Earnings Labs

Azenta, Inc. (AZTA)

Q4 2014 Earnings Call· Wed, Nov 12, 2014

$23.11

-4.64%

Key Takeaways · AI generated
AI summary not yet generated for this transcript. Generation in progress for older transcripts; check back soon, or browse the full transcript below.

Same-Day

+3.55%

1 Week

-4.95%

1 Month

-0.66%

vs S&P

+1.52%

Transcript

Operator

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Brooks Automation Q4 and Year End Financial Results Conference Call. During the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, we’ll conduct a question-and-answer session. (Operator Instructions). As a reminder, this conference is being recorded Wednesday, November 12, 2014. I’d now like to turn the conference over to Lindon Robertson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Brooks Automation. Please go ahead sir.

Lindon Robertson

Management

Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon everybody. We would like to welcome each of you to the fourth quarter financial results conference call for Brooks fiscal 2014 year. We will be covering the results of the fourth quarter ended on September 30th and then we’ll provide an outlook for the first fiscal quarter ending December 31st of this year. The press release was issued after the close of the market today and is available at our Investor Relations page of our website, www.brooks.com as are the illustrated PowerPoint slides that will be used during the prepared comments during today’s call. I’d like to remind everybody that during the course of the call, we will be making a number of forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Litigation Securities Act of 1995. There are many factors that may cause actual financial results or other events to differ from those identified in such forward-looking statements. I would refer you to the section of our earnings release titled Safe Harbor statement, the Safe Harbor slide and the aforementioned PowerPoint presentation on our website and our various filings with the SEC, including the Form 10-Q for the third quarter ended June 30, 2014. We make no obligation to update these statements, should future financial data or events occur that differ from forward-looking statements presented today. I would also like to note that we may make reference to a number of non-GAAP financial measures, which are used to in addition to and in conjunction with results presented in accordance with GAAP. We believe that these non-GAAP measures provide an additional way of viewing aspects of our operations and performance, but when considered with the GAAP financial results and the reconciliation of GAAP measures, provide even more complete understanding of the Brooks business. Non-GAAP measures should not be relied upon to the exclusion of the GAAP measures. On the call with me today is Brooks’ Chief Executive Officer, Steve Schwartz. We will open with his remarks on the business environment and our fourth quarter and fiscal year highlights. Then we will provide an overview of the fourth quarter financial results and a summary of our financial outlook for the quarter ended December 31th, which is our first quarter of the fiscal 2015. We will then take your questions and during these prepared remarks, we will from time to time make reference to slides available to everyone on the Investor Relations page of our Brooks website. So with that, I would like to turn the call over now to our CEO, Mr. Steve Schwartz.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Thank you, Lindon. Good afternoon everyone and thank you for joining our call. We’re very pleased with our fourth quarter performances consistent with the significant progress we’ve made across the entire business during fiscal year 2014 and it gives a strong momentum as we head into fiscal ‘15. To recap some of the most significant highlights of the year, we demonstrated excellent traction in our business with growth of 14%. We continue to transform our product portfolio to position ourselves in businesses that we can grow profitably, with the divestiture of Granville-Phillips and the subsequent acquisition of DMS. We expect to benefit even more from the rapidly growing OEM market for deposition and etch processes and our product line that is proving to be very well suited for advanced packaging applications. We grew our life sciences business by 46% and we established ourselves as the clear market leader in applications, which relate to the cold chain of condition for biological sample handling and storage. In addition, we had another year of significant financial improvement as we boosted gross margins by 270 basis points over 2013 and we finished the year with almost $250 million in cash, leaving us well positioned to continue to make investments in future growth. I’ll give some highlights from Q4 and then the year and I’ll speak about some of the events that transpired subsequent to the end of the quarter before we give color about our outlook heading into our fiscal year of 2015. As I mentioned on our last call, we continue to build very strong momentum in our vacuum robot franchise. Fiscal 2014 was a record year for Brooks in the shipment of MagnaTran robot. Our vacuum robot business grew by more than 50% over fiscal year 2013. Our aggressive investment and single…

