OpenRAN movement provides new avenues, customization, and flexibility that meets such requirements as it offers interoperability among different video digital control unit solutions from different providers. I believe it's the brightest future of our industry.\nOpenRAN has picked up steam across the globe and is causing a massive disruption and dis-aggregation in how networks are architected. Today, it isn't just the greenfield tech but also major market players that turn toward OpenRAN. As the market in general continues to move from analytic approaches to OpenRAN, our best-of-breed, open-network hauling solutions become more and more relevant as they can be seen through our joint project in Brazil with various design wins we are working on. Allow me to elaborate on the Brazil project.\nWe are participating in TIP 5G OpenRAN trials, which test equipment provides for 5G OpenRAN. It's a joint project TIM Brazil is carrying out with TIP, Telecom Infra Project, and the National Telecommunication Institute. A new-generation, all-outdoor, ultra-high-capacity IP-50E millimeter wave solutions, capable of delivering up to 20 gigabits capacity today, is being trialed. This type of solution is a must for OpenRAN as it provides the connectivity to the radio units.\n", "We are proud to be involved in this project in Brazil's future network deployments, and we see it as an opportunity to prove our technology edge. To meet future 5G and OpenRAN-related technology demands, we are developing a new high-capacity, low-latency system-on-a-chip. It is designed to offer the next stage of fronthaul linking between digital and radio units. And with this solution, we'll be the first ones in the market offering this technology.\nWe are very excited about this prospect. Ceragon's System on Chip will tape-out as planned for July will support both microwave and millimeter waves. With high bandwidth and low latency, it will support significant expansion of 5G networks in addition to supporting all previous wireless generations. Our existing IP-50E and IP-50C family of products successfully support now 5G deployments.\nThe new system-on-a-chip will enhance our offering with an increased capacity reaching 100 gigabits per second as well as improved 5G and OpenRAN compatibility. We are innovating on a disruptive market trend as we've always done from 2G all the way to today's 5G. Ceragon has grown so much in the last decade and a half, and it is a global company today. It has been a pleasure serving as the president and CEO of Ceragon for the past 16 years and to lead an incredible progress and the very many accomplishments of the company.\nIn the beginning of July, I'll be transitioning my responsibility to Ceragon's former deputy CEO and CFO, Doron Arazi. I will continue serving the company as vice chairman of the board for -- of the board. Throughout my time at Ceragon, I've truly been honored to work with so many talented leaders and visionaries, including our incoming CEO, Doron. With that, allow me to briefly pass the mic to him.\nDoron?\nDoron Arazi -- Chief Executive Officer\nThank you" ]

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[ "Photographers have their own version of sleight of hand. They can manipulate people, objects, landscapes and light in images, fooling lesser humans into believing the final product is a representation of reality, rather than something created by hand. In the old language, we called this \"trick photography.\" Now, in the PC age, we just call it \"Photoshop.\" The latest version of Photoshop, the flagship image-editing application in Adobe's Creative Suite, adds a new stack of cards to the photographer's trick deck. Wired.com was shown demos of new tools in Photoshop CS5 -- such as the new Content Aware Fill and HDR tools -- that we expect will amaze and please photographers with the tools' ability to bend pixels with absolute precision. Photoshop CS5 will arrive as part of Adobe Creative Suite 5, the company's package of 14 productivity apps for visual designers, photographers and publishers. Creative Suite 5 will ship later this month (or possibly early May) according to Adobe. Prices for the suite range between $1,300 and $2,600 depending on which package you buy, with upgrades priced between $500 and $1,500. Photoshop CS5 alone will cost $700, or $200 for an upgrade. Photoshop CS5 Extended, which has some additional tools, will cost $1,000, or $350 for an upgrade. This year marks the 20th anniversary of Photoshop's arrival, and there are certainly several \"wow\" features in Photoshop CS5 which achieve a level of technological advancement most of us couldn't have even dreamed of twenty years ago. Most impressive is the new Content Aware Fill brush, a mind-bending tool that can remove large objects from photos, altering the background to make it realistically appear as though the object was never there. It can zap tourists, delete power lines and otherwise alter photos with click-and-drag ease. This video shows it most plainly. Fast forward to about the halfway point if you want to see the really crazy stuff. (When this video first started making the rounds in March, some thought it was a hoax. It's not -- this is a real feature of Photoshop CS5.) As with any new tool in Photoshop, expect Content Aware Fill to be overused: A surfeit of tourist-free images of Machu Picchu will soon be littering Flickr. But beyond the novelty, it's a truly useful touch-up tool that turns what used to be hours of work into a simple drag of the brush. ", "Speaking of brushes, all of the painting features in Photoshop -- neglected since the release of Photoshop 7 -- have been rewritten. The app now features much more realistic interactions. If you use a digitizer tablet, you'll find that your brushes are considerably more responsive. The angle of the stylus now controls the edge of the brush and the new paint mixing tools control color blending, wetness and bristle length, making for a very life-like painting experience. Another bit of Photoshop trickery that's become popular lately is high dynamic range imaging, or HDR. The Flickr crowd is crazy for it, and Adobe has responded by improving Photoshop's Merge to HDR tool, which helps you create HDR images. The new HDR tool now has 14 HDR presets which can save considerable effort when hand-toning an image. The HDR presets shipping with Photoshop range from the cartoonish to the fairly realistic, and should satisfy all but the pickiest of HDR enthusiasts. Composing a real HDR image requires multiple photos taken with multiple exposures, but now you can fake it. Photoshop CS5 has a new set of tools to create what Adobe calls \"single image HDRs.\" The results will never quite match a true HDR with multiple images, but the new single image HDR toning dialog lets you get pretty close using just one file. Also incredibly helpful for HDR fans is the new \"remove ghosts\" tool in the HDR dialog, which makes it simple to eliminate ghosting and artifacts caused by differences between your layered HDR images. With Photoshop CS5, you can simply outline a ghosted area (say, for" ]

