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Aehr Test Systems (AEHR)

Q4 2024 Earnings Call· Tue, Jul 16, 2024

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Greetings. Welcome to the Aehr Test Systems’ Fiscal 2024 Fourth Quarter and Full-Year Financial Results Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] Please note, this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to your host, Jim Byers at MKR Investor Relations. You may begin.

Jim Byers

Analyst

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to Aehr Test Systems’ Fiscal 2024 Fourth Quarter and Full Year Financial Results Conference Call. With me on today's call are Aehr Test Systems President and Chief Executive Officer, Gayn Erickson; and Chief Financial Officer, Chris Siu. Before I turn the call over to Gayn and Chris, I'd like to cover a few items. This afternoon right after market closed Aehr Test issued a press release announcing its fiscal 2024 fourth quarter and full year results. That release is available on the company's website at aehr.com. There were two other announcements issued today and those are also posted to the company's website. This call is being broadcast live over the Internet for all interested parties and the webcast will be archived on the Investor Relations page of the company's website. I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, management will be making forward-looking statements that are based on current information and estimates and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors are discussed in the company's most recent periodic and current reports filed with the SEC. These forward-looking statements, including guidance provided during today's call, are only valid as of this date and Aehr Test Systems undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements. And now with that said I'd like to turn the conference call over to Gayn Erickson, President and CEO. Gayn?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Thanks Jim. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to our fiscal 2024 fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. Thanks for joining us today. I'll start with a quick summary of the highlights of the fiscal fourth quarter and full year we just completed in May and spend some time giving an update on the key markets areas addressing for semiconductor wafer level test and burn-in, including some new emerging opportunities. I also want to go over the exciting news we announced today with the acquisition of Incal Technology, which has some incredible products addressing the ultra-high power semiconductor market, including a significant number of AI processor makers. Then Chris will go over the financials in more detail and provide our guidance for the new fiscal year. After that, we'll open up the lines to take your questions. Starting with our financial results, as we reported in our pre-announcement last week, our full year revenue and net income results exceeded our previously provided guidance and surpassed analyst consensus. Although we saw customer pushouts of silicon carbide devices due to slower electric vehicle demand in the second half of our fiscal year, we still achieved another record for annual revenue for Aehr of $66.2 million. On the bottom line, GAAP net income was $33.2 million or $1.12 per share, which includes a tax benefit resulting from the release of the company's full income tax valuation allowance of approximately $20.8 million recognized in the fourth quarter. Chris will talk more about that. This past year, wafer level test and burn-in the silicon carbide power semiconductors used in electric vehicles or EVs were a key driver of our business. And we anticipate that market will continue to be a key contributor to revenue in the current fiscal year. We're also seeing traction with…

Chris Siu

Analyst

Thank you, Gayn. Good afternoon, everyone. On today's call, I will summarize our results for fiscal year 2024, as well as the fourth quarter and then I will provide our guidance for fiscal year 2025. Starting with the full year results, we reported record revenue of $66.2 million, up 2% year-over-year. Our full year GAAP gross margin was 49.1% compared to 50.4% in the prior year. Our full year non-GAAP net income increased to a record $35.8 million, or $1.21 per diluted share, which includes the impact of a tax benefit resulting from the release of the company's full income tax valuation allowance of approximately $20.8 million, compared to non-GAAP net income of $17.3 million or $0.59 per diluted share in fiscal 2023. In fiscal 2024, we generated $1.8 million in operating cash flows. Our annual bookings in fiscal 2024 were $49 million compared to $78.3 million in the prior fiscal year. The decrease was mainly due to customer push-outs of forecasted orders related to silicon carbide devices due to slower electric vehicle demand in the second half of our fiscal year. Our backlog as of the end was $7.3 million with $13.5 million in bookings received in the first six weeks of the first quarter of fiscal 2025. We now have an effective backlog of $20.8 million. Looking at our financial results for the fourth quarter, total revenue was $16.6 million, down 25% from $22.3 million in Q4 last year. WaferPak revenues were $12.4 million and accounted for 75% of total revenue in the fourth quarter, which is significantly higher than the 38% of total revenue in the prior year Q4. WaferPak revenues continue to represent a significant revenue stream for our business due to the strong demand for new WaferPak designs from our existing and new customers as…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. At this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] First question comes from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum. Please proceed.

