With first quarter results starting to come in, National Instruments had a record quarter and reported its highest-ever first quarter revenues of $312 million. That number is an increase of 4% year-over-year and continues the company’s recent trend toward record numbers. Profits were up as well, with net income at $24 million — up 34% from last year’s first quarter.
The growth was driven by large orders — orders greater than $20,000 were up 7% year-over-year — and with strength in Europe, the Middle East, India and Africa, where NI’s revenues grew 11% year-over-year. Revenues were up 1% in the Americas and flat in Asia-Pacific.
Alex Davern, president and CEO of NI, said in a statement that he was pleased with the company’s performance in software revenue growth in particular. In the second quarter, NI started moving toward more frequent software releases and agile development.
“We believe our software-based platform is our most critical differentiator, and its continued growth signals strength in our market position,” said Davern. “I am also encouraged by the strong performance of our broad-based data acquisition portfolio. These products provide measurement capabilities to systems across many applications and industries, which has long been a strength of NI.”
NI continues to have high expectations on its performance, projecting that its second quarter revenues will be between $320 million to $350 million and noting that the midpoint would be a new second quarter revenue record.
A number of other test companies reported results this week. Testing multinational company Bureau Veritas reported organic growth of nearly 6% year-over-year in its consumer testing segment, which includes electronic test; and even higher growth in its certification segment. The company said that its electrical and electronic-related testing grew in the mid-single digits, driven by automotive testing and by internet of things testing in the U.S. and Europe. Bureau Veritas reported revenues of $1.3 billion for the first quarter of 2018, reflecting an organic growth rate of 2.6%.
Benchmark Electronics reported that its revenues were up year-over-year from $558 million to $608 million for the first quarter, although it reported a loss of $24 million compared to profits of $9 million during 2017’s first quarter. The company said that loss included $40 million of foreign taxes and costs associated with repatriating cash to the U.S. The company brought in $102 million in its test and instrumentation segment, up from $76 million during the same period last year; and its telecom-related revenues were $83 million, up slightly from 1Q 2017’s $80 million.
MKS Instruments, which offers test solutions to markets including the semiconductor space, had a very healthy first quarter with revenues up 27% year-over-year to $554 million. Profits were up as well, to $105 million for the quarter compared to $65.1 million in the previous year’s first quarter. MKS said that in semiconductor test revenues, it saw a jump of 26% year-over-year to $313 million.
In other test news this week:
–Keysight Technologies worked with Qualcomm to achieve 3GPP user equipment Category 20 speeds of 2 Gbps in the downlink, using Keysight’s 5G Protocol R&D toolset and a mobile test device with the chipmaker’s Snapdragon X24 LTE modem. Keysight said that speed was achieved through aggregating “20 separate streams of LTE data” and incorporated 4×4 multiple-input multiple-output and advanced modulation encoding.
Keysight also this week announced continuing collaboration with China Mobile on 5G work; more on that here.
-Analyst firm Frost & Sullivan expects revenues from the calibration and repair services market to reach $3.98 billion by 2022, although the company noted that there is a lack of skilled workers in most regions. Frost said there are a number of regional differences in growth drivers for the market, with the North American calibration market projected to have steady growth “driven by the greater complexity of instruments and stricter regulations,” while in Europe, the drivers include “demand for more quality products, market consolidation, and evolution of Industrial Internet of Things.”
“In the Asia-Pacific region, the continuous development in wireless and data communications networks and infrastructure is expected to drive progress in the calibration services market,” Frost concluded.
–MIPI Alliance has released a system software trace data format for transmitting trace and debugging between a test system and a chip or platform. The MIPI System Software Trace or MPIP Sys-T specification is publicly available, with a library of example implementations available on GitHub.
