Thomas Rohrs
Analyst · Stifel
Thank you, Claire. Good afternoon, and welcome to our second quarter conference call. Our second quarter results and certainly those of the first half of the year serve as strong evidence that our strategy and operational excellence efforts are right on target. Our $249 million of revenue was in line with our forecast, down 3.5% from Q1 and up 56% from the same period last year. Our first half revenues totaled $507 million, up 64% from the first half of 2017. This is industry-leading performance. Our earnings per share of $2 - excuse me, of $1.02 is essentially flat to our record first quarter and 70% higher than the same period last year. For the first half of 2018, we have increased gross and operating margins by over 200 basis points compared to the first half of 2017. And year-over-year, our first half earnings per share have grown 75%. We maintained our Q2 cash balances from Q1 levels even after completing $25 million of stock repurchases during the second quarter. We've since completed the entire $50 million program, which Jeff will discuss shortly. We are successfully achieving our goal of outgrowing the rest of the industry. Over the last four years, we have outgrown wafer fab equipment spending, our customers revenue growth and the growth of just about every supplier in the WFE market. Despite our excellent performance, our market cap is pretty much where it was a year ago. Last quarter, I thought that one of the issues was that we are not doing a good job of telling our story. But it goes beyond that. Syndicate investors are constantly worried about a downturn in the market. Many still believe the old cliché that says, "If semi OEMs catch a cold, then suppliers, such as Ichor, will catch pneumonia." I have spent a lot of time over the past three months meeting with investors and analysts explaining why this cliché is no longer true. So now I'm going to discuss what's really happening in Q3, so everyone can understand what industry downturns look like for us and why there is no need to be afraid of them. Then I will provide a progress report on all the incremental revenue growth drivers I have been discussing since last quarter. Lastly, I will tell you that we are deploying capital in a prudent and strategic way, including through M&A and stock repurchases to include - excuse me, to increase shareholder value. Each of these three aspects will hopefully help you understand why Ichor is a great company and a great investment. First, regarding our Q3 outlook. Our expected decline in revenue compared to the second quarter is consistent with all the relevant outlooks we've heard in the last two weeks. It's pretty much the same sequential decline seen by our largest customer and the key semiconductor WFE component suppliers. So in fact, they've caught a cold and we've caught the same cold, and that's the extent of it. There's no exaggerated impact due to inventory corrections or drive towards less outsourcing, or anything else that may have caused people to think that we've catched pneumonia. As I said during the conference webcast in June, after news of memory capacity pushouts started to percolate through the investment community, if our customers are down a little more in the second half than they expected, then we will be too. And that's exactly what is happening. We also have the very - highly variable manufacturing cost structure, which means we can quickly take actions to align our cost structure to the revenue outlook. With a drop in Q3 sales during the 12th quarter, our gross margins will end up around 16%, down slightly more than expected as a higher-margin weldment and precision machining products are biased towards memory spending. At the midpoint of guidance, we will still be close to 10% profitability in the operating margin. That being said, while our variable cost model allows us to take action to reduce costs, we are not cutting to the bone, given that Q4 looks better than Q3. At this point, the relevant players have indicated Q3 will be the trough quarter, with a rebound expected for Q4, and visibility for the first half of 2019 to be stronger than the second half of 2018. Therefore, we have cut Q3 manufacturing headcount by about 20%, though, we have refrained from cutting key R&D and marketing resources. Back in my old Applied Materials days, Jim Morgan once explained to me that a downturn was the time to gain market share through product proliferation and qualifications, and that is exactly what we are doing. This strategy will lead us to deliver about $0.49 to $0.57 in earnings per share in Q3, rather than about $0.60 in earnings per share if we were less strategic about our expense management. This is a good time for me to interject a few comments about China tariffs, which is the other key factor that the industry is facing in Q3. While there is still a great deal of uncertainty and doubt about the effects of tariffs, it is becoming clear that as much as half of all Chinese imports could face a 25% tariff. As most of you know, we do not manufacture any of our products in China. And therefore, we are not faced with any significant direct tariff charges when we sell our customers into the U.S.-based operations. We do have one significant China supplier who builds precision manufacturing parts for us, but thanks to our strategic purchase of talent, we now have the ability to build these parts, and we will do so if it is necessary. With that as a backdrop, you've now seen the impact on our business that a downturn can have. We'll make a significant profit despite the fact that we are not cutting spending in key areas of engineering, marketing or sales. We understand that investors will always be concerned about the semiconductor business cycle, but our Q3 outlook demonstrate that these concerns should be mitigated. The downturn of this consolidated wafer fab industry is much shorter and much less painful. Therefore, the near-term pause is actually an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate the resilience of our operating model. So now let's talk about what comes after the Q3 downturn, which is the return to better time starting in the fourth quarter and into 2019. Importantly, the moderation of wafer fab equipment growth expectations for 2018 from low double-digits to the single-digit range, given the pushouts reported in the last couple of months, sets the stage for a potentially six straight