Christian Schwab

Analyst

Hey, congratulations guys on the acquisition. Gayn, if you look at the Incal acquisition, I assume that the company is a growth company. Can you give us an idea of approximately how much revenue of the $70 million is Incal?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Probably the easiest question that I'll try and answer as best I can. So one of the challenges is we need to close it first. And they did about $12 million over the last 12 months. And so you know, plus or minus a month or two even at that same run rate, plus or minus $1 million or $2 million or something like that. Candidly, we're taking a pretty cautious stance but if you use those kind of numbers, like $1 million per month from the time we close it. It's probably a good number. But it gets into a lot of the strategy that's going on. There's been a number of customers that they've been engaged with that-- we have reason and believe either directly or indirectly, our engagement is going to help them with respect to their manufacturing plans. And so we've taken a pretty conservative forecast based upon kind of their current run rates in that $70 million. And we would expect it to grow from there. So again, just trying to take a pretty conservative stance right now and we'll know a lot more after we do all the customer visits here over the next several weeks.

Christian Schwab

Analyst

No, that's fair. Thank you. As you mentioned on the silicon carbide side that you would expect to qualify this fiscal year with a number of companies in China, given their increased presence in the silicon carbide market and ability to maybe lower prices faster than others and gain further share, how many customers by the end of the fiscal year would you hope to be engaged with?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Okay, well, I hope to be engaged with fewer customers because I feel like we are cup runneth over with the number of engagements because as soon as they become customers, then we stop talking about the engagement and trying to be serious there actually. I think what you probably meant is how many are we now adding as customers? And if I may put that in your words. I've put a specific number on, I mean we've got some internal targets that we're going for, but I would say, several plus if you look at our current forecast and funnel. There is -- in terms of well-qualified, perfectly capable, have fabs, it's well over a dozen just pure silicon carbide players. These are guys that aren't customers from us yet. And might be close to two dozen total if you look at everybody. And as we discussed about it last year, there are probably more questions on China. We are engaged with multiple Chinese suppliers as well and would hope to add one or more of those as customers also over the next year-and-a-half or so. The reason I'm hedging a little bit on the year-and-a-half is we know that there are people that are talking about bringing on capacity in second half of 2025. And we're just trying to figure out when the first tools would be installed, i.e., I can still win them and maybe install the darn thing in the fall and that would still be a win for us. But the timing relative the over, under, or June 1st fiscal year is a bit of a [pain] (ph) right now.

Christian Schwab

Analyst

Okay, that's fair. Thank you for that clarity, Gayn. And then my last question, on the AI Accelerator large language model, can you give us an idea if you're successful there on the new customer? How big could that be?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Yeah, we're trying to get our arms around that as well. It's a little weird to talk about who it is or who it isn't, but I've actually just, and this might get me in trouble someday, but it's not Nvidia. I've been trying to be pretty clear with people because it's just not fair. I guess at some point, if Nvidia ever goes with us, now what am I going to say? But they are a revenue generating company today. They have customers, they're doing very well. It's pretty exciting. There's some discussion about being able to go public with them once we have successfully demonstrated it. They really would have a huge benefit by moving their system level test burn-in to wafer level. And I can't decide who's more excited about this, if it's us or them, with them cheering us on to please hopefully make this work for them. This is an interesting one because we are doing some pretty unique things that I'll just share a little bit about, but I'm also holding things to my chest because of competitive reasons. I just don't want to give away any of our secrets. But the idea to actually be putting, I mentioned 2,000 – 3,000 watts on a wafer, 3,500 watts on a wafer. If you're actually close to this technically, you would know that all AI processors at these geometries are, in lithographies, are all 1 volt or they're about parts. What that means, if you're going to do 3,000 watts, you're putting 3,000 amps onto a wafer. Okay, people's head spin with this the idea of putting you know 1,000 amps much less 2 or more 1,000 amps on a wafer. And so what we're doing is quite novel and we're using the FOX-XP system that we shipped first to optical AI. At the last quarter we mentioned that, that we were working on something else on the side, stay tuned, but that's what we were alluding to. The development of that system in terms of the power, being able to put that much power out and remove that much power because you have to remove it all through the wafer itself is totally novel. How we deliver that power for optical IO, is actually interestingly a little higher voltage and lower current, whereas in the AI, it's higher current and lower voltage. But the thermal challenge is the same. So we have a lot of confidence through that. We're working through that with this right now. And where -- I walked in back just now, was talking to the apps guys. They're working on this on multiple wafers right now with multiple WaferPaks. So it looks encouraging. And stay tuned. I've got my fingers crossed that we can work through all this stuff. And we think we are pretty confident that we can make this work. And the customer is hoping and cheering us on to make it work.