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[ "In some parts of the South, Friday's rare snowfall didn't pack the punch anticipated, but it still forced the closure of schools and the cancellation of flights. Cities put emergency crews to work throughout much of the region while state offices and schools were shut down. An estimated 8 inches fell in De Kalb in eastern Mississippi, while 200 miles south in metro Biloxi, snow fell but didn't stick, the National Weather Service reported. \"We had flurries for about five minutes where I am, that's it,\" said John DeMiller, owner of the Petit Bois Grocery in Biloxi. DeMiller's 10th-grade daughter stayed home from school Friday after the Mississippi Department of Education closed all schools due to inclement weather. DeMiller hadn't expected much snow, and when schools were closed in his town without accumulations, he was flabbergasted. \"I'm going, 'they just lost their mind,' \" he said. Share your winter weather photos, stories Just north of metro Biloxi, though, 1-2 inches fell and black ice could pose a problem as wind chills drop, National Weather Service forecaster Phil Grigsby said. Officials in Georgia were bracing for enough snow to paralyze parts of the state. Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which canceled hundreds of flights, had reported 4 inches of snow, National Weather Service meteorologist Dan Darbe said. Numerous accidents have been attributed to the dangerous conditions, he said. Temperatures were to fall to the mid- to upper-20s in the Atlanta area after the snow tapered off sometime between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. Friday, he said. Traffic accidents were expected to increase as slush turned to ice late Friday, he said. The clear skies already over parts of western Alabama are expected to move into Georgia later this weekend, Darbe said. In Louisiana, Commissioner of Administration Angele Davis announced state government offices were closed in 42 parishes. Earlier in the day, iReporter Susan Sharman in Bastrop, Louisiana, said she couldn't believe snow was falling over her town. \"I haven't seen snow like this in Bastrop in over eight years,\" she said. Metro Baton Rouge, Louisiana, saw about an inch of snow on its streets, while the rest of the area got 1 to 3 inches, Grigsby said. But Mardi Gras revelers don't have much to worry about. ", "The very early morning snow shouldn't interfere with parades Friday evening, he said. Windchills in the 30s, however, mean paradegoers need to bundle up before the fun. Drivers should also be wary of any black ice that may form on bridges and overpasses, he said. Yasamie Richardson of Alabama Emergency Management said conditions could be \"very, very dangerous,\" in her state and the likelihood of power outages was \"very great.\" She said authorities were encouraging people to prepare for the possibility of losing electricity. \"My husband and I haven't seen snow since we were stationed in Massachusetts and my children have never seen it,\" Sara Johnson in Wilmer, Alabama, said in a CNN iReport as the first flakes began to fall Friday morning. The weather system pounded parts of Texas on Thursday, leaving a record 12.5 inches in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The National Weather Service said the 24-hour total in the area topped the previous record of 12.1 inches set in 1964. \"For the DFW Metroplex this is amazing,\" said iReporter Brent Dow. See Dow's photo of a Texas-size snowman West of Dallas, in Irving, Texas, Michael Whiteside was awakened at 2:45 a.m. Friday \"to the sound of my patio roof collapsing from the weight\" of the snow, he said in a CNN iReport. At Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, where American and American Eagle canceled about 230 flights, officials were working to ramp up departures Friday. An Airport spokesman said Friday afternoon that most flights were running on time. There was some relief in sight for the South. Warmer weather was melting the snow Friday in Dallas, and" ]

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[ "Every year, I take at least one vacation out of the country to get my international travel fix. And this time, I'm taking you with me. The travel bug is a forever-itch that leaves you longing to wake up in a foreign country, Jarrett Bellini says. No, not literally. Sit down. This year, YOU can weigh in on where I go and what I do once I get there. We're calling it: Let's Ruin Jarrett's Vacation! By adding your comments below or sharing your ideas on CNN.com Live's Facebook page, you can send me to either Argentina, Greece, South Africa or Turkey. The destination that gets the most positive response is where I'll go. And to make it more fun, I won't even find out where I'm heading until I actually get to the airport this Sunday, August 30. There, I will tear open an envelope, read the results for the first time, and then head to my departure gate -- hopefully with at least a few articles of appropriate clothing. Once I get to wherever it is you send me, I'll be blogging on CNN.com and and checking in from time to time on CNN.com Live. By sharing your ideas on Facebook, you'll be able to guide many aspects of this vacation. You call the shots. And I'll cry myself to sleep at night wondering why I agreed to work on vacation and let other people plan it. I suppose, now, you might want a little background on why I'd actually want to do this. I mean, besides the fact that clearly, I'm a glutton for punishment. Really, though, I think I just like a challenge. In the fall of 2003, after an entire month of fruitlessly waiting by my phone to hear back about an entry-level position with CNN, I finally gave up hope and took my apparent job snub as some sort of cosmic sign from the Slacker Gods. I decided, then, that the only reasonable course of action was to buy a plane ticket to Europe to spend the next three months running around with my backpack, trying -- again, quite fruitlessly -- to meet foreign chicks. Though not quite a rucksack Casanova, I did come back from these magical three months with a far greater ability to entertain myself in a completely new place among absolute strangers. (Granted, for me, this can be accomplished by the presence of shiny objects.) ", "Amazingly, the day after I returned from Europe, CNN called and offered me the position. It took four long months, but the timing was remarkable and I couldn't have been happier. But, as I started my new professional life, I was sick. I had the travel bug. Now, this is not to be confused with bed bugs, which, FYI, I painfully fell victim to in Copenhagen at a horrible, bomb-shelter-of-a-hostel they call Sleep in Heaven. Apparently, Heaven smells like mildew and leaves you with a rash. No, this was the travel bug -- the forever-itch that leaves you longing to wake up in a foreign bed in a foreign country, rising to face new ideas and new people beneath an unfamiliar sky. Of course, that's just my poorly poetic way of saying: The world is huge and amazing. It's so good! Once it hits your lips, it's so good!" ]

