Fusen Chen
Analyst · D.A. Davidson. Your line is now live
Thank you, Joe. In addition to our normal quarterly update during today's call, I will also share our perspective on the underlying driver contributing to the global semiconductor shortage. Clarify which drivers are expected to be transitional versus secular and also highlight recent customer win and the progress within our growing portfolio. Before addressing these items, I would like to first discuss our ongoing ESG focus. As we continue progress on this evolving ESG journey, we have continued to expand our reported metrics while ensuring we are organizationally prepared to meet our future goals. During the March quarter, we issued our fifth annual sustainability report, a 75 page document that track our accomplishment in addressing environmental, social and governance topics. In addition, I'm pleased to report that we have recently brought on dedicated staff to support our global diversity and inclusion initiative. We look forward to sharing more information in the futures. Turning to our current business condition. We would like to share our perspective on the underlying demand driver, positively impacting our business today. At a high level, we see two transitional drivers and several additional and meaningful secure drivers that are expected to continue positively impacting demand for our products and solutions over the long-term. First, the two transitional drivers stem from dramatic capital equipment underinvestment in fiscal year 2019 and 2020. And also the incremental end market demand due to work and play from home effecting applications such as PCs and gaming. While we expect these drivers to be transitional, lead-times for our new core products and also capacity utilization of our installed base remain at a very high level. These data points give us confidence that these transitional drivers are likely extend into fiscal year 2022. The most comparable period of underinvestment in the past was during 2008 and 2009, which then lead to an extended period of strong demand. In addition to these two transitional drivers, I would like to clearly highlight the more material and secular long-term trend such as the anticipated data explosion, supported by global 5G, IoT and artificial intelligence adoption. The electric and autonomous vehicle transition, and also the increasing capital intensity needed to support next generation, higher density semiconductor assembly requirements. These new applications are expected to create additional layer of demand, structurally supporting the above average semiconductor growth over the coming years. Specifically for K&S, we are also addressing the increasing capital intensity needs within our core-served market while we are actively expanding our core market reach. As I discussed last quarter, this new capital intensity dynamic is being driven by growing demand for multi-chip applications. Placing several dies into one semiconductor package provide an effective high-density assembly solution that support smaller form factor, feature-reach, connected consumer electronics. Higher density package such as a System-in-Package, multichip modules and heterogeneous assembly techniques are market-ready solution to mitigate the well-known challenge of 2-dimensional node shrink. Today, we estimate approximately 40% of wire bonder shipment are supporting multi-die assembly. This rate has effectively doubled in the past years, highlighting our direct participation supporting more complex assembly. Added complexity creates the need for more advanced assembly solution, which extends our value proposition within this core served market. On average, multi-die package consists of approximately four individual die. Looking ahead, we expect this to be the beginning of a long-term trend and anticipate the percentage of bonders supporting multi-die applications to grow along with the average number of die-per package, creating a new and significant growth driver to our large and dominate core business. An increasing number of die-per-package increases the number of interconnects per package, which in turn, increase the capital intensity of the assembly market. Similar to the increasing complexity, we are experiencing within our core market. Multi-die packaging is picking the momentum for the leading-edge logic, memory and optical applications. We continue to anticipate adoption will increase over the longer term, driven by the need to reduce design costs, while enhancing power efficiency and the performance in a post-Moore's world production environment. We are very well prepared to support customers through this transition, and I'm pleased to announce that we have recently won several qualifications at the top OSATs, IDMs and the foundries supporting complex assembly of leading-edge applications, enabling next-generation logic, memory and image sensing capabilities. As a reminder, we are participating in this fundamental assembly change at the leading edge through four competitive systems: The APAMA thermocompression system, the Katalyst high accuracy flip-chip system, the Liteq500 lithography system and our hybrid System-in-Package solution, which is uniquely positioned to support high-speed placement for high-density multi-chip, flip-chip applications. Over the coming quarters, we are extremely focused on expanding our customer engagements and expect these recent qualification win will further enhance our product diversification and the long-term growth rate. Within mini LED, we shipped over 130 PIXALUX systems collectively, through the March quarter. This rapid growing installed base highlights our leadership and enabling position within this exciting, emerging mini LED opportunity. Our execution and the current run rate is on track to achieve this high-end of our fiscal 2021 target of $60 million to $80 million. We also anticipate market opportunities to broaden in the second half of fiscal year 2022. We have a clear leadership position in this market and have materially enhanced our technical competency since releasing PIXALUX in fiscal 2019. Our development initiatives remain on track as we actively extend our existing competitive position and the market presence. Mini LED technology is expected to penetrate the broad display market, addressing consumer, IT and the commercial applications. We remain very engaged with the prospective customers and expect market adoption to accelerate throughout fiscal 2022 and a multi-year ramp to continue. I look forward to sharing additional updates as we expand our portfolio of mini and micro LED solutions. Turning to the March quarter's results. We generated $340.2 million of revenue, representing a 27% increase from the December quarter and an over 125% increase from the same period in the prior year. The APS segment increased by over 15% sequentially, driven by higher utilization of the installed base. We continue to make ongoing progress to expand our shares within the APS market. Capital equipment represents 85% of overall revenue and increased by 29% sequentially, due to improvement across all of our end markets. Within the March quarter's capital equipment sales, general semi competitor which supports a broad set of applications, such as smartphones and consumer electronics continue to be very strong. And increased 16% sequentially. As discussed earlier, increasing complexity adds an additional layer of demand and the higher growth to this sizable end market. Across our other end market, we saw the largest sequential trends within the automotive and the industrial end market, which increased 83% sequentially. These sales are helping to address near-term automotive semiconductor production needs and also much longer-term production supporting the transition to electrification and autonomous driving. Next, Memory increased by over 60% sequentially. Although continued to remain relatively soft, we currently see high utilization within the memory market and anticipate further improvements within memory over the coming quarters. Finally, LED increased nearly 60%, driven by sequential improvement in both general lighting and advanced LED. For the March quarter, we estimate approximately 35% of capital equipment sales, supported more complex, advanced packaging applications, which highlights the increasing capital intensity of general semiconductor, LED and the memory market. During last quarter's earnings call, we guided revenue to be $1.1 billion for the full fiscal year. Despite a very strong demand environment, we anticipated supply chain constraints would limit our production capacity in our second fiscal half. Although both known and unknown supply chain challenge remains. I'm pleased to report that our efforts to mitigate recent supply chain constraints strengthen our ability to support customers and improve global semiconductor production capacity. Additionally, as we have aggressively worked to improve the known supply chain constraints, our outlook has also improved. For the full fiscal year, we now anticipate revenue to be between $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion, representing a significant increase over our prior guidance of $1.1 billion and an over 100% sequential change from fiscal year 2020. Over the remaining fiscal year, we anticipate some incremental manufacturing and operating expenses as we continue to address these controllable supply challenges. Lester will provide more details shortly. In summary, we are confident current market driver, including 5G, IoT; transitions in automotive and the fundamental change within our core equipment market increases our value proposition for our customers and the broader industry. Additionally, our progress and execution entering new higher growth market supporting leading edge IC assembly and the mini and the micro LED panel assembly add additional and meaningful layers of business that further support the inherent leverage in our operating model. I would now like to turn the call over to Lester Wong, who will cover this quarter's financial overview in greater detail. Lester?