Christian Schwab

Analyst

Great, thanks, Gain. I'll get back in the queue and let some other people ask questions. Thank you.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Okay, thank you.

Operator

Operator

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Jed Dorsheimer with William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

Jed Dorsheimer

Analyst · William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

Hi. Yeah, thanks for taking my question. And, Gayn, congrats on the acquisition. I guess just from a framing perspective, is it fair to say that next year is largely going to be driven off of silicon carbide, maybe a little bit in gallium nitride, and is you invest in some of these other very interesting and high-volume markets?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

The way we've actually got the forecast right now is we've taken a pretty conservative stab at the silicon carbide things. And so I think we're – we could do well over 30% and new customers in new markets in that $70 million number. So, if you look at the hard disk drive application, I already mentioned it could be like a 10% customer. The production forecast for the AI is a 10%, certainly of the $70 million. The flash memory will not be. We don't -- I think that's not going to be for revenue, we don't have any in there for this, but we hope to secure an order for maybe the next year revenue. And then the GaN could -- with the production capacity that we've been shown, that could maybe be a 10% customer or more as well. So you got you got 10%, you know, three different 10 percenters and none of those are silicon carbide. And then I feel like I'm missing one, there's too many of them. But then within the customer base we are seeing some of the customers candidly we thought we're going to close this year that had moved out in time, but then the fabs are coming. So I think being able to secure that first wave, but you know, several of those guys at least getting a single production if not multiple production systems could happen by May as well. So I guess yes, silicon carbide is still going to be really strong. We think that even within silicon carbide we'll be more diverse than sort of the six customers they have, but only two of them really were 10% type customers. We'll actually see more customers that could be material to us, but they are the leading edge to the fabs that'll be coming online in 2025, late, and 2026.

Jed Dorsheimer

Analyst · William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you. And then could you just help me connect the dots? If I use, you know, you said $12 million with 2 months of $1 million, so $10 million for Incal. It would suggest that the core business is kind of your guidance for a conservative or down year at the low end of $60 million. But on the operating income, if it is immediately accretive, which I think was stated in there, are you making a significant investment in the OpEx to cause the EBIT to come down by 6% or so percentage points or is that -- is something going on in gross margin?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

Yeah you know what it's I'd say, it's mostly the prior than the gross margin of it. We've actually made incremental expense investments, some of which candidly was in anticipation of much higher revenue this year, but it was things like the additional infrastructure we put in place in sales support infrastructure for all the selling that's going on. And eventually those need to turn into orders, as we are now very diversified in terms of the number of engagements at high level, but they obviously need to come to fruition, otherwise you put all these dollars in place and they're not helping. So there's explicit direct sales costs associated with that. We also have in our forecast, it's a little different than last year, the mix of our customers changing with some new customers includes customers that today were engaged in both directly and with local reps in those countries and they have a commission structure in them that is higher up front than later. So we have a pretty material, I think it's $700,000 -- $800,000 or so in external commissions on, would seem to be the same dollars, but it's actually dollars that are bought by new customers in new markets or new countries that has kind of messed us up a little bit. But I mean good money spent for sure, but that's another one. And then we've got some of the legal things, legal costs that we've talked about with respect to, I'm just going to use their code name with the acquisition, right, that are going on. And there's a few other things just respect to some profit sharing and some other things are slightly different year-on-year. We definitely are making investments in R&D this year, both incremental to the -- I'll call it the wafer level burn-in product line, we have to get used to thinking about that, but also we'll be making some incremental investments in the package part. We'll talk more about that roadmap as we close that deal, but some things that we're already contemplating and working on. It's interesting, we just did our – [start] (ph) planning last week and we're looking at the R&D programs and while things like Sierra, the automated aligner and some enhancements, the silicon carbide roadmaps are pretty much in play. I mean, we're meeting the customer needs with all the different capabilities that we need. So the bulk of the R&D resources this year are all in the other markets that we've talked about in pure-execution against some things against the GaN guys, the hard disk drive, the flash memory side of things, and the AI. All kind of incremental to our platform, so nothing like you know boil the ocean, but it's kind of fun to watch us being able to start putting more energy behind these other markets.