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[ "They prefer the darkness and calm of early morning when their targets are most vulnerable, still sleeping or under the influence. They make sure their prey -- suspected killers and other violent fugitives -- know what they're up against. U.S. Marshal supervisory inspector James Ergas takes aim during a computer-simulated attack. \"When they wake up to a submachine gun and flashlight in their face, they tend not to fight,\" says James Ergas, the supervisory inspector for the U.S. Marshals Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force. The U.S. Marshals Service is the nation's oldest law enforcement agency and best known for protecting federal judges, transporting federal prisoners and protecting witnesses. Less known is the cutting-edge work of the agency's six regional task forces in capturing suspects. The task force in Atlanta is located in a nondescript warehouse office park. In 2007, the investigators from the Southeast task force arrested more than 3,000 suspects; only once did the Marshals exchange gunfire, Ergas says. Watch Ergas blast bad guys in simulated attack » \"This is the crème de la crème of the Marshal Service,\" says Eugene O'Donnell, a former prosecutor and New York City police officer who now teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. On any given day, Ergas and his force are tracking 10 to 15 suspected killers roaming the Southeast, while also searching for other violent offenders. Already this year, they have been involved in a number of high-profile searches: Gary Michael Hilton, the suspect charged in the killing of Meredith Emerson who disappeared while hiking in northern Georgia; a fugitive Marine wanted in connection with the killing of Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach in North Carolina; and suspects wanted in connection with the killings of two suburban Atlanta police officers. But most of the time they're chasing suspects outside of the glare of the media spotlight. \"Our mandate is to track violent fugitives -- murderers, armed robbers, rapists and fugitives of that caliber,\" says Keith Booker, the commander of the task force. Watch Booker describe their mission » One suspect currently being hunted is Charles Leon Parker who has been on the run since the 1980s after being accused of molesting his stepdaughters. The Marshals were brought in recently, Booker says, after Parker allegedly called one of his victims and said, \"I wanted you to know I saw you and your daughter, and she sure is beautiful.\" ", "O'Donnell says it takes highly trained, high energy, \"really special people\" to do such work day in and day out, especially when they're up against \"some of the most dangerous individuals in the country.\" \"It's not an exaggeration to say they're the front of the front line,\" O'Donnell says. \"It's not going to get any more challenging than this in law enforcement.\" To make sure they are well prepared, the Atlanta office is equipped with a locker full of high-powered weaponry; a high-tech operations center, complete with flat screen TVs, where they communicate directly with investigators in the field; a two-story house for training; and a 300-degree computer simulator that puts the Marshals into real life danger scenarios. In one demonstration, Ergas steps into the simulator and responds to reports of shots fired at a workplace. A woman rushes to a victim on the ground, as Ergas barks out commands. Moments later, a man rounds the corner. He too tends to the victim. Suddenly, the gunman runs into the corner and Ergas opens fire with his Glock. The suspect hits the ground. Watch Ergas say there's no better training than the simulator » A split second later, another gunman emerges, and Ergas blasts him too. Think of it as Wii on steroids. \"These are things you cannot get on a range,\" Ergas says. There are 50 different scenarios the simulator can create, with a technician able to change each scenario. A trainee can use a shotgun, rifle, Glock 22 or Glock 23. The guns shoot a laser" ]

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[ "aphy for you. Can you give us some color there on what you're seeing in terms of the order book and pull through? And how do you see those trends evolving post-NMPA approval here?\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. I think it's too early to say post-approval. I think we'll wait and see and talk to Barry. That's pretty fresh news.\nBut I think in China, we're seeing the business continue to be strong. Hopefully, it continues to be decent.\nSusan Kim -- Chief Financial Officer\nIt still continues to be strong, improving since COVID every quarter.\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. It continues to improve. And so I think we're really bullish on China. I think there's macro factors that are completely outside of our control between the U.S.\nand China that maybe I start to lose sleep over a little bit, but they're completely out of our control. But based on what we control and what we can see and what customers are actually doing with our technology, we're quite encouraged, and we think the opportunity is still in front of us, quite frankly.\nTejas Savant -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nGot it. Really helpful. Thanks, guys.\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYup.\nOperator\nAnd for the next question, Dan Brennan of Cowen. Please go ahead, sir.\nDan Brennan -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGreat. Thanks. Thanks for taking the question. Hey, Christian.\nHey, Susan. Maybe just, Christian, you alluded to it a couple of times during the call, but just on the funnel itself, I don't know in the past kind of look on a clarity you provide on it. But just could you give a sense of what the funnel looks like today maybe like customer segment and kind of how it's evolved over the course of 2021?\nChristian Henry -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. First of all, Dan, congrats on your new role. We're going to miss Doug, but it's good to have you on the ball club. With respect to the funnel itself, let's state that we haven't given a lot of color, and I don't think we will give a lot of color because those processes internally are evolving and are being built and improving all the time.\n", "We've spent a ton of time this year defining the funnel more, creating a common language from which the sales force can communicate with each other and with executives so that we get much better about forecast accuracy, so that we can stand up in front of you and give you what we hope to be pretty reliable projections. One of the things we talked about for the first time, kind of some of the segment, market areas that we're focused on and our relative revenues. The reality is that the company didn't have any of those capabilities, and we had to come in and build that. And so at this time, I really -- it's probably not appropriate for me to give you more color on the specific funnel other than the general comment that often use.\nThis -- the increasing commercial footprint is directly impacting the quality and the size of the funnel, which does give us generally better visibility into the future than perhaps we've had in the past. But at any given quarter, since instruments are still such a significant part of our quarterly revenues and they're quite binary because they're large dollar numbers, they could have an impact on any given quarter. But if you look out over time, we're very encouraged what we see in the funnel that there is very strong demand for these products and platforms. This will help us grow.\nAs we grow, we will be able to improve our gross margins. As we improve our gross margins, we'll be able to get better leverage across the business and make that push toward ultimately getting to cash flow breakeven and better.\nDan Brennan -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGreat. No, that was helpful. Thanks, Christian. Maybe just a high-level one on kind of academic funding.\nObviously, it seems to be pretty robust from the headline figures and entering '22. Is that something -- clearly you've got a lot of growth levers at your disposal, which you've discussed, but is that something " ]