Lindon Robertson

Management

Thank you Steve. Please refer to the PowerPoint slides now available on the Brooks website under our Investor Relations tab. I draw your attention to slide three to start the remarks. Earlier in the year, we disclosed the roadmap to 2017 and the key milestones for 2014 to ensure we stay on the path to achieve our goals. The focus is growth and profitability. As you can see in our growth commitments for the year, we far exceeded life science systems revenue growth with 46% year-to-year. That contributed $20 million of top line revenue to our business in 2015. And the backlog expansion for life sciences was similar, 40% expansion keeping us on the path for growth. But it’s not all about life sciences; 85% of our business is in the semiconductor space and our best measure of the future is the active design wins. We had many wins, but not all design wins are created equally. We are assessing those with the criteria of driving incremental growth in 2015 and beyond. Early in the year, we had 12 identified but followed through on 18. How do we know that they generate growth? As Steve referenced, they are coming from the packaging space, or our opportunities coming back from captive OEM suppliers, so they are new areas for the merchant business. Finally, we didn’t state a goal on dividends but we’re happy to support an increased dividend on the confidence of our ongoing operating cash flow. Now, let’s focus on the fourth quarter results for a few minutes, turning to page four. The top-line revenue came in at $123 million, an increase of 4% sequentially; and at the bottom-line, non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.07. We had another quarter of solid execution. In summary on this page you’re…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions). And our first question comes from the line of Patrick Ho with Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your question.

Patrick Ho - Stifel Nicolaus

Analyst · Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your question

Thank you very much. Congratulations to nice end of your fiscal year. Steve, first on the DMS business, when you look at it traditionally logic and foundry customers typically have kind of a tighter discipline and control on the contamination side of things. You mentioned a memory win. Is that being driven by their now, I guess, more aggressive push just smaller shrink say, the 25 and 29 nanometer node as well as the migrations to new device structures like 3D NAND; what’s driving I guess memory customers looking at some of these solutions as well?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes. First, it’s the node, actually the [land width] right now is the first one. And we anticipate that perhaps in 3D structures, we’ll begin to see more of that but that’s been slow to start. But we do see it as an artifact of the [land width] being driven down.

Patrick Ho - Stifel Nicolaus

Analyst · Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your question

Great. And maybe…

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

And just most of the business so today has been logic and foundry.

Patrick Ho - Stifel Nicolaus

Analyst · Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your question

Okay, great. And maybe as a follow-up to that. And you correct me, if I’m wrong. A lot of your DMS sales or the traditional DMS sales are typically driven by fab expansion projects. From a big picture standpoint, is that a positive sign that you’re seeing some of these fab expansion projects now I guess picking up once again that’s driving the sales there?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Patrick, that’s exactly the case. Interestingly when we look at what we see as backlog for the current quarter, more systems go to actually not the top three manufacturers compared to the top three IC makers in the world. So it’s interesting that the breadth if you will of the next year of IC makers is driving most of the business in the current quarter.

Patrick Ho - Stifel Nicolaus

Analyst · Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your question

Great. And one question on the life sciences side. With the FluidX business now being integrated into your life sciences operations as a whole, what are some of the key market drivers there? Is there a level -- I will say seasonality when spending trend or is that highly dependent on when some of your biostore sales occur that will drive I guess subsequent FluidX sales? What are some of the drivers there in terms of their trends?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes, what we see from the FluidX team is they worked very hard to win and account. And once they get their tube or the vial established as the device that will be used for the handling of samples, then it’s very sticky. So they get repeat the business if you will as customers need more tubes and vials. Interestingly we have in our entire installed base very have very little overlap to-date of our stores and FluidX tubes as we haven’t pushed the customer one way or another but the ability to go win and sell together we think provides a tremendous opportunity for us. And the other thing as we talked about an increased investment in FluidX, they’re very well penetrated in Europe and much less so because they didn’t have quite the footprint in North America. And so some of the investments that we want to make are to give them coverage in North America to help expand a really excellent business model where they just didn’t have resources to expand quite as quickly in North America yet.

Patrick Ho - Stifel Nicolaus

Analyst · Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your question

Great, thank you very much.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Edwin Mok with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question.

Edwin Mok - Needham and Company

Analyst · Edwin Mok with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question

Hey great, thanks for taking my question. Good job on all the growth initiatives this year. So, firstly I’m particularly interested in your commentary about displaying robot design by the OEM themselves in kind of their internal design, right? I was wondering is this a trend that you see across the board or is it just one or two particular customer? And do you think this is a sustainable trend that you go for into advance mode?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Edwin, we’ve seen -- it’s been a few years of work to try to get to this point, but I think we see it across the several of the large OEMs that they recognize that an automation company that can keep up with their needs and demands is more than they opt to be investing on their own. And so, the next generation of robots that we’re able to deliver, we think are very sophisticated, we think they need the cleanliness and material requirements and I think the OEMs understand very clearly that their incremental spend or incremental engineering really opt to be around process technology. And I think they’ve become very comfortable with us as a supplier. But as I mentioned in my remarks, one of the demands that they have is that we also keep up with the next generation road map and we’ve made investments to make sure that we’re able to serve not just the products that we’re winning, but also the ones that they’re working on.