Jed Dorsheimer

Analyst · William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

Got it. And then well that begs the -- I guess my final question. So given these changes, you know, as you start to grow in these other areas, how do you see, has there been a shift in, I would assume that once you cover those incremental investments, you will have a contribution margin that drops. How does that leverage look? Is it at $80 million or $100 million? How are you thinking about getting back to that 20% operating margin or above?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

You know, without -- I mean, you guys have created your models on there. If you were to think that our OpEx is approximately the same going forward this year, so that makes sense, like it went up, but our revenues didn't go up. I think we put the infrastructure in place, [majority] (ph) to be able to continue to grow, get back to our $100 million plus run rate that we were on without incremental expenses. So I mean, I would be careful ratcheting it down but if you would just look at similar gross margins and then just incremental revenue you can draw a line and connect the dots as to when we get back to 20%, you know, 25% plus net profits pre-tax.

Jed Dorsheimer

Analyst · William Blair. Jed, please proceed.

Got it. I'll jump back in the queue. I appreciate it. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Okay, the next question comes from Jon Gruber with Gruber McBaine. Please proceed.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Gruber McBaine. Please proceed.

Jon, that's you. He just misspelled your name, mispronounced your name a little bit.

Jon Gruber

Analyst · Gruber McBaine. Please proceed.

Yeah, yeah, I mean good presentation, a lot of prospects, but what I don't understand is with the acquisition, all these prospects, you get flash member 30% in new things, the disk drive, why is there no revenue growth excluding the acquisition?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Gruber McBaine. Please proceed.

Yeah, I think you're getting it right. I mean, I think in general, you've got to put some numbers together, and that's probably not a bad model to think about. It's really about the push-outs that we saw with respect to the silicon carbide ramps, things we were expecting people to be coming in pretty strong. And we're just looking at soft forecasts right now. We have multiple customers in our forecast that are going to buy one or two systems and not a lot of big ones. So our key customers themselves, for example and again, if you just look at the big silicon carbide guys, so let's just back up so I'm not talking about my customers in general or who they are. But I think if you look at the top four silicon carbide customers, they all guided down this year. And so, there have been people that are -- we're wondering how bad it was going be for us, and can we even continue to maintain our growth while they're having a soft year followed by a strong year. So I think we're -- it's the right thing to do right now is to communicate this. If we see strength in the second half come in harder than we are currently conservatively forecasting, then we'll guide up at that time.

Jon Gruber

Analyst · Gruber McBaine. Please proceed.

Thank you.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Gruber McBaine. Please proceed.

Okay. Thanks, Jon.

Operator

Operator

Okay. The next question comes from Matt Winthrop with Equitable. Please proceed.

Matt Winthrop

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

Equitable, I don't know. Hey guys, how you doing, Gayn?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

I'm good, thanks, Matt.

Matt Winthrop

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

Sort of on a global basis, I have never seen a company turn or you turn as excited 180 degrees from how [grower] (ph) you were the last two calls. Is there anything you could put your finger on? Are cycles shorter, were you guys super lucky? Had a lot of things in the fire that all started to turn? What do you attribute to much more upbeat and such a rapid sort of positive, at least potentially positive outlook going forward?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

Geez, Matt, I feel like I'm always a pretty optimistic and upbeat guy, so.

Matt Winthrop

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

Listen to [what else we call] (ph).