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[ "anies' products today, they're still really being tested and not rolled out in any massive hardware sense this year and the focus is more on retrofitting existing lines and improving productivity.\nCertainly, rising wages and current processes are still very labor-intensive, and so there's certainly focus on those areas to reduce cost. And then another factor that's going on certainly is new facilities are being built as companies diversify away from China to other emerging areas. I mean we even read about electronics manufacturers here in the U.S. and -- but certainly also in India and other markets, were seeing some investments, too, just start to begin.\nSo I'd say it's a great transitional year. It's one where the new technology is not here yet where there's a lot of focus on cost, and that's kind of certainly having its impact on our business. There is business for us for retrofitting and improving lines. But as you can see from our guidance, it's much less exciting and growth oriented than when major new lines are being implemented or new features are being brought to market.\nOperator\nOur next question is from Joe Giordano with Cowen and Company. Please proceed.\nJoe Giordano -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nI guess maybe -- wondering if you had an update on integration of some of the deep learning capabilities into the In-Sight platform. I've seen some of you guys at trade shows, and that's something you guys have been working toward. I think some of your competitors are close to launching something similar to that. So just any update there on being able to put all that technology onto a single platform?\nRobert J. Willett -- Chief Executive Officer, President And Executive Director\nWell, generally, Joe, we don't give a comment or we don't comment about future product launches which may or may not be coming from Cognex. So that's not something that I would comment on. Certainly, we're very excited and we're seeing some excellent growth in our deep learning business, and it's an area we think we're leading in from a technology point of view. And of course, making that technology more accessible and easier to use would be what one would expect a product road map to include, but I'm not going to get specific about when and in what form we might launch future products with that technology.\nJoe Giordano -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\n", "Okay. When I think about where your balance sheet is and what you've done over the last couple of years, you've obviously -- you were hiring like crazy to meet demand. So how do you feel you guys are positioned now in terms of like is your capacity too high from a human capital perspective? And in terms of the financial capabilities, I was a little surprised to see no buyback this quarter. Just how should we think about that going forward?\nRobert J. Willett -- Chief Executive Officer, President And Executive Director\nYes, Joe, I'll talk about the sort of capacity issue then I'll invite John to comment on the buyback. So you're right. We've been investing very heavily in the businesses. We saw some phenomenal growth and phenomenal potential in the business. Obviously, 44% growth in 2017. We were, in a sense, under capacity as we -- we didn't have the capacity to support that level of ongoing business as we exited the year. So we were doing some catch up in '18.\nWhat you're seeing now is we're going to be slowing down significantly on hiring and expense growth, and we're reallocating resources because we're -- Cognoids are very talented and capable individuals that we take great effort to hire, have the cultural fit with our business and train and develop. So they're great assets for us that we're going to or are in the process of redeploying toward high-growth areas of the business such as logistics.\nSo we think it gives us extra capacity for what we want to do in the future, but we certainly are slowing down expense growth and hiring based on what we see and we've been discussing on this call. Now I'll turn it to John on the buyback in Q1 question.\nJohn J. Curran -- Senior Vice President of Fi" ]

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[ "ntinue at these unprecedented levels for the foreseeable future. With semiconductor supply constraints pervasive and ongoing, most major device manufacturers have provided multiyear visibility into their heightened levels of investments, which are being put into place to support ever-increasing demand forecast.\nCompanies across the supply chain are working to increase capacity, and so are we. Earlier in the year, we talked about our plans to increase capex in order to add the capacity that will enable Ichor to retrieve quarterly run rates in excess of $400 million. We continue to aggressively drive these efforts ahead of a very strong 2022. We continue to believe that 2021 is just the second year of the multiyear growth cycle, propelled by the conversions of multiple demand drivers, such as 5G, IoT, AI, high-performance computing, and autonomous vehicles, in addition to more recent initiatives in support of domestic semiconductor supply self-sufficiency.\nTogether, all of these drivers are resulting in increased capital intensity for the semiconductor industry and higher levels of investments in fab technologies capacity. And in this extremely healthy business environment, Ichor plays a critical role, especially as the greater intensity of etch deposition and EUV lithography plays into our focus on fluid delivery for these critical applications for leading-edge devices. Now I'll update you on the progress the team has made on our strategy to leverage our engineering capabilities and IP portfolio to develop new products that will result in longer-term expansion of our share-served markets, as well as drive the operating model toward increased levels of profitability. We continue to make progress on our proprietary next-generation gas delivery solution, as well as with our other components we have developed, as part of these overall R&D efforts.\nOur first fully configured next-generation gas panel was shipped and will start qualification this quarter. The qualification process is expected to take at least six months. We continue to work with two additional customers. And given the current demand on their engineering resources during this robust period of WFE investments, we currently expect to ship our second beta systems in early 2022.\nIn our chemical delivery business, we shipped a beta chemical delivery system to a North American customer in the third quarter. We expect this qualification period to extend through this year, with first revenues occurring in early 2022. Additionally, we expect to ship another beta unit for an additional application in early 2022. We completed the qualification of our first evaluation unit of our proprietary liquid delivery subsystem to a Japanese customer in the third quarter.\n", "As I noted on our last call, the scale of this first opportunity is relatively small but an important step in penetrating the Japanese market, which is the largest portion of the web processing SAM, as well as continue to quote opportunities at other OEMs that are larger in scale. In our precision machining business, the two qualifications we highlighted last quarter will begin to see first revenues beginning later in the fourth quarter. These qualifications will both increase our proprietary content on a gas panel and be accretive to our gross margin profile. In summary, in a very challenging operating environment, the team is working extremely hard to ramp the business to address the customer demand we are experiencing.\nAnd we expect to return to record-setting revenue levels for the forthcoming quarters. Our fourth quarter revenue guidance of $275 million to $305 million indicates our expectation for sequential growth above Q3 and our target to achieve a new revenue record for the company. Given the supply chain challenges, our current forecast for Q4 is not quite as high as we expected a quarter ago, but we have strong visibility for at least six months and anticipate continued sequential growth as we move into 2022. At the midpoint of Q4 guidance, our expected growth in 2021 will be below WFE growth.\nHowever, we" ]

