Russell Ellwanger
Analyst · Benchmark. Please go ahead
Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining our call today. Being the first financials release call we are holding since November 2021, we will include in today's call a longer-term financial model stating the reasons for and the margins resulting from the new capacity agreements that we have announced in the past years. An important aspect of our growth strategy is manufacturing efficiency and scale. Increasing capacity in an accretive cost-efficient manner is a competitive edge. First, looking at this past quarter, our revenue for the third quarter was $358 million, down year-over-year, reflective of challenging market conditions. At this revenue level, Fab utilizations were Fab 1 6-inch, about 55%; Fab 2 8-inch, about 75%; Fab 3 8-inch, about 40%, due primarily to the weakness in data centers; Fab 5 8-inch, at about 60%; Fab 7 12-inch, about 60%; and Fab 9 8-inch, about 65%. As you can see, with the present utilization levels, we have the ability to quickly ramp up manufacturing to capitalize on a market rebound. A positive point demonstrating our operational efficiency, at these lower utilization levels, excluding the accretive impact of one-time items, we had substantial operating profit. Currently, we are seeing a return in several areas to rational customer inventory levels and are beginning to experience some upsides relative to customer forecasts as end-market opportunities present themselves. We have yet to see customers increase their forecasts, although certainly in the RF segment, inventory levels have reached or fallen below the previous steady state. We remain proactive with our customers, providing operational flexibility