Morris Young
Analyst · Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead sir
Thank you, Gary. Good afternoon, everybody. Our Q2 results demonstrate that the momentum in our business continues to build as a renewed need for compound semiconductor substrate drives market expansion. Historically, we have had a number of quarters where certain product categories were performing well, while other categories languished. Today, it feels like our business is firing on many cylinders. We ended Q2 expecting our revenue to be approximately flat, following strong growth in Q1. However, we continue to see increasing demand in both gallium arsenide and indium phosphide substrates as well as healthy growth in our raw material business. This allowed us to deliver solid gross margins and increasing profitability. It is clear from the market demand that our new factory and capacity expansion were built at exactly the right time. With them, we are now able to support current and emerging customer requirements across growing applications such as 5G telecommunications and its related technologies, data center connectivity, LED-based sensing and display and a variety of new consumer-related devices. I am pleased to report that in Q2, we qualified with another Tier 1 customer who plays an important role in the supply chain for major end customers in many of these areas. This was a very extensive qualification process, and we believe it can open new doors of opportunities for us in the coming quarters. It also underscores the value of our investment in our manufacturing and business processes, in-house expertise and product development. We believe we are now in a strong position to win market share and expand into key new emerging applications. Now, turning to product categories, indium phosphide set a new revenue record in Q2, and once again surpassed gallium arsenide as our single largest product category. This year, we are on track to grow our indium phosphide revenues by more than 35%, with demand being driven by a number of customers across a diversified set of applications. Once again, we believe this indicates an acceleration of some big trends in the technology landscape. In particular, we saw continued strength for 5G and its related technologies. At the substrate level, it can be difficult to distinguish between optical connections specifically for 5G equipment and those for related technology like passive optical networks that supports 4G and 5G functionality. For our perspective, any modernization of telecom infrastructure that utilizes indium phosphide is positive for our business. Demand continues to be strong and we have been able to scale up our manufacturing to keep customer delivery times as flexible as possible. Datacenter connectivity demand remains steady and at a positive level. As a result of the overall growth in adoption of silicon photonics in the datacenters, silicon photonics technology provides a number of advantages, such as lower power consumption and increasing bandwidth and data transfer capabilities. We completed the direct qualification of a Tier 1 customer in Q1, and we believe we are now selling indirectly into another major player in this space. We are also very pleased to report that we are beginning to ramp volume for a new customer device that we believe is now moving into production. We expect the ramp for our substrate related to this application to be gradual over the coming quarters, adding incremental growth to our business. Our qualification into the supply chain for this customer is the result of many quarters of collaboration with both the end customer and its supply chain partners. Turning to gallium arsenide, we are seeing signs that market supply is tightening. Our revenue for LED applications grew by more than 20% in Q2. Demand was driven by high end applications, including automotive and lighting and display. As expected, revenue from wireless application declined modestly in Q1. As we move into Q3, however, wireless revenue is expected to grow nicely from Q2 levels as a result of broad-based IoT application demand. Our success for development of 8-inch gallium arsenide wafers for LED applications such as microLED and LiDARs is setting the stage for a new wave of growth. Among the many benefits, we believe 8-inch gallium arsenide will help to enable the scale and the efficiency required for very large volume applications. Industry news and customer interest suggest that microLED are likely to become the next major volume driver for gallium arsenide chips. MicroLED can support higher brightness, higher dynamic range and a wider color gamut while achieving a faster update rate, wider viewing angle and lower power consumption. Their application extends from wearable devices and handheld devices to very large screen, like high-end televisions. Tier 1 players are driving the development of this technology, and we believe that our wafers are already being used for early-stage activities. The level of customer activity and general industry excitement gives us confidence that microLED will come to market and it’s also a factor in our motivation to deliver the 8-inch gallium arsenide waffers. Now turning to germanium substrates, as expected, revenue from germanium substrate decreased modestly in Q2. However, the satellite solar cell market looks to be healthy in the second half of 2021, and we expect to see growth this year. Finally, I want to touch on our raw material business, which grew another 10% sequentially in Q2 after a 45% sequential growth in Q1. As you may recall, we recently consolidated two joint ventures, BoYu which manufactures high-temperature pBN crucibles and pBN-based tools for OLEDs and JinMei which is a diversified industrial high-purity material supplier. In 2020, both companies relocated to our campus in Kazuo, enabling them to expand capacity in response to strong market demand. Today, JinMei is processing approximately 12 tons of material per month, which is more than 25% of the world’s yearly consumption of gallium. Its robust growth has been made possible by the new state-of-the-art facilities that not only allows it to handle more demand, but also attract new customers and open up incremental business opportunities, such as material recycling and recombination. Coming into Q2, we expected the raw material portion of our business to come down a bit from a record number in Q1. However, continued expansion, coupled with a recovery in pricing of raw materials such as raw gallium, has allowed both companies to continue to grow. The improvement in commodity pricing also enabled the joint ventures, which would account for using the equity method to perform very well in Q2. We saw another meaningful increase in their contribution during the quarter. We believe the demand environment should remain healthy this year and that their performance will continue to be positive to our results. In closing, this is an exciting time in our business. The investments we have made over the past years in our facilities, our team and our business processes are producing solid returns in our results. We are participating in several major technology trends, and we are now in the supply chain of some of the most prestigious companies in the world. Further, our growth and record results underscores the expanding number of major applications for compound semiconductor infrastructure as well as our strong competitive position. As we look ahead in Q3, we expect this momentum to continue. I will now turn the call back to Gary for our third quarter guidance. Gary?