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[ "ething going forward, we would like to see it will continue to increase, OK? So that you know. Probably this quarter, we have a small hiccup, but hopefully, we're really expecting though in the future, we have some growth in second quarter after.\nOperator\nOur next question is coming from Sara Wang, Morgan Stanley. Go ahead please.\nSara Wang -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nSo I just have one question on 5G pricing. So it seems, currently, all big three operators are offering early bird 5G plans at around 13 99, but there are some smaller operators offering much lower prices. So can we ask Chunghwa's strategy on the official 5G pricing? Or do we see any pressure to actually lower the price from the early bird pricing level here?\nFu-Fu Shen -- Assistant Vice President & Director of Investor Relation.\nI think we are stick within our 13 99, this kind of strategy. You see, for example, like we recently, when we launched Samsung S20, we actually included this kind of in the contract for customers subscribing with 13 99, if you can sign with us with the option with the 5G plans. But out 90% of our customers actually signed with 5G plans, which means, once when we launched 5G service, those customer can automatically become our 5G migrate to 5G. So customers see kind of interesting in 5G service. So we believe this is still a good strategy. We will stay with this kind of things. So this is a 5G handset. So later on, if we have a good 5G handset, probably we will continue this kind of strategy. We will look into that. Actually, I would like to add on something. Now only the 13 99, I think for 5G, not only for the speed, for the data usage, we really would like to see some innovative applications to be included for use in new experience when they migrate to 5G service. Thank you.\nOperator\n[Operator Instructions] The next question is coming from Amber Lee, Yuanta. Go ahead please.\nYufang Lee -- Yuanta Securities -- Analyst\n", "I think last time, Chunghwa mentioned that correct me if I'm wrong. You mentioned that for the full year 2020, you still expect decline in mobile service revenue as we have. But now as we have seen some 5G early birds offering in the market, if we look at the initial adoption pace and perhaps client feedback, do you still expect the service revenue to decline for this year? Or you can go back to growth trajectory from this year on?\nFu-Fu Shen -- Assistant Vice President & Director of Investor Relation.\nWe still expect the mobile service revenue in 2020 is a declining trend since the like we mentioned earlier, the subscription for 5G, in the first stage, still very limited, OK? So for especially for this year. So I think the early burden is this is just a trial, but we would like to maintain this kind of a high end retained our high-end customers and try to maintain this kind of experience, experience, try to give this kind of experience. So for this year, for the whole year, declining trend like this. Yes. So the like we mentioned that next year, probably, hopefully, will be the year we expect 5G will have some kind of performance, hopefully. Yes.\nYufang Lee -- Yuanta Securities -- Analyst\nOkay. And to follow-up on the realities in your first question. Should we conclude that handset sales itself actually generate negative margins? Or it's just a lower-margin business instead of negative?\nFu-Fu Shen -- Assistant Vice President & Director of Investor Relation.\nMargin itself, of course, net handset sales, of course, yes.\nShui-Yi Kuo -- President, Senior EVP of Finance Chief Financial Officer & Director\nI answer your question. Because under IFRS 15, the handset sales and our telecom service under together, we should allocate revenue between our handset sales and the streaming service revenue. So the handset sales usually have a negative margin, but it's the number is not very big. And I add one more information about your question number one. I think the 5G will time to educate this market and which we will stimulate our customers to use 5G services. And I think our goal here, we will aim to provide more and more innova" ]

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[ "ey're going to be more expensive due to higher component costs. But at the same time, it looks like you guys have proven that there is a market for low- cost geographies with phones like iPhone SE. So how do you see these two different segments within the smartphone market evolving over the next one to three years? And then I had a follow-up for Luca.\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nAgain, I want to stay away from commenting about future products. But generally, I think it's important when you think about 5G is to look around the world at the different deployment schedules. And some of those look very different perhaps than what you might be seeing here. And so, that's very important. In terms of the price, I wouldn't want to comment on the price of handsets that aren't announced.\nKrish Sankar -- Cowen and Company -- Analyst\nGot it. No worries, Tim. And then I have a follow-up to Luca. Opex as a percentage of sales for March looks like about 15% higher than in your prior quarters. Kind of curious how much of that is part of it is driven by some of your Intel modem asset purchases or TV+ in the opex or how do we think about it on a go-forward basis?\nLuca Maestri -- Senior Vice President & Chief Financial Officer\nYeah, I think we felt good about our opex results because they were at the low end of our guidance range, but clearly, we want to make all the necessary investments in the business and from -- in terms of the new services, not only for TV+, but all the new services that we launched during 2019, this is a period where we're making the necessary investments in advertising and marketing and that level of investment is reflected in our opex results. And also as you correctly stated, we completed the acquisition of the Intel baseband business during the December quarter. And so, we had -- we reflected the run rate of the expenses related to that business partially during the quarter after the completion of the transaction. And we -- that is a very important core technology for the Company. So we will continue to make all the necessary investments also there. There is a third category of expenses that affected the December quarter and is the fact that our revenue was very strong. And we have certain variable expenses, for example, credit card fees that are associated with the higher volume and of course, impacted our opex results.\n", "Tejas Gala -- Senior Analyst, Corporate Finance and Investor Relations\nThanks, Krish. Can we have the next question please?\nOperator\nThat will be from Mike Olson with Piper Sandler.\nMike Olson -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nAfternoon. Thanks for taking the questions. So slightly different take on an earlier question on Wearables and that is -- what impact do you think Wearables is having on driving people into the Apple ecosystem? You mentioned 75% of watch buyers are new to the Apple Watch, but many of them new to Apple overall. I'm sure a lot of existing iPhone, iPads or Mac users are going to be Wearables customers, but do you think Wearables bring people into the ecosystem to buy other devices in a material way?\nTim Cook -- Chief Executive Officer\nI think that -- Michael, it's Tim. With each Apple product that a customer buys, I think they get tighter into the ecosystem, because they like -- that's the reason that they're buying into it is they like the experience -- the customer experience. And so, from that point of view, I think each of our products can drive another product. I would think in that case, it's more likely that the iPhone comes first. But there is no doubt in my mind that there is some people that came into the ecosystem for the Watch.\nMike Olson -- Piper Sandler -- Analyst\nOkay. And then I think you recently mentioned that augmented reality will pervade our entire lives. And I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts about how you think it starts to impact our lives more significantly? For example, will the inflection point in AR come from gaming or industrial usage or some other category. In other words, where will the average person, kind of, first feel the impact " ]

