Peter Wennink
Analyst · SIG. Please go ahead. Your line is open
Thank you, Roger. As Roger highlighted, we had a very strong quarter in both sales and profitability, driven by continued strength in both Logic and Memory as well as a significant demand for upgrades as customers look to bring additional capacity online as quickly as possible. The additional upgrades consisted primarily of software based productivity packages. We are seeing a significant increase in demand from our customers across all market segments and all nodes, mature and advanced, compared to 3 months ago and we expect another very strong year with demand across our entire product portfolio. The steeper than expected recovery in demand for semiconductors, amplified by the COVID induced lower investments of the industry in 2020, has created significant upside to demand over the past quarter. This more cyclical demand sits on top of the secular growth from the accelerated build up of the worldwide digital infrastructure and is fueling demand not only for advanced and mature Logic nodes but also for Memory. In Logic, customers continue to see strong demand across a broad application space for both advanced nodes as well as mature nodes. And last quarter we expected revenue from Logic in 2021 to be up 10% year-on-year. However, we now expect Logic to be up around 30% this year. In Memory, the applications that are driving the strong Logic demand are also fueling demand for Memory. As we mentioned in earlier calls, the Memory recovery started last year and continues to strengthen as customers’ plans to increase capacity is driving significant demand for our systems in the second half of the year. Compared to last quarter where we expected revenue from Memory in 2021 to be up 20% year-on-year, we now expect Memory revenue to be up around 50% this year. On our Installed Base business, service revenue will continue to scale with the growing installed base and with increasing contribution from EUV services as these systems run more and more wafers in volume production. We are also supporting our customers with upgrades to maximize performance of their installed base. In order to meet the high demand in the current tight chip supply environment, customers are prioritizing software upgrades to quickly increase capacity, as reflected by our higher upgrade number in Q1. And some hardware upgrades require extended machine time to be installed and in the current high demand environment customers will be less willing to take systems down which has a dampening impact on the 2021 growth profile of hardware upgrades. We therefore still expect growth of our Installed Base business of around 10% this year as mentioned last quarter. On EUV, we continue to see increasing customer confidence in this technology, which is translating to expanding layer counts in Logic and increasing deployment of EUV in Memory at multiple customers evidenced by a number of customer announcements around increases in their CapEx plans which will include spending on EUV for advanced nodes. To support this strong EUV demand, we are working to increase our output capability. At the same time, we are driving our product roadmap to produce higher productivity machines which will increase the effective EUV capacity per system and the wafer output capacity of our customers. We plan to transition to the NXE:3600D system in the second half of the year, which will provide customers with a 15% to 20% higher productivity compared to the NXE:3400C systems shipping in the first half of the year. Limited by the available modules and parts this year, we are still planning for growth of around 30% in EUV revenue this year. With the expanding adoption of EUV at our customers, we see increased demand building in 2022 and beyond. We are improving our manufacturing cycle time and are planning our supply chain for a capacity of around 55 systems next year. As a reminder, all of our planned shipments in 2022 will be NXE:3600D systems with the increased productivity capability. Our strengthened outlook on the year relative to last quarter is primarily driven by demand for DUV systems. With increased demand on leading edge nodes, as well as mature nodes running longer and ramping stronger, demand for both our immersion and dry systems is stronger than ever. We have put in place plans to increase our DUV capacity to help meet our customers’ increased demands. In our Applications business, as demand for scanners continues to increase, we expect a step up in demand for our YieldStar metrology systems, particularly in Logic. The newly released YieldStar 385 is beginning to ramp across our customer base as well. With the recovery in memory, specifically in 3D-NAND, we expect a substantial increase in e-beam inspection revenue this year. For the industry at a high level, we see three trends driving considerable growth this year and in the years to come. The first trend, in the shorter term there is a more cyclical or you could say a “catch-up” driven demand from decisions made in 2020 due to the global pandemic. These shortages were initially evident in the automotive market, but more recently there are also indications of supply tightness impacting other market segments. We expect this to drive considerable demand for lithography systems this year and into next year. The second, is a secular growth trend driven by the digital transformation taking place as we become a more connected world, across both people and machines. And this transformation was further accelerated over the past year with the increased remote activity and reliance on technology to stay connected. These secular trends are driven by expanding end market applications such as 5G, AI and High Performance Computing. These and other mobile, distributed applications drive demand for both advanced Logic as well as more mature technology required for the services and applications that drive the growth of the digital infrastructure. And along with increased Logic demand comes increased Memory demand. This in turn drives demand across our entire product portfolio. And the third trend, which we are starting to see now and which we will likely continue to see longer term, is the desire for more technology sovereignty which includes semiconductor and silicon based technology, leading to a geographical decoupling as different governments put initiatives in place to localize supply chains and become more self-sufficient. This inevitably will create some level of inefficiency in the semiconductor supply chain and creates additional equipment demand as more fabs are strategically built across the globe. If you summarize the growth of the different segments and the trends just discussed, we now expect sales growth towards 30% this year. To achieve this growth, we are ramping up our capacity to support customer demand, resulting in a stronger second half. With the higher revenue and increased mix of DUV and upgrades, we now expect gross margin to be between 51% and 52% this year. For the industry as a whole, the long-term demand drivers only increase our confidence in our future growth outlook towards 2025. We plan to provide an update on our 2025 scenarios at our Investor Day in September. And with that, we would be happy to take your questions.