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

Well, I mean, that's kind of weird, and I know you mean that professionally, not on a personal level, but I'll just say on a personal level, I feel like, in January and February, you know, we had customers, when we forecasted last year, we weren't -- our forecast was bigger than what we told you guys, okay? Not that anyone thought $100 million was conservative, but I did. We had these customers that were anticipating those fabs going in, and then by the time we got to November and December, you started to see some of the wheels getting wobbly, and people got kind of scared, and they just held. We absolutely were completed benchmarks or finished with people that we thought would have been buying two, three, four months ago and they just pushed out. And it just sort of seemed as a lot of these things are, if you look at the kind of technology adoption cycle, I can draw it, but if I can draw it in everyone's mind, you're going up this hill, it actually accelerates a little bit, then it turns over and goes down, turns around again and then goes up strong. That sort of technology adoption cycle has existed in a lot of different things. And when you turn down that first time, it's pretty scary. And people are like, oh gosh, that's it. We went from, a year-and-a-half ago, our entire business model was built around the crazy idea, one of the things that was driving the silicon carbide, and it wasn't always about silicon carbide, but that 30% of EVs, 30% of automobiles in 2030 would be EVs, or $30 million. At that time, people were like, come on, is that even possible or not? By around fall people were…

Matt Winthrop

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

That in my mind is a fantastic answer. Keep on plugging. We'll keep watching. I appreciate everything you do again.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Equitable. Please proceed.

Thanks Matt. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

Okay, the next question comes from Tom Diffely with D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Tom Diffely

Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Yes, good afternoon. Thanks for the question. Gayn, curious, you know, when you look at the book of business you had a year ago when there's a $100 million you thought you would get for the year versus where you are today. I assume most of that was Silicon Carbide and a lot has been pushed out. So I guess the first part of the question is how far have some of these programs been delayed or pushed out? Obviously some of them look like they're about a year behind schedule. And then the second part of the question is, have they all been pushed out or have some of them been canceled?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Yeah, so, okay. So it feels like mostly pushed out. So if I -- that's actually, I like the way you phrased it because it helps you remember. I'm good at remembering what I thought at the time. If I were looking at my forecast in my funnel last year, I had like three big guys that were all planning to be buying in the spring. Two new ones and more from one of our -- the big lead guys. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, four big guys, right? One of them struggled to build some products, another one ended up doing well with their package part because of the way the customer makes. The other one had some slowdowns. Another one, the value -- and two others, actually, there's five of them, two others were in the midst of evaluations and they didn't end up pulling the trigger because they pushed out their fabs. So I mean I just that's -- and I was you know $10 million here $20 million there, $15 million there and you kind of do this and so a lot of it just sort of shifted out in time. Every single one of those is still absolutely committed to wafer level burn-in and modules and their fab capacities have pushed. What they told The Street and themselves one year ago, is definitely pushed out from that now but every one of those fabs is well it's not true. Most of those fabs have all been, continue to be reiterated and re-announced. I think there's some people that might have pushed this fab out a little bit further. So if you look at the OEMs, in some cases, some of the big guys, like if you look at Korea, Japan, and Europe their ramps were always [‘25, ‘26] (ph) it feels like these early EVs were like foot soldiers like you know forward whatever they call you know scouts to test the water but their big programs are yet to come and some of those haven't even changed their mind. This is still the exact same schedule they were on but now it's just getting closer. So you know it feels like to me that it's about, you know, a one year, to one-and-a-half year push out of most of those guys, and I believe it'll come back. The difference is I don't think anybody believes, no one's saying, oh, it's going to be 60% penetration by the end of the decade. They're back more to the 30% kind of number, which is a lot of systems for us.

Tom Diffely

Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Yeah. Okay. And then the second question would be, think back to a year ago again. And when you think about the car makers themselves, are they all still on the silicon carbide path or have some of them decided to stick with silicon a little bit longer?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Yeah, so I think it's, they're more towards silicon carbide than they were a year ago. And I can, -- yeah, I have specific examples of it, I'd be careful of it, but some of the examples were, people were like, well. So a lot of cars, as you know, have more than one engine in it, okay? And if you look at two years ago, it was very common, people understood, that Tesla put the IGBT in the front, and silicon carbide was the first one in the back always. So if you had a single engine, it was silicon carbide, if you had two, it was silicon carbide and back and IGBT in front. IGBT is silicon for everybody else that's knowing, okay? They had different properties, et cetera. My car that I'm driving, I have a Model S, has two silicon carbide engines in it, the inverters. So we've heard that more and more from the OEMs they're actually prefer to just use silicon carbide and candidly because costs have come down and availability is up they can afford to do that. Try to think. There's other things I have that's more under NDAs and stuff I can't share but I believe more and more. One thing that shocked me when I was in China, is how the China OEM guys really talked to silicon carbide with preference. Now there's still models that they're going to have a second engine in IGBT, but it's more and more silicon carbide in all modules as a preference. So I'd say more conviction to silicon carbide and more to modules than a year ago.