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[ " where that activity ends up and how we can -- what we get back from our customers and that does fluctuate up and down over time.\nRichard Hamilton Prentiss -- Raymond James & Associates -- Analyst\nThanks, Jay. One more quick one, and then you'll get someone else squeezed in. Any updated thoughts on in Building Systems. There has been a lot of talk about private 5G networks and what the opportunity might be. What are your thoughts as far as capital deployment back to kind of question on what's the opportunity for private 5G maybe in Building Systems?\nJay A. Brown -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYeah. The in-building and I would put venues into this category to five or six years ago, we had talked about in building and venues and we saw some opportunities but relatively limited. And that business has really picked up on the small cell side. And we are seeing some really nice opportunities on in building and venues and seeing some healthy growth there. The returns are good.\nIt's a place where we like to invest. Certainly, it falls into that category of the densification comments that I was making earlier. Any place to see a densification of people with the growth in traffic that we're seeing, really the only way to manage the network toward a viable solution is to go in and put in small cells and that's true in the public right of ways, and it's true in venues and in buildings.\nSo the growth in traffic that we're talking about and the deployment of this 5G network just requires a greater densification than in building and then use are following the same pattern that we're seeing happen in right of ways.\nRichard Hamilton Prentiss -- Raymond James & Associates -- Analyst\nGreat, thanks guys, stay well.\nBenjamin Raymond Lowe -- Vice President of Corporate Finance\nMaybe we can try to squeeze in two more callers before we drop off this morning.\nOperator\nNext, we'll hear from Sam Badri of Credit Suisse.\nSami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst\nHi, thank you. I wanted to ask you about your tenants with power that moved higher in the quarter and it comes along with the solid move in your rental revenue per tower. Is there any opportunity for accelerated tenancy improvement given the 5G build in some of the other trends that you mentioned? And as you see tenant to go up, what the impacts of free cash flow at this point?\nJay A. Brown -- President and Chief Executive Officer\n", "Yeah, we are seeing increased tenancy on the towers. Historically, we've added about one tenant every 10 years roughly. I think that's a pretty good forecast for what we'll see over the long term. It's underpinning our 7% to 8% targeted growth in the dividend over time. So I think we'll -- I think that's kind of the path that we're on. And as I made the comments earlier around the capital spending by the carriers in the environment that we're in, I think we've got a good tailwind to continue to stay on that path of increasing tenancy of about one tenant over 10 years.\nThe unit economics of the business remain intact and Dan mentioned this in his prepared remarks. But we're drop in $0.90 of every dollar up at the Organic Site Rental revenue lines. We're dropping that all the way down to AFFO. And this is a real credit to our team who has done a tremendous job of managing the expenses and being thoughtful about places where we can take out costs in order to achieve that those very high incremental margins on incremental dollars of revenue.\nAnd that's one of the beauties of our business model and certainly one we think we can continue to sustain and improve upon.\nSami Badri -- Credit Suisse -- Analyst\nGot it. One other follow-up is, does your guidance include any type of benefit from the Biden infrastructure bill that may be passed in the near future? And then, if your guidance does not include it, how do you imagine the broadband budgeted spend benefit your business if it -- there is a path for that?\nJay A. Brown -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nWe have not anticipated any of that in our current forecast or guidance. I think the most likely path for be" ]

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[ "-curve of IoT-based applications, very beginning. That's got multiple decades of growth in front of us. So I mean, just on the second comment you made, I'd say that the secular growth trends that CSS are facing are very attractive to us and also are robust. And finally, and this one will take a bit longer and be more, I'll call it, more consistent over the next few decades. I think we're at the beginning part of an accelerating electrification trend. And EES will benefit greatly, but that affects our other business units as well.\nAnd so I mean it's hard for me to say UBS has got the strongest growth trends. We've spent some time outlining all the various growth trends. We think we're well positioned to take advantage of. But I would say those -- that's how I would it. Utility, yes, on your utility comment, yes, on your broadband comment, that I will put datacom and IP security right up there with it in electrification as well.\nOperator\n[Operator Instructions] Our next question will come from Chris Dankert with Longbow Research.\nChris Dankert -- Longbow Research -- Analyst\nCongrats again on the quarter here. I guess I want to make sure I got my numbers straight based on Dave, what you were saying, synergy savings stepped up pretty materially into the second quarter. The number I'm coming at to is $68 million. Is that correct? Is that what you're intending to guide to here on 2Q?\nDave Schulz -- Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President\nThat would be high. And so if you think about -- we called out $34 million in Q1. And we called out the -- for the full amount. So we have said that 60%, 40% split on synergy realization, front half, back half. So we've not provided a specific number for Q2, but your number is too high.\nChris Dankert -- Longbow Research -- Analyst\nGot it. Got it. And then just housekeeping, and sorry if I missed it, but any comment on your April growth to date or just kind of how growth trended through the first quarter into 2Q here?\nJohn J. Engel -- Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer\n", "Yes. And we've been very pleased with the momentum as we -- again, preliminary basis, our April sales up roughly 20% versus the prior year pro forma. And obviously, April and the prior year was the first full month that we had a true COVID impact. Now we saw the decline in our sales rates in the middle of March, April, we were down on a pro forma basis, 16%. So we've come off the trough from the prior year. And we also commented that the gross margins are in line with Q1.\nOperator\nAnd this does conclude our question-and-answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to John Engel for any closing remarks.\nJohn J. Engel -- Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer\nWell, thank you all very much. As we said, we're off to a great start, and we do appreciate your support, and we look forward to following up with you. And I know we've already got a long list of calls, Leslie and Will and Dave, and we'll be connecting with you. So thank you. Please stay safe and healthy, and have a great day.\nOperator\n[Operator Closing Remarks]\nDuration: 47 minutes\nCall participants:\nLeslie Hunziker -- Senior Vice President of Investor Relations and Corporate Communications\nJohn J. Engel -- Chairman of the Board, President, Chief Executive Officer\nDave Schulz -- Chief Financial Officer, Senior Vice President\nDeane Dray -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst\nSam Darkatsh -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nNigel Coe -- Wolfe Research -- Analyst\nDavid Manthey -- Baird -- Analyst\nChris Dankert -- Longbow Research -- Analyst\nMore WCC analysis\nAll earnings call transcripts\n\n\n\n\n" ]