Edwin Mok - Needham and Company

Analyst · Edwin Mok with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question

I see. Okay, great. Good color there. And then I was curious if I -- listening your commentary, it sounds positive about the [semi cap] spacing you talked about improved bookings that are going through this quarter. But excluding CCS you actually got flat BPS business, why is that the case?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes. On a revenue base, the BPS is relatively flat, but on an order base, we do feel a little bit of strength in the business. But won’t necessarily convert to revenue in this quarter.

Edwin Mok - Needham and Company

Analyst · Edwin Mok with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question

I think it’s just a [point] in the revenue, that’s great color. And then just quickly moving to our life sciences, can you tell share with us at least in kind of rough terms for the last fiscal year. What is the mixed up system sales versus consumable sales for the last year? And then more specifically to FluidX. Can you give us some idea about margin profile of that business. Is it in line with this 40% that you just trend or is it above, below on the gross margin basis? Thank you.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Edwin, it’s a good question. We continue to have it up till now seen about 50% of our revenue in systems in round numbers. And it does vary really consistently around 25% and vary between 23% to 26% in any given period to be consumables and instruments, we group those together. And then the balance of that 25% is in services. When we look forward to this year, obviously the FluidX business helps to pick that up a bit and we anticipate that the consumables and instrument business, which FluidX brings both to us as well would probably come up to about 30%. Now we’re optimistic that our services will continue to build with the placements of our stores and so the final arithmetical come out at the end, but I think we’re going to see our consumables and instruments come up to be a nicer piece of continuous business supporting our base business. Now in terms of margins, I wouldn’t very off of our current profile and that is range about 40% to 45% gross margin expectations in each of these spaces. So, we haven’t seen a significant differentiation between the three as of yet. We do believe that as we go towards our 2017 goals then we build this business toward that objective out of that timeframe to be $120 million that we’re going to see some margins change, because we will have; one, stronger top-line business and we will have gone through the integration of our business equation and we will have also brought on the ultra-low temperature product capability, which will be kind of standalone in the market. So for now we would reiterate think 40% to 45% across the life sciences business without much differentiation between the three sub-components, but we’re optimistic that when we’re talking to a year to two years from now we’ll be talking about a different level of margin.

Edwin Mok - Needham and Company

Analyst · Edwin Mok with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question

I see. Okay, great. Just I mean quickly just finish up on life science then. I think you guys mentioned that bookings is a little lighter this quarter or at least lighter, book-to-bill is below 1 this quarter. And, but you said that you believe that $20 million revenue run rate is sustainable. Is it because some of these bigger project that you guys are bidding on will come on pretty shortly in the New Year or is it possible that -- little more than we might see a quarter or two of softness before it can come back?

Lindon Robertson

Management

We fell nervous about this, but we understand. This is the nature of the business. It’s really tough for us to predict. We keep things in our sites and in the pipeline. So, I think our team is pretty confident. We’ll be able to sustain at these revenue levels. The bookings will sometimes be up and down, but right now, we’re pretty confident that between the backlog and what the bookings pipeline looks like that this is about the revenue levels we expect.

Edwin Mok - Needham and Company

Analyst · Edwin Mok with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question

Great. One last question and I’ll go. Just on the OpEx side you mentioned the increase $1 million in life science kind of investing in general. Is that call it a new level of spending we should expect or is it just short-term two quarter scenario?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

I think the investments that we’re putting in will be something that’s sustained and around the life science business. And then however later in this year, you will see some I think cost improvements by the end of the year as we have and our plan to take some integration steps of the businesses we’ve acquired it. What we’ve said in the past that we still hold strongly and that is our first priority was to integrate the platform and the technology and capabilities of our teams, now we’re seeing the opportunity to take some actions on real estate and things like that to take out as we’ve stabilized and actually matured quite nicely across the capabilities of our team.