Tom Diffely

Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Great. All right. I appreciate the perspective and thanks for the time.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Please proceed.

Thanks, Tom.

Operator

Operator

Okay. We have a follow-up coming from Christian Schwab with Craig Hallam. Please proceed.

Christian Schwab

Analyst

Great. Thanks. Let's have a quick follow-up, Gayn. We did hit China in silicon photonics. Whether you expect those to be revenues in fiscal ‘25 or ‘26?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Okay, yeah. So I think we have forecasts for China – well, yeah, I guess I just said it – we have forecasts for China in this year. And silicon photonics, I think we have some as well. Pretty conservative assumptions right now. Yeah, like I don't think we have it assumed to be a 10% this year. Could it be? Sure. But the problem with the silicon photonics, at least the optical IO, is, and again, obviously there's more than I can share, so I draw this pretty clean, but those companies that would drive that roadmap hold those cards close to their chest. Right, they're not out, there's no market. You tell me what Nvidia, AMD, Intel is going to do, and the other AI processors, and I'll tell you what the optical IO market will look like. And they're not talking publicly about it. So we know a little bit more than we can share. We'll just watch and we'll have to be careful being the canary to let everybody know what's going on. But if people start announcing optical IO, chip-to-chip, you can just think to yourself that's good for us. And China right now is all silicon carbide customers. They have GaN too by the way. Their current engagements are all silicon carbide today. Yeah, for China. By the way, a couple more things on China, a little bit more color for people, okay? To us, China is not all one market. And I know people are listening to this, okay? There are companies that are going to build extensions and do things in China that are say not Chinese companies, right? And they're very protective of their IP and they want to be very careful with it. And so if you sell to them…

Christian Schwab

Analyst

That does. And then my last question was just a means of potential clarity. You talked about OpEx being flat and aggregate year-over-year because you overspent this year. Does that include Incal or is that a comment on your business?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

No, no, my OpEx this year – I’m sorry, my OpEx this year, is higher than last year is what I said. So if you look at the numbers, you know, and I think if you just sort of look linear across, you'll find there's maybe $3 million, $3.5 million bucks missing. You're like, wait, wait, what happened here? We're actually, that's a result of several areas of expenditures. I forgot to throw Chris under the bucks a little bit too because we're also spending more money on finance and other things that we did for SOX compliance and stuff. But we have incremental expenses in R&D -- we have expenses in legal, we have incremental expenses in commissions, we added more people in sales, and we have a little bit more finance side of things. And then a sprinkling of some bonuses tied around the company kind of represent those dollars.

Christian Schwab

Analyst

Okay, I guess just for clarity, again, for Intel, how much should we assume is their quarterly OpEx?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

All right, we haven't done that yet.

Chris Siu

Analyst

Well, right now, the forecast or outlook, we have already included them in the calculation, in the forecast, yeah, in the model right now.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Basically, it's a relatively small company. I think we've shared about this before, but as our headcount goes up, they have about 24 employees. They have a lease for next couple of years that's right down the street from us. We haven't talked about synergies. Synergies aren't going to come through people. No way. But, you know, over time we don't need that second building potentially, those kind of things. But we're not -- you know, we don't need -- we're not needing to scrounge to try and do any expense reductions or things like that. No way. We're going to spend more money with those guys.

Christian Schwab

Analyst

Okay, got it. I got it. Thanks, Gayn. Thanks for the added clarity.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Thank you. One last round for folks, Pete. Anyone else with a raised hand?

Operator

Operator

The next question comes from Shahar Cohen with Lucid Capital. Please proceed.

Shahar Cohen

Analyst · Lucid Capital. Please proceed.

Hi guys. Congrats for the amazing turnaround and the [specification into other than sick] (ph). A question about Incal. So first, how much of their current revenue is from their legacy advantage, sub-manufacturing, if you can disclose. And A, to what there's a normal family, which as I read in the websites, is that the one that's supposed to do the high-Watt testing, is that already used in testing of AI application, and is that already used by NVIDIA and leading to major revenue growth in the last year or so as one should expect? Or do you expect them to grow significantly in 2025 versus 2024 calendar year?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Lucid Capital. Please proceed.

