Fusen Chen
Analyst · TD Cowen. Please go ahead
Good afternoon, everyone. Although some of our core markets remain in a state of digestion, we continue to anticipate a return to capacity growth in the core Ball, Wedge and APS segments throughout fiscal 2025, as we continue to expand share through technology transitions in advanced packaging and dispense. Yesterday, we made several positive announcements regarding a high-potential foundry win, our Copper First Hybrid bonding process, which we expect will reach a three micron pitch, and also an expansion of shareholder return initiatives. Our leadership in Fluxless Thermo-Compression, FTC continues to grow. The collective efforts by our advanced solutions teams, and execution across many parallel customer development programs have allowed us to drive market adoption of this innovative process. These recent wins represent significant milestones which highlight the market potential, our system-level competitiveness, and also the broader reach that chiplet and advanced packaging can have on high-volume, more mature portions of semiconductor packaging. First, these milestones highlight that FTC is a very competitive and compelling industry solution which is capable of directly supporting many different stacked-die applications, including the world’s most advanced logic and memory production. But also within other high-volume logic markets which are transitioning from the mature flip-chip process. We are very proud of our innovations within TCB technology and also our strong foundational base of leading customers, which illustrates the current market needs and longer-term potential of this competitive technology. Secondly, our current wins and innovations highlight our leadership position in this technology transition. K&S is the first, and only provider of Fluxless systems which are proven in a production environment. Today, we have a global TCB install base of over 100 systems and are approaching $200 million of cumulative TCB sales. Of this install base, approximately 30 systems are running FTC in either a development or production environment across five major IDM, OSAT and Foundry customers. Maintaining this level of support across different emerging applications and customer locations continues to be accomplished by our dedicated Advanced Solutions team. Close customer engagements have been essential in the development of our FTC platform – APTURATM-- and provided the critical market insight which enabled us to develop a very flexible and capable system architecture which can support a broad range of new packaging formats. While there are many different marketing acronyms used to explain the growing mix of advanced packaging offerings such as on wafer, on substrate, on interposer, on IC; we have built a system which supports a wide variety of material handling configurations and is very capable of supporting the most advanced TCB requirements, whether chip-to-chip or chip-to-wafer. As the need for advanced fine-pitch FTC and Copper-First hybrid grows, we expect our competitive position will continue to improve across high-performance applications. Finally, these announcements serve as a reminder that the future of semiconductor assembly will require new and increasingly more complex assembly solutions that can provide greater transistor density at the package level. This growing need extends well beyond the most advanced process nodes. Emerging packaging technologies provide a new level of value, increasingly necessary to offset the limitations of two-dimensional node-shrink. Today, our new product portfolio including vertical wire, HPI, FTC, and copper-first provide capable solutions well-positioned to support package level transistor-density across end markets. We have been focusing extensively on this transition for years, are pleased with our recent progress, and look forward to additional adoption. Turning to the fourth quarter results, we delivered revenue of $181.3 million and non-GAAP EPS of $0.34. From an end-market standpoint -- key portions of General Semiconductor, Automotive/Industrial and Memory have improved as anticipated, while LED demand remained very soft. We continue to anticipate coordinated recovery of our two most significant end-markets; General Semiconductor and Automotive/Industrial through fiscal 2025. For the September quarter, General Semiconductor reduced sequentially, primarily due to strong June quarter TCB revenue stemming from shipment schedules and revenue recognition timelines, which create quarter to quarter variability. Excluding TCB, general semiconductor increased by 11% sequentially, driven by capacity digestion and returning demand from global OSATs as anticipated. Although the December quarter tends to be seasonally softer -- averaging a 10% sequential reduction over the prior three years. We are confident broader Ball Bonding demand will improve further through fiscal 2025 due to reasonable unit growth combined with high field-utilization rates. For Automotive and Industrial we are seeing demand improvements after a challenging year. As explained last quarter, the demand improvements in General Semiconductor, driven by Ball Bonding, were completely offset by the challenges within Automotive and Industrial during fiscal 2024. At this point, we believe both critical markets are past trough, and expect coordinated recovery to accelerate in fiscal 2025. Despite this recent period of capacity digestion, we