Edwin Mok - Needham and Company

Analyst · Edwin Mok with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question

Great. That’s all I have. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Jairam Nathan with Sidoti & Company. Please proceed with your question. Jairam Nathan - Sidoti & Company: Hi, thanks for taking my question. First, I kind of wanted follow-up on the SG&A question. So, is that anyway related to the minus 150 biostore or what is about the projects, if you could give some more details on you’re trying to bring forward?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Jairam it’s both. We have some minus 150 capabilities that we’re bringing to market a little bit earlier than we’d anticipated. So that’s the real plus for the company. So, this we’re spending that company will make at some point, the fact that we can accelerate that by couple of quarters is good for us from a product to market position standpoint. And then as I mentioned before, some of it is to expand the capability from the -- of the FluidX team, so they can go out and capture more market, so expand their distribution capability. But the new product acceleration and bring it to market is related to indeed next generation store technology. Jairam Nathan - Sidoti & Company: Okay. And my other question, sticking on the life sciences front and as far as the bookings go, is there any seasonality here with respect to number of bids out there or has there been change in the competitive environment?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Jairam, no changes that we have in the competitive environment. Give us a few more seasons before we have to quote on seasonality. But the one thing we do that we are prepared for is that our understanding and our experience has been that smaller items like consumables and instruments are sometimes -- sometimes there is acceleration for year-end budgets to be spent. And we’re standing by, but that’s -- those are smaller items; it doesn’t really impact the procurement to the stores necessarily. Jairam Nathan - Sidoti & Company: Okay. And my last question on -- Lindon, you mentioned that the tax rate going up. What about the cash tax rate? I know that’s been in a single digits.

Lindon Robertson

Management

So, our cash tax rate will continue to be quite nominal. Essentially what happens is we end up paying just a little bit of cash tax in foreign jurisdictions where we don’t have debt operating loss to carry forward. But in U.S., we still carry substantive deferred tax assets. Our total net deferred tax assets is $83 million. So, you’ll see us grow for quite some time now which is quite strong source of cash for us. Jairam Nathan - Sidoti & Company: Okay, thanks. That’s all I had. Thank you.

Operator

Operator

(Operator Instructions). And our next question comes from the line of Ben Rose with Battle Road Research. Please proceed with your question.

Ben Rose - Battle Road Research

Analyst · Ben Rose with Battle Road Research. Please proceed with your question

Yes, good afternoon. Couple of questions for Steve. When you talk about being in the third inning of the transition for the company, I guess that’s paraphrasing from you. Could you talk a little bit about whether that’s third inning from the perspective of executing against the market opportunity or are we in the third inning in terms of your anticipated acquisitions and divestitures going forward.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Ben, it’s probably -- I’m going to split, probably right in between. From the same point of the cost reductions, our ability to integrate companies that we’ve required to get them on to common platforms and systems and for us to manage streamlined business model that applies to all of the product businesses, that’s the third inning portion. We’re working on low-cost region, transition, footprint utilization as Lindon mentioned. But in terms of our streamlining the cost structure and putting the efficiencies in place to improve the gross margin as much as possible, it’s more from an operating standpoint at that level. We like the product portfolio very much. We do intend to put the balance sheet to work to continue to grow the business where as you know we’re making pretty significant investments from an R&D standpoint, but there will be capabilities that we continue to add to fill in both on the semi side and in the life sciences. So, we will continue to be acquisitive as it suits the business that we’ve laid out here. So, we like the portfolio and the platform and the direction of the products that’s rather far along in terms of direction. And Vector is correct, we’ll make investments there. But most of the reference was to the kinds of things that we’re doing from a common operating platform and developing the business model here for us.

Ben Rose - Battle Road Research

Analyst · Ben Rose with Battle Road Research. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And in terms of the second to your pick up that you’re seeing on the semi-cap side, I realized that not all of your customers over in Asia are telling you what kinds of products they’re making with the systems that they’re purchasing from you. But can you speculate a little bit as to what kinds of end user products might be driving that uptick in the second tier such that they would need new systems from you?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Well, Ben that’s a tough one for us. Let me just give you, because it would be speculative. But these are next tier foundries if you will. And so the devices that they continue to make, they seems to be the customers here, I wouldn’t know specifically what those are. But you’d know the names of all of them. But I’d say they are next tier foundries.

Ben Rose - Battle Road Research

Analyst · Ben Rose with Battle Road Research. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And then just going back, I guess question for Lindon on slide 13 where you’ve laid out the improvement made on the operating margin side. Could we anticipate a like operating margin improvement for Brooks Product Solutions in the coming fiscal year in terms of what happened in fiscal ‘14?

Lindon Robertson

Management

Yes. You get a lot of leverage on this margin on growth. And so, it’s going to vary a bit on how the year bares out for us on the growth level. But we do have actions in place to continue to strengthen the gross margin. And as we build out our integrated CCS business, I think you’ll see stabilization of the expense structure there. So, as you get rolled to, it’s got good leverage, Ben. And that will determine just how much of the operating margin flows through?