Okay. All right, Shahar, you've done your homework. So you're going to make me back up and let people know, try and catch up with you a little bit. All right, so Incal is made up of two sources of revenue. They have a test and burn business, which is made up of really three families of burn-in systems. Low power, medium power, and high power. Their Alpine line of systems is their low power, Tahoe is their mid power, [Sonoma] (ph) is high power. They're all fully compatible from a software perspective. They all have a similar hardware and software architecture, but a very unique platform concept that I think from a tester guide. The Alpine system uses [indiscernible] test electronics and power supplies that are shared over multiple burn-in boards and multiple devices on each burn-in board, making it one of the lowest cost, most cost-effective burn-in systems on the market. We struggled to ever compete with that product line before. Their Tahoe system is a mid-power system, candidly similar in many of the features to our old ABTS system or our current ABTS system, but it has power supplies and pin electronics that power each burn-in board for more capability and more power with individual temperature control and amazing software. And Sonoma uses, again, similar pin electronics and power supplies, but per device, allowing them to actually, locally generate extremely high currents within millimeters of the device, very similar to how the application works, which is one of its key differentiators. And that allows them to be able to be used for these really high-powered like AI devices. The Sonoma is in fact what has really been growing for them. They have multiple customers on each of their platforms and there is revenue in all three of those segments even within our fiscal year going forward and we're currently committed to meeting the needs of those customers. We have no plans to abandon any of those roadmaps, okay? But Sonoma is where a lot of the road growth is and customers want to pull it into production where we can help them with. You mentioned something that we haven't talked about publicly, but I'll go ahead and go mention it. They actually also do some repair business for kind of as a third-party repair authorization. And we haven't talked about that yet. That's something ahead of us. We pulled that out of the revenue from last year. So we didn't talk about how much revenue they did in that business. So the kind of million dollar run rate is without that business.

Shahar Cohen

Analyst · Lucid Capital. Please proceed.

Got you. So thank you very much for the call. Really helpful. Any more color you can provide on the Sonoma growth rate maybe that was or maybe expected?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Lucid Capital. Please proceed.

Yeah, well we're just going to stay flat on this for right now. I mean, and I'm not trying to be super elusive. We want to go see all of the customers and be able to build that up. But we'll probably get you more information. In general also, we don't normally forecast too much going forward on all the different product lines, just for competitive reasons too. But that's the area that I think that were both companies are most excited about to try and help, although there's a bunch of Tahoe customers too that are asking for production volume, so there's the mid power and high power systems are pretty interesting and they've been growing and you know we would hope that -- we can help accelerate that growth.

Shahar Cohen

Analyst · Lucid Capital. Please proceed.

All right. Thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

Okay, the next question comes from Larry Chlebina with Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Hi, Larry.

Larry Chlebina

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Hi, Gayn. Your AI processor job, once you complete that, could that evolve into possibly getting into heterogeneous PC chips, you know, high volume PC chips that are all going heterogeneous?

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Perhaps, yes. I mean, it's very interesting, the dynamics in the test space that have gone on with the Advent, the system level test, which is highly adapted, designed for test methodologies as well as application specific test methodologies that have really changed the way people look at semiconductor tests. And then with the heterogeneous integration or the idea you take these chiplets and you take all these devices and you put them all together onto even a silicon substrate. Sometimes a silicon substrate has DRAM in it. It actually has active things inside of it. And you have this multi-chip module, unlike you've ever seen before, made up of a couple of compute processors, four or six stacks of high bandwidth memory, a couple of optical IO, interfaces on it, et cetera. And you think each one of those devices I mentioned today has 100% burn-in. Where are you going to do it? You want to do it at the package level when all those pieces are there? The answer is not if you can help it. You want to move all that stuff to die level and wafer is the best way to handle the die. And so, you know, all of this whole topic just gets me excited as a nerdy test guy because that's all good for us. And they bringing on, I keep using their code name, but Incal, to be able to help us because they're doing, you know, the burn-in of those heterogeneous packages, right? I've seen them, you know, it's pretty cool and you're watching what they're doing and I can't help but think, well, boy, maybe we can also help some of this stuff go to wafer level, and if not, we got the package. The beauties all have both.

