Fusen Chen
Analyst · B. Riley Securities. Please proceed with your question
Thank you, Joe. Good afternoon, everyone. Throughout the past quarters, we continued to execute on several growth initiatives, including driving critical progress in Advanced Packaging and Advanced Dispense qualifications, enjoying broadening adoption of our new ball bonding solutions, while we also observed ongoing utilization improvements across several of our key end markets. Before reviewing our quarterly results and performance, I would like to mention a few points on the recent industry momentum within Thermocompression. There have been three key milestones which we are excited to explain. First, the formation of, as well as our membership in, the U.S.-Joint semiconductor consortium was announced last month. Resonac Holdings Corporation, a leading provider of global semiconductor materials, formed this consortium to support industry collaboration and market adoption of new advanced packaging production solutions. After Joint and Joint 2 were created in Japan, the U.S.-Joint consortium represents the third Joint consortium globally and the first in the United States. A combination of 10 leading equipment, materials and process companies based in the U.S. and Japan represent the U.S.-Joint’s forming members, who have the near-term goal to establish a U.S.-based R&D facility with advanced packaging capabilities. Construction for the U.S.-based R&D facility will begin in the current calendar year, and at completion, will provide access for critical industry-leading advanced packaging technologies, materials and processes, which are not readily available locally to many of our U.S.-based customers. Our second TCB milestone is associated with collaboration with the subsidiary of a large semiconductor conglomerate who has successfully demonstrated our leading Fluxless Thermocompression, or FTC system, which is capable of direct copper-to-copper bonding as a standard feature, can also enable an exciting new chip-to-wafer hybrid bonding process. Hybrid bonding involves making both conductive and dielectric bonds, providing specific benefits for select end-markets. With a lower requirement for capital-intensive front-end investments relative to existing chip-to-wafer hybrid solutions, we expect this bumpless-FTC process to further expand our long-term chiplet and heterogeneous opportunities. As explained by industry headlines, there are many hybrid bonding processes including wafer-to-wafer as well as chip-to-wafer. This innovative TCB-enabled hybrid solution targets chip-to-wafer applications for deployment in high-volume consumer, and the compute markets, by offering a lower capital-intensive path to hybrid-based chiplet assembly. At a higher-level, adopting chiplet-based packages can reduce product development times, allow for amortizing design costs over broader end-markets, and is critically important in extending Moore’s law. With that said, our existing FTC system, which can bond Copper-to-Copper interconnect as a standard features, can provide a more direct pathway to chiplet-based production for many customers. Those, who seeking a chip-to-wafer hybrid option now have an additional alternative. As the industry accelerates the adoption of Thermo-Compression, we continue to enjoy growing commercial success and broadening market access through our intimate and expanding customer engagements. Over the past four years, on a trailing basis, our TCB business has grown by 10x, and we are still in the early stage. This was accomplished through new access to Silicon Photonics, 3D sensing and leading-edge market, including our first mover position in Fluxless TCB at a leading IDM customers. We have continued to drive industry adoption and have announced several win in the assembly and test space earlier today, highlighting this rapidly growing opportunities. Also, we continue to make a progress in our Foundry engagements and remain very optimistic you know we can unlock an additional leading-edge customers over the near-term. Similar to our initial IDM customer engagement – which began in 2020 – new-technology win with leading customer require a lengthy and collaborative engagement process and significant patience. These recent wins and evaluation progress, help solidify our TCB process as a long-term solution to support the growing adoption of chiplet-based architectures. While there are several different technologies and processes to support the diverse needs of the future chiplet market, we are well prepared to support the industry with our leading solutions. We are clearly excited as we are securing positions in new markets supporting AI, HPC and mobility, which have historically not excluded been from our served markets. These wins provide confidence in our leadership, as well as the long-term potentials for Fluxless adoption. Due to Thermo Compression adaptability, out-of-box Copper-to-Copper capability, and broader customer set, it provides lower barriers to entry for mass-market chiplet adoption. Thermo- Compression remains an emerging technology with a long-technology life ahead to support these growing market needs. Different interconnect technologies can be challenging for analysts and investors to forecast, although I would like to remind investors to not overly focus on one specific interconnect technology. There are many packaging transitions across our end markets with a growing number of tradeoffs, largely between cost and performance, but also production capability and system-level-requirements. It’s critically important to recognize that the high-volume, cost-sensitive portions of the semiconductor assembly market will also need stacked-die solutions over the long-term. These varying market needs are becoming more evident every quarter, as we are actively developing several multi-die and stacked-die solutions which are being evaluated across our customer base. Many of these higher-volume opportunities will likely demand more cost-effective processes, such as vertical wire, and remain independent from many of today’s TCB and Hybrid-focused markets. From our humble wire-bonding roots, we are pleased with our new market footing and access we have demonstrated. Recent customer adoption combined with ongoing innovations provides a strong foundation to support long-term advanced packaging adoption. I