Ben Rose - Battle Road Research

Analyst · Ben Rose with Battle Road Research. Please proceed with your question

Okay, great. Thanks very much.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question.

Farhan Ahmad - Credit Suisse

Analyst · John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question

Hi. Thanks for taking my question. This is Farhan asking the question on behalf of John. My first question is regards to the demand that you’re seeing. How much of the demand are you seeing from the Korean OEMs?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Hang up Farhan, we’re struggling to find any numbers, but it’s pretty low level at this moment just to give you an idea. So, this is not one of the big quarters.

Farhan Ahmad - Credit Suisse

Analyst · John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question

Okay. So, you have not seen a pick up from demand from the Korean OEMs yet?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

We didn’t have it in the fourth quarter.

Farhan Ahmad - Credit Suisse

Analyst · John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question

Got it.

Lindon Robertson

Management

Yes. I would add a comment just looking back across the year we’ve talked that early in ‘14 it was actually a significant source of the growth. And we are seeing interest in the CCS product line across several spaces including Korea. And so, as we step forward, we’re going to see some benefits there. But I think Steve has captured it correctly that we wouldn’t call out Korea as being the primary growth driver right now.

Farhan Ahmad - Credit Suisse

Analyst · John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And is it fair to say that for December quarter as well?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes, it is.

Farhan Ahmad - Credit Suisse

Analyst · John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And then just one quick question in terms of the September quarter, you had a very strong quarter in terms of the semi products and I just wanted to understand relative to your expectations, clearly you’ve done better than expected there. So, what I wanted to understand was, was it throughout the quarter that you see better than expected orders and revenue or was it more in the latter half of the quarter that you started to see a pick up?

Lindon Robertson

Management

It’s a great question. I would say that it was very mass coming through the quarter towards this end of the quarter. We didn’t know coming into the last month if we would be at these levels or not. And what we saw was a little pickup in both automation and cryogenics, but we also saw a little bit in the life science space. As we mentioned on the call, we were little short on the CCS, a couple of systems that didn’t go that we expected. So, I think it’s hard to tell where the decision timing is at the customer side, but in terms of our realization of what was happening was more in the last month of the quarter.

Farhan Ahmad - Credit Suisse

Analyst · John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. Please proceed with your question

Thank you. That’s all I have.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of Craig Ellis with B. Riley Financial. Please proceed with your question.

Craig Ellis - B. Riley Financial

Analyst · Craig Ellis with B. Riley Financial. Please proceed with your question

Thank you for taking the question and congratulations on the revenue trends in the business, guys. My first question was just to clarifying the development spending on the life sciences side. Was that an incremental million in the December quarter and the March, so a total of $2 million incremental or just $1 million incremental for both quarters.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes. Craig, right now, we anticipate in each of the quarters about $1 million.

Craig Ellis - B. Riley Financial

Analyst · Craig Ellis with B. Riley Financial. Please proceed with your question

Okay. And then the follow-up to that is since that’s pulling in products that you had to expected to ship, what’s the timing on revenue recognition on the product that is now coming to development a little bit sooner? Are we going to see that in fiscal ‘15 or is that really fiscal ‘16 revenue materiality, Steve?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Craig, I’d put it into ‘16. And the reason I say it is the first units will be the beta units and the terms have not yet been worked out. We talked originally about by the end of the calendar year having a couple of units in the field. We’d likely have more than that. But we’ll be more clear on what to expect from revenue standpoint. But right now, say for to put it out into ‘16.

Craig Ellis - B. Riley Financial

Analyst · Craig Ellis with B. Riley Financial. Please proceed with your question

Okay, that’s helpful. And then lastly and sticking in life sciences. Company is clear on the ability maintain revenues at the $20 million level. Gross margin’s got to a very nice level of 40.2%. Do you think you can hold gross margins at 40% or higher as you go forward or is there anything that would cause that number to be a little bit lumpier than what you expect on the revenue side?

Lindon Robertson

Management

We really think that we should be able to maintain those. But so, Craig, to put it in context we describe this as really being of 40% to 45% gross margin expectation. There is going to be individual timeframes like last quarter where we had a contract that took us below that level but at a critical run rate, we see ourselves solidly between 40% to 45%.

Craig Ellis - B. Riley Financial

Analyst · Craig Ellis with B. Riley Financial. Please proceed with your question

Thanks Lindon. Thanks guys.