year of industry growth for 2019. Last quarter, I explained the reasons why we will continue to outperform industry spending, and why we believe we can continue to grow faster than the wafer fab equipment market. These include expanding our footprint and overall market share in precision machining; expanding our footprint and market share in weldments; expanding our footprint and overall market share in our gas panel business by achieving a foothold in South Korea; achieving incremental revenue growth in market share for our emerging Liquid Delivery business; and finally, continued strong execution in M&A. Today, I will reiterate our incremental growth objectives and give you a progress report on these initiatives. In the areas of weldments and precision machining, we increased our served markets by over $1.5 billion through acquisitions of Cal-Weld and Talon Innovations. Before we acquired these companies, they each basically served one customer. We have significant opportunities to expand our share of these served markets by leveraging our strong relationships with our other four large customers. We expect to achieve market share gains in both weldments and precision machining. We began initial qualifications last quarter, with first revenues now expected at the end of this year and accelerating into 2019. So this is happening. We have established new market share agreements and new customer qualifications for these parts of our business. Moreover, much of our additional capacity is being built in Malaysia, which has an ultracompetitive cost structure. Next, through our recent acquisition of IAN Engineering, we now have a beachhead in South Korea, which we will leverage. We will provide weldments and precision machining capabilities to the Korean equipment suppliers as well as the Korean subsidiaries of other OEMs, which will be an incremental revenue driver for 2019. We have also the opportunity to expand our market share in Liquid Delivery Modules, and through IAN, we have begun working with SEMES, a $1 billion wafer fab equipment company, to bring our proprietary Liquid Delivery solution to Korea during 2019. IAN already provides gashouse to SEMES as well as to WONIK IPS, one of the fastest-growing equipment suppliers, primarily in the CVD segment. This means our overall share of the $1.5 billion gas panel market has increased with this acquisition. Outside our new foothold in Korea, we have multiple opportunities for growth in our Liquid Delivery business, which is a $700 million market opportunity. We won a substantial award with the U.S. OEM last year, which is now just beginning to kick in and will certainly add incremental revenue growth in 2019 and beyond. But furthermore, we are working closely with additional OEMs to expand our reach in clean track and other wet processes and to further increase our market share. Long term, we see additional geographic expansion. We are engaged in strategies to expand our market share with equipment OEMs in addition of customer markets, particularly in Japan. We are eager to bring our Liquid Delivery products to some of the largest OEMs there, who have sizable market positions in wet processing - wet processes, such as CMP, clean and track. These should be a significant source of incremental revenue beginning in 2020. Last quarter, we introduced the new slide in our IR deck that summarizes all these significant opportunities. In total, we have expanded our served markets from a $1.5 billion gas panel market to a $4 billion market opportunity that can be leveraged through our acquisitions, through our geographical footprint and our propriety products. As we said last quarter, for 2019 alone, we have quantified at least $100 million of incremental revenue from these initiatives, and we are progressing well with all of these. This will set the stage for an additional growth and outperformance next year and beyond. Finally, we continue to pursue additional acquisitions, which fit our strategy and are accretive to our earnings. We will continue to use our strategy that has been very successful with Ajax plastics, Cal-Weld, Talon Innovations and now IAN. We will stay within our strategic strengths of fluid dynamics in the semiconductor market space, we will work with our growing list of customers, we'll buy companies that give us a platform for additional revenue growth, and we will do deals that are accretive. So in summary, here are the key points about our business, which I hope are now well understood by all of our investors. First, our financial performance in Q3 is proving that there is little to fear in downturns as we now know them. They are shallower, shorter and much more profitable than the downturns of yesterday. Second, we are making solid progress in executing our incremental revenue growth drivers. We have design wins in Liquid Delivery, we are penetrating new customers in weldments and precision machining, we are landing and expanding with OEMs in Korea, and we are putting pieces into place to address customers in Japan. Third, we are following through on our commitment to deploy capital through organic investments and M&A as well as by returning cash to our shareholders. We have returned $50 million through this year's stock repurchases, reducing our share count by 2.2 million shares. Finally, as I have said earlier, we have outgrown the wafer fab equipment industries since 2014, with 38% annual growth versus the industries' 14%. We will continue to outgrow the industry, with wafer fab equipment to grow in the single digits in 2018, we will grow at several times that rate, and we could do so again in 2019. You're all aware that Ichor has been executing against our strategic growth initiatives at nearly unpatched - an unmatched rate, outgrowing the industry and every one of our peers and customers. We hope to gain your confidence in another year of revenue growth, outperforming the industry, with expanding gross and operating margins, strong earnings growth and multiple drivers for incremental revenues beyond 2018. Our view is we will demonstrate our operational and financial resiliency during this third quarter and emerge stronger than ever. Our current visibility is better for Q4, and our revenue strength accelerating from there as we look into 2019. And with that, I will turn it over to Jeff to provide more detail about our second quarter financial performance and our guidance for the third quarter. Jeff?