am very proud of our team for developing and driving the recent customer success across our portfolio. Turning to the June quarter business results, we were able to achieve our guidance midpoint while generating slightly more non-GAAP EPS than anticipated, due to our operational focus. At a high-level, we expect most of our end markets have already experienced trough levels of demand over the past 18 months. Over this time, certain markets began showing signs of improvement, while other markets faced headwinds that restricted our corporate-level performance. For example, our Ball Bonding revenue, on a year-to-date basis, has improved by 42%. Despite this relatively meaningful level of improvement, we also experienced offsets due to well-known automotive and industrial headwinds, which reduced Wedge demand earlier this year. At this point, we are pleased to begin seeing signs that multiple end-markets are improving gradually, although in better coordination, and we remain optimistic. While the market environment has become more positive, we expect our high-volume solutions are still well below the normal demand levels we would consider sustainable for the broader industry. Our core Ball and Wedge businesses have room to grow. Looking at our end markets more specifically, we continued to see utilization improvements in General Semiconductor, pockets of demand improvements in LED, Automotive and Industrial; resilience in APS, and ongoing recovery in Memory. Within General Semiconductor, utilization rates for Ball Bonding have continued to improve sequentially, although have not yet reached the critical tipping point expected to drive high-volume customers to broadly require capacity additions. Recent order activity has centered around high-volume regions where utilization rates have averaged over 80% for the past two quarters. At the same time, the rest of the world has lagged slightly but is continuing to improve. As expected, global ball bonder utilization rates have exceeded 75% last quarter and are anticipated to be in the high 70% range during our fourth fiscal quarter. Looking out into fiscal 2025, we continue to anticipate semiconductor unit growth expectations will support an additional step-up in demand for our high-volume solutions. We also anticipate ongoing industry growth will continue into calendar 2025, based on market forecasts, but also due to ongoing global front-end related investments. In addition to the improving General Semiconductor dynamics, we also booked approximately $20 million in Thermo-Compression revenue during the June quarter, which included our recognition of an additional FTC system which supported the recent TCB-enabled Hybrid development milestone. Within Automotive and Industrial, we have also seen improvements in demand as our interconnect leadership position is actively supporting emerging processes utilized in efficient power storage, power delivery, and power control for electric vehicles, charging infrastructure, industrial applications, and sustainable energy generation. We continue to see many innovations effecting power-semiconductor assembly which are driving the need for more robust interconnect technologies such as our recent High-Power-Interconnect or HPI, solution within Wedge bonding. HPI is being deployed in volume battery production as well as for more efficient power conversion required for charging and sustainable energy applications. We remain directly involved with several global EV manufacturers, the broader power semiconductor technology transitions, as well as leaders in the dynamic battery market. Of note this quarter, we continue to support an exciting dispense opportunity recently deployed with a leading solid-state battery company. While sub-markets of Automotive and Industrial may still be digesting capacity, we expect ongoing improvement to continue throughout fiscal 2025. Within Memory, we see customers investing in new capacity and technology which is supporting the NAND market and gaining support for new stacked-die solutions in the large and established LPDDR market. While NAND is arguably the largest stacked-die market in the semiconductor market, relying nearly exclusively on wire-bonding technology, we expect high-volume DRAM to transition to 3D packaging formats over the coming years. Several important leaders in the memory market are expected to accelerate development and pre-production activities over the coming quarters, with higher volume production to begin in late calendar 2025, or early 2026. Similar to the growing leading-edge and high-volume assembly needs for chiplet-based architectures, the memory market continues to seek out new ways to leverage packaging technology to drive greater transistor-density-per-area. Our thermocompression and vertical wire solutions are anticipated to more effectively meet the mass market’s performance, maufacturability, and cost requirements verse emerging technologies such as chip-level hybrid bonding that can be prohibitively expensive due to the requirement for front-end capabilities as well as well-known yield challenges. We remain in a very unique industry position as evident in our leadership enabling critical technology transitions such as direct copper-to-copper and fluxless adoption for leading-edge applications, High Power Interconnect solutions for automotive and industrial applications, and vertical-wire solutions for high-volume consumer-oriented markets. These emerging solutions supplement our existing, broad portfolio of interconnect solutions. We are well positioned to support customers’ needs while delivering significant long-term value to investors. In closing, after nearly 2 years of capacity digestion, we are pleased to continue seeing gradual signs of broader-based cyclical recovery across multiple end markets. Gartner recently projected a 17% semiconductor revenue industry growth rate through calendar year 2025. This growth expectation seems very reasonable considering ongoing global front end investments, and is expected to be led primarily by AI, automotive and general semiconductor, which we expect will directly benefit the company and its investors. Global utilization rates which are moving to the high 70% range, also increases confidence for a more robust 2025 recovery. I will now turn the call over to Lester for the financial review update.