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[ "Atlanta (CNN) -- Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain told supporters Saturday that he is suspending his presidential campaign, which has become hobbled in recent weeks by allegations of sexual harassment and an Atlanta woman's claim that they carried on a 13-year affair. While he will still be able to raise and spend campaign funds because he did not officially drop out, Cain's White House bid is effectively over. Cain said he came to the decision after assessing the impact that the allegations were having on his wife, his family and his supporters. Cain and his wife, Gloria, held hands as they walked up to the podium where Cain made his remarks in Atlanta. The crowd chanted, \"Gloria! Gloria!\" before the candidate spoke. Even as he stepped aside under the weight of the allegations that have dogged him, Cain said that he was at \"peace with my God\" and \"peace with my wife.\" He repeatedly called the allegations \"false and untrue,\" and added that \"the (media) spin hurts.\" \"I am not going to be silenced and I will not go away,\" Cain said, announcing what he called his Plan B: A website, TheCainSolutions.com, through which he will continue to advocate for his platform. His catchy \"9-9-9\" economic plan is not going anywhere, he said. \"Your support has been unwavering and undying,\" Cain told his supporters. He will endorse another of the Republican presidential hopefuls soon, he said. Other candidates were quick to react. \"Herman Cain provided an important voice to this process,\" Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann said in a statement. \"His ideas and energy generated tremendous enthusiasm for the conservative movement at a time it was so desperately needed to restore confidence in our country.\" Fellow Georgian Newt Gingrich said the \"9-9-9\" plan \"got our country talking about the critical issue of how to reform our tax code and he elevated the dialogue of the Republican presidential primary in the process.\" Texas Gov. Rick Perry said he knew the Cains made a \"difficult decision. He helped invigorate conservative voters and our nation with a discussion of major tax reform.\" Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said Cain brought \"a unique and valuable voice to the debate over how to reform our country's uncompetitive tax code and turn around the economy. I understand his decision and wish him and his family the best.\" ", "Recently, Cain acknowledged that Ginger White's allegations of an affair have led to a drop in campaign contributions, and a Des Moines Register poll showed his support among likely Republican Iowa caucus-goers has fallen to 8%, down from 23% in October. The poll has a sampling error of plus or minus 4.9 points, the newspaper said. Respondents said they were most concerned that Cain does not understand important issues, but said the allegations against him contribute to their concern, the newspaper said. This week, White told the news media that she and Cain engaged in an on-and-off affair for more than 13 years. She described the affair as \"very casual.\" White issued a statement, through her attorney, after Cain's announcement Saturday. \"Ginger White respects Mr. Cain's decision regarding his campaign and indeed would have respected any decision he made,\" the statement said. \"That being said, she is disappointed that he has not apologized for the public statements he has made about her and other women who have spoken out.\" In a fund-raising letter Tuesday night, Cain referred to White as \"troubled.\" Two women -- Sharon Bialek and Karen Kraushaar -- previously accused Cain of sexually harassing them in the 1990s while he was head of the National Restaurant Association. Two other women also have said Cain sexually harassed them while they worked at the association, but they have declined to be identified. Cain told the Union Leader in New Hampshire that he repeatedly gave White money to help her with \"month-to-month bills and expenses.\" But" ]

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[ " with my key customer, they really appreciate how Taiwan was managed throughout the pandemic, how the Taiwan semiconductor companies were managing the delivery in a very adverse supply chain environment, throughout the whole 2020.\nAnd I believe that would carry us far. For the partner that we support, they're gaining market share. And I think this is another reason that I believe not only we will grow or capture a huge chunk of the semiconductor growing logic space, we will also force and enable more outsourcing for IDMs. That I believe that in the next few years, we will enjoy a higher growth rate as a result of all of these factors.\nCharlie Chan -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nThanks for the insight, for the insight, Dr. Tien. I think that's a very clear. I mean, I also have a follow up, Roland's question about your gross margin trend. Sorry, I am not sure if you did give the gross margin guidance for this year? Can you kind of breakdown by your ATM business and the EMS business, the gross margin trend in 2021? And also, I know you don't go comment about the pricing, right? But may I know for flip chip and testing, do you expect the price to go up this year?\nTien Wu -- Group Chief Operating Officer\nJoseph, you will comment on the gross profit?\nJoseph Tung -- Chief Financial Officer\nAs I mentioned earlier on, I think the -- for 2021, I think we will continue to see margin improvement at the gross level with the steady or improving opex ratio. I think also on the operating margin, we'll continue to see improvement. And that comes from a lot of the efforts that we put in, in terms of improving our efficiency, creating synergy with SPIL, and also the higher loading facility, of course, it helps, a friendlier pricing environment also help. I think all these put together give us a very high confidence that we will be improving our margin going forward for ATM.\nAs far as EMS's perspective, I think the more relevant margin is at the operating level. Because of the different product mix, it will have quite a bit of fluctuations on the gross level. So the more relevant or more meaningful benchmark is really on the operating level. For that, we are targeting a 4% operating margin for EMS business. That's slightly up from what we achieved in previous year, which was at 3.8%.\nTien Wu -- Group Chief Operating Officer\n", "Okay, for the other line of business, flip chip, the fan-out and all of the others, we're also seeing a more friendly environment, but not as friendly as wirebond, they're friendly. Okay, I will not comment anymore.\nCharlie Chan -- Morgan Stanley -- Analyst\nThat's OK. Okay, thanks, gentlemen. It's very helpful, thank you.\nOperator\nNext one to ask question, Sebastian Hou, CLSA.\nSebastian Hou -- CLSA -- Analyst\nThanks for taking my questions. So just follow on the pricing and the margin, that part. Just if I look at your Q4 2020 margin that has improved, I think there is a combination of the utilization rate improved, synergies, and then pricing. But looking now into your 1Q guidance, revenue and margin will be similar to last quarter. So, can we say that the pricing is not a factor anymore in this quarter to drive the margin for improvement?\nJoseph Tung -- Chief Financial Officer\nI think it's -- to have a similar margin for first quarter compared to last quarter, it's quite a bit of a challenge itself already, because we are facing further NTD appreciation, which will have a over 1% impact on the margin. We are going through Chinese New Year, and some of the factories are going through annual maintenance. So then we will have less working days. And also, throughout the -- there's a lot of homework that needs to be passed out. Overall, compensation expenses is going to be higher for the quarter. So all the things put together, I think we are doing a pretty good job in maintaining our margin at similar margin from fourth quarter.\nTien Wu -- Group Chief Operating Officer\nI mean, just for clarification, the so-called seasonality is still here. In other words, some of the key customer run their high-volume device for consumer or" ]