continue to participate in emerging transitions driven by secular growth in electric vehicles and sustainability trends. We have a strong network of global customers, who are critically enabling these transitions, which we continue to support. Over the past four years, many countries in addition to the European Union have implemented targets or policies to incentivize EV adoption. Just last month, the International Energy Agency, IEA, reported 7 million EVs were sold globally in the first half of calendar 2024, representing a 25% year-over-year increase. While our core wedge, SMT and battery assembly solutions are directly enabling these critical transitions within the Automotive market, we continue to seek out new solutions which can expand our market access. During the recent September quarter, we recognized revenue for an Advanced Dispense system positioned to support a solid-state EV battery manufacturer. This represents a new market for our Advanced Dispense business but also diversifies our growing base of battery-related opportunities in the US, Europe and Asia. We anticipate follow up orders in the coming quarters to support this customers production ramp. LED overall remained soft within Ball Bonding and continues to be in a state of digestion across the traditional wire-bonded, high-bright lighting market. While this current level of demand will likely persist over the coming quarters, we remain focused on driving adoption of our Luminex, laser-based mini-led placement system, which is positioned for direct-emissive and advanced backlighting adoption over the coming quarters. During the September quarter we booked revenue for one LUMINEXTM system which is in late-stage development and production readiness. We look forward to qualifying additional customers who seek ultra-fast LED placement, throughout 2025. Lastly, we see ongoing strength related to both capacity additions and technology change within the Memory market. In addition to the improving capacity needs for traditional stacked NAND applications, we are working with key memory customers to leverage vertical wire application in next-generation low-power DRAM packages, as previously explained, but also within NAND applications. Initial vertical wire LPDDR solutions, leveraging a vertical-fan-out configuration, are currently running at two key memory customers -- which we anticipate will move into a low-volume production environment next year. Like LPDDR, Memory customers are also seeking new stacked packaging formats for NAND memory, which also utilizes our unique set of vertical wire solutions. Both approaches offer smaller package footprints and performance benefits related to an improved die layout, lower parasitic capacitance, and also lower parasitic resistance. These unique vertical wire solutions are compelling examples of how new packaging formats are mitigating node-shrink challenges. We expect similar approaches to extend beyond memory into higher-volume general semiconductor applications over the coming years. We are pleased with our recent progress and emerging position supporting advanced packaging applications serving the compute market. This leading-edge market is now being enabled by chiplet and heterogeneous packaging techniques and was previously excluded from our served market, despite our dominant ball and wedge bonding share and has been a key target of our Advanced Solutions strategy. We are proud to demonstrate our strength, progress and potential with this long-term Advanced Solutions strategy, although additional technology changes are providing opportunities in several other areas as well. While the current TCB wins with Foundry, IDM and OSAT customers, who are supporting leading-edge applications is expanding our market potential, we want to remind investors that leading-edge applications are not the only opportunity for advanced packaging. Besides Copper-First hybrid and FTC -- our production ready assembly techniques including vertical wire are providing new solutions for memory and high-volume general semiconductor. Additionally, High Power Interconnect, HPI is enhancing power semiconductor and battery assembly approaches. These all represent critical technology transitions which are enhancing the value of our respective assembly processes. We are well prepared for these transitions and have multiple market-ready solutions to support our extensive customer base. Consortium participation, broadening market engagements, key customer adoption and a comprehensive set of advanced packaging solutions highlight our preparedness to address the next set of industry challenges. After an extended period of capacity digestion, we also expect ongoing improvements and cyclical recovery across key end-markets – most notably-- general semiconductor, Automotive and Industrial. Looking into fiscal 2025 we remain optimistic due to the recent technology wins, but also due to underlying market conditions. The relatively high global ball bonding utilization rates combined with reasonable semiconductor unit growth is expected to trigger additional growth in our core market during fiscal 2025. In addition, the expectations of a broader Automotive and Industrial recovery are also supported with our results this quarter. Finally, broader macroeconomic improvements are also expected to stimulate global semiconductor unit growth through fiscal 2025. I will now turn the call over to Lester for the financial update. Lester?