Tuya Smart (NYSE: TUYA), a global IoT development platform, recently announced that total revenues grew by 118% year-over-year in the second quarter of 2021 to USD 84.7 million. The announcement was made during the company’s second earnings call since going public in March 2021.
While answering questions during the earnings call, Jessie Liu, Board Director and CFO of Tuya Smart, shared additional details about the company’s MCU chipset replacement plan, a strategy that was announced by the company earlier in the year in response to an ongoing worldwide supply shortage of integrated circuits (commonly known as semiconductor chips).
“Tuya’s nine major product categories are all eligible for the MCU chipset replacement plan, which will help our customers to overcome the difficulties of semiconductor shortage,” explained Liu. “We plan to replace chips that currently cannot handle a certain degree of high-precision ADC digital to analog conversion and also multiplex motor-driven equipment.”
In the face of the semiconductor shortage, Liu added that Tuya is continually looking for ways to help customers to succeed. In a nutshell, Tuya’s MCU chipset replacement strategy achieves similar functionality to currently unavailable advanced chipsets through a smart combination of wireless communication chip processing and the functionality of currently available chips. The result is customers save money, improve efficiency, and ensure production lines continue to operate.
“Professional chipset replacements are similar to the industry applications in terms of being more vertically focused, reducing customers’ all-in cost, improving value proposition and solving the problem of chip shortages. Our gross margin will remain similar. At present, our clients in the small home appliances sector are benefiting from this plan the most. We will introduce more chip replacement plans in the future,” added Liu.
Responding to another question about Amazon banning some of the biggest Chinese merchants on the Amazon platform for ‘review abuse’ this year, Liu expressed confidence in Tuya’s full year results. “The Amazon issue impacted Q3 results on a limited scale and was already reflected in our Q3 revenue guidance,” noted Liu.
“This was an unexpected event that happened in the last couple of months, but the majority of our customers sell their IoT products through offline retail channels, with about 80% of IoT devices powered by Tuya sold through offline retail channels. Our e-commerce customers are very resilient, and have deep experience in product development, supply chain, and e-commerce operation,” added Liu. “We remain confident for our full year results”.
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