Operator

Operator

And our next question comes from the line of David Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead with your question.

David Duley - Steelhead Securities

Analyst · David Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead with your question

Yes. Just a follow on, I think it was Edwin who asked that. As far as your revenue guidance goes, because I think when you listen to your comments that all your sequential revenue growth is coming from a recent acquisition or return of revenue from acquired business. So, a little curious why the core semi business isn’t up sequentially in the upcoming quarter, could you just address that what you’re seeing?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes, Dave. For us, it’s a matter of only timing on units we think. Parts of the business are really busy and parts are not as much. It’s unusual times when all of the parts of the business don’t go together. For example, the cryopump business generally is for one of two semi-processes, PVD or implant, but automation systems go with all the tools. And so we have -- unusually, we have patterns that are not as regular from the standpoint of Etch and CVD or driving some outsized growth whereas in implanted CVD for example don’t experience the some kind of revenue rise. So, parts of business are up. And we believe this is because of the device structure both FinFET, the 3D NAND kind of devices but other parts of our business are not up in the same way used to be five years ago when part of the business was up, all of the business was up.

David Duley - Steelhead Securities

Analyst · David Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead with your question

And why do you think that is now that not all the segments are moving in the same direction is they used to?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Again, I think device structures drive different amounts of business for various profit segments. And there is reuse of tools as we understand it. So, it is conceivable that some new process technologies will drive -- incremental growth will drive some new equipments and there can be some reuse. But we don’t know that specifically, but that’s what we sense.

David Duley - Steelhead Securities

Analyst · David Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead with your question

Okay. You gave some great detail on the segments of this business in your prepared remarks like how couple of them were up pretty substantially last year and then atmosphere components business being down and now has bottomed then you also talked about all these, I think significant design wins in etch and deposition and in advanced packaging. So, maybe help us understand what you think of growth trajectory of your Product Solutions business is or any color that you can give us will be helpful? Thanks.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes David, it’s really tough for us to call the market, but we do feel that we’re in a good position that if the semiconductor capital equipment market is up, we will be up higher than that from a percentage standpoint because of the positions that we have in some of the higher growth segments. So, it’s really tough for us to call as we don’t have any more visibility than anybody else does. But you can anticipate that if equipment is up, we believe that the portfolio we’ve put into place will be in a growth rate higher than that.

David Duley - Steelhead Securities

Analyst · David Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead with your question

Okay. And inside your Product Solutions group, what do you think for Brooks will be the biggest growth drivers this year and next year?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Dave, perhaps one we think the big different maker for us inside our business will be CCS as we ramp that. As I said, we have $4.5 million this past quarter and we think it will get to $7 million. But we do think we’ll hit $40 million for the year. So, we think that it’s going to be a significant difference maker particularly on the year-to-year growth basis. But we also see the increasing application across the front-end and in the packaging space. And I’ll just come back to your point, just in the near-term there is some seasonality in industrial spaces for us. So, we see a little bit of softness typically when we go into this December quarter, because all of the ramp around glass treatment and coatings is already behind us in the year for the retail space in the December quarter. So, in this coming quarter we’ll see a little softness in that and that’s very typical for us, we see that every year at this time. So, and on a year-to-year basis we don’t see that business particularly breaking out into growth pattern or incremental applications. We have other high share there that depends on the applications of that retail space. But I think the applications in the front-end, as well as in the packaging are significant for us in the CCS.

David Duley - Steelhead Securities

Analyst · David Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead with your question

So, great, you have several drivers, that’s good. One thing just final thing question for me is you seem to have a lot or talk a lot more emphasis on design wins with the OEMs on the robotic, new vacuum robotic front. Maybe you could give us an idea about how big that business is and what the growth trajectory is or any sort of details to help go with the design wins? I always have a difficult time understanding how design wins translate into revenue and how much revenue. So, maybe if you -- whatever you could provide in that will be great?

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Yes, David, it’s tough for us to break it down to that level of granularity right now. But 50% growth is pretty substantial, it’s a good, it’s a really good and healthy business for us. But we’re not at a point where we’re fear to breakout at that level of granularity.

David Duley - Steelhead Securities

Analyst · David Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead with your question

Okay, thanks.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Thanks David.

Operator

Operator

And there are no further questions at this time. I’ll now turn the call back to Steve Schwartz.

Steve Schwartz

Chief Executive Officer

Well, thank you everyone. We appreciate your interest in Brooks and we do look forward to speaking with you on the reported results from our fiscal first quarter of 2015. Thank you very much.