Larry Chlebina

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

That's where I was going next. You got open up the possibility to go wafer level on some of those projects.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Perhaps, and if not, we got them covered. I mean, it's just way better to be able to say whatever you want, but I just think there is opportunities and you start seeing it all blurring together, you're like, wait a minute, you got this optical IO, wafer level, you got heterogeneous, you know, you've got stacks and stacks of high bandwidth memory. How can we get that to a wafer level? Now you've got a processor that you can put into test modes and do a long cycle burn-in -- in a much more scalable, also lower power mode than at the system level that might not only be an enabler for scale, but you might even be able to get enough electricity to do it. And you're like, wow, it's a target-rich environment. And being able to go and actually sit down with these companies that are building them for their own use or building them for sale or building them for rent or building, you know, it's exciting.

Larry Chlebina

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Okay, One last question. On the flash memory opportunity, I tried getting you on this at the CEO Summit as, is the opportunity in a new fab or is it possibly in an existing fab since it requires higher power than maybe existing systems can handle.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

This was probably one of the many questions you asked me that I said I can't answer till I answer for everybody, huh?

Larry Chlebina

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

You said you were going to answer on the conference call – here we go.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

So I think I can see both. Generally speaking, people think about making big changes when it's time to do a new fab, right? So it's an easier cut to think about the new fabs that are coming online between DRAM and Flash over the next you know four, five, six, seven years. However, having spent you know 20 years of my life building memory testers, I -- you know every five years I was replacing the memory tester I sold them five years ago, which sounds crazy, but you get to a point where through parallelism or power or capability you can't even use the old tool. And this is true with a lot of ATE systems today. Like, you know, I was part of, you know, HP, Agilent, VeriGY. We're acquired by Avantis. Avantis has the 93,000 platform now that we designed in HP back in the late ‘90s. And today those [93k's] (ph) are fully compatible. People will have -- have made, have hundreds and hundreds of these on their floor, but they'll buy a new board that goes into that machine each year to meet new capabilities. So in some ways, we built our platform similar, like the FOX system. The FOX, the very first FOX system we built was for flash memory, right? And people that know our history know that at the time it was like we were too small and a little too risky and Along came a couple of companies that said, you know what, we're willing to look the other way on your risk because what you have is novel and unique and I need it. One of them happened to be one of the biggest phone manufacturer in the world for facial recognition. And another one was what now is the biggest silicon photonics company in the world for their platform. That part laid into multiple different customers, multiple different applications, silicon carbide, now GaN, and these other applications where people are interested in using it, but memory is still a core target for us and we think that we can get into that. My install base, those customers have critical technical needs going forward in their roadmap that is going to require them to make changes. The equipment they have will not work. And at that point we could displace seemingly perfectly good systems in their fabs with new ones that are better. So I think it can be.

Larry Chlebina

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

The greater if it be both.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Me too. I'll take one right now. I'll take, you know, we're excited. This is a big deal to us that this, people don't make this commitment lightly. And all, by the way, there's another one. We're talking about expenses. I'm going to spend some money on this flash development this year. It's expensive, what we're going to be doing. And we're going to build up some WaferPaks, we're going to be doing some technology, we're going to do some prototyping, we're going to put a bunch of manpower on it. We may not make a dime this year and it will be all that OpEx's money worths then. Because this, I think this market needs it, I think flash first, then DRAM, and I think we are in a great position architecturally to be able to address that. And so any one of those deals is – is enormous.

Larry Chlebina

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Well it's worthwhile doing this for sure. Alright thanks Gayn, have a good night.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst · Chlebina Capital. Please proceed.

Thanks Larry.

Operator

Operator

There are no further questions in queue.

Gayn Erickson

Analyst

Alright folks thank you very much. I know that we ran a little longer than normal. We really appreciate everyone's time. We'll figure out how to make these as concise as possible as our story is no longer focused on a narrow market or a two and a couple of few customers. So we'll find our way to be able to be able to summarize and make it easier to digest. But we are really excited about this, excited to head into the new year. And we welcome our new friends from Incal. We're throwing a lunch for them in a couple of days, and we're excited to host them to come over and meet the crew. And we'll keep you guys updated on a quarterly basis. Have a good one, and take care.

Operator

Operator

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.