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[ " ask. It sounds like margins will stay somewhat muted in the short term with revenue growth slightly better margins in the future. But how should we think about aspiration to international markets. Are we heading going into the low-30% or below 30% range in the near-term and when you get back to mid-day result what kind of profile do you think of international margins?\nMichael T. Prior -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nI don't necessarily want to give a target, certainly for the near term. But I think a healthy integrated telecom in those areas. Once you've gotten to maturity is certainly on the higher end of that range you're talking about, I think, is where I would expect to be.\nRichard Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nAnd last one for me. You touched on a little bit the opportunities of mid-model fiber, fixed wireless connectivity. How should we think about, again, kind of aspirationally, what you're thinking as far as putting capital to work? And I would also throw in maybe private network enterprise 5-G Systems, like you talked about with some of the band like. How should we think about aspirational Capex spending and returns you might achieve?\nMichael T. Prior -- President and Chief Executive Officer\nYes. I think when we look at it, we want to -- when we're putting capital to work in these new areas we want to be sort of minimum mid-teens returns as targets. What we found with a lot of the build-out projects is the initial, especially, say, a new fiber build with anchor tenants. There are some you do on the lower end of returns on that initial contract because of the value of having build that asset and future revenue ads we can put on it. So I think it depends on the situation. Then a lot of the things we are talking about recently, we actually have either committed spend by wholesale or enterprise customers covering most of the capital expenditure and in many cases, all upfront or we have government subsidies doing that or we have a combination.\nSo it depends. But in a lot of the cases, we have commitments or clear line of sight to cover the original Capex right away. And then it's really about growing revenues on top of that.\nRichard Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nAny kind of goalpost, as far as how much money you might be thinking of spending on the Capex side, as we look out over the next one, two, five years?\n", "Justin D. Benincasa -- Chief Financial Officer\nRick, I think we'll be better on that one in the fourth quarter to talk more about. Usually, when we kind of lay out the rest of the year, 2022. But I think directionally, Rick, I think we see a fair amount of opportunity. We look at every opportunity based on risk and return. But I would expect that we'll have opportunity to make some nice investments going forward to secure growth. And just our view is once you -- sort of the first to fiber or one of two large infrastructure providers for a community or a larger community, you are -- that's a very valuable asset with a lot of long-term earnings potential and cash flow potential, as well as sort of optionality to provide additional services.\nSo we're going to tend to lean forward into those opportunities, but we're still going to put them through the discipline of a conservative return analysis.\nRichard Prentiss -- Raymond James -- Analyst\nOkay. Period. Thanks guy very well.\nJustin D. Benincasa -- Chief Financial Officer\nYea. You too.\nOperator\nOur next question comes from the line of Greg Burns of Sidoti & Company. Your line is open.\nGreg Burns -- Sidoti & Company -- Analyst\nMorning. How much FCC support revenue are you still getting in the U.S. Virgin Islands? Like how much was in this quarter?\nJustin D. Benincasa -- Chief Financial Officer\nWe're getting about $10.9 million annually right now.\nGreg Burns -- Sidoti & Company -- Analyst\nAnd that one, just remind me what -- for what period it went down?\nJustin D. Benincasa -- Chief Financial Officer\nIt was about $16 million, and it drops by third year, and it started in July.\nGreg Burns -- Sidoti & Company -- Analyst\nAnd then in terms of your" ]

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[ "n demand for telecom transmission products after a lengthy period of telecom transport strength. Sales of chips to transceiver customers grew 13% sequentially to a new record level. We have strong engagement from new and existing customers for chips including for 5G wireless network applications. Based on the continued strong growth expected in global network and datacenter traffic, an optical infrastructure needed to support by 5G wireless networks.\nWe believe the market for our telecom and datacom products should be strong on a multi-year basis. We are well-positioned with our industry-leading products and deep customer relationships. We believe from global bandwidth expansion regardless of who builds or supplies networks. Our next generation products are critical to our global customer base and include high-performance DML, EML and pixel products enabling high speed optical transceivers including 400G and above and next generation wireless front hall and access solutions.\nM-by-N and high port count twin ROADMs. A range of high-performance DCO transmission modules and underlying highly integrated components. And finally, high baud rate indium phosphide components including those for 800 gigabit transmission. Looking to the second quarter, we expect telecom and datacom revenue will be up sequentially given primarily by growth in telecom transmission and transceiver chip sales.\nNow on to lasers. First-quarter laser demands softened more than projected due to elevated customer inventory levels, resulting in revenue dipping to $33.8 million. Looking to the second quarter, we expect lasers to rebound to the mid to low $40 million level. Over the long run because of our investments in unique new product and technologies, we believe we have good opportunities for growth driven by new laser product introductions in addition to market growth.\nOur commercial lasers business is important to our long-term strategy. It provides us with significant addressable market to grow into and provides us with a level of customer and end market diversification. Throughout my remarks, I've highlighted the significant progress we have made toward our strategic and financial goals. Over the past several years, we have made significant investments in new products, markets, design wins and M&A.\nWe believe these investments position as well for the future. At Lumentum, we are releasing the power of light to create a brighter future and it is a very exciting time for all of our stakeholders. I would especially like to thank our employees for their hard work that has put us in such a great position. I will now hand it over to Wajid.\nWajid Ali -- Chief Financial Officer\n", "Thank you, Alan. Good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to be discussing our strong first-quarter results. Net revenue for the first quarter was 449.9 million which was up 11% sequentially and 27% year on year.\nGAAP gross margin for the first quarter was 37.3%. GAAP operating margin was 13.3% and GAAP diluted net income per share was $0.61. Again, GAAP results include the impact of restructuring, writedowns, amortization of intangibles and other charges related to the acquisition and our actions to attain acquisition synergies. First-quarter non-GAAP gross margin was 45.8% which was up 690 basis points sequentially and 550 points year on year.\nAs Alan noted, the strong year-on-year gross margin improvement was helped by improvements in telecomand datacom margins, as well as acquisition synergies. Non-GAAP operating margin for the first quarter was 27.3% which was up 830 points sequentially and 340 basis points year on year, driven by higher gross margins. Non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $83.3 million or 18.5% of revenue. SG&A expense was $37 million, R&D expense was $46.3 million.\nNon-GAAP net income was a $111.4 million for the first quarter and includes $2.6 million of net interest expense and tax expense of $8.7 million. Non-GAAP diluted net income per share was a $1.44 based on a fully diluted share count of $77.6 million. We ended the quarter with cash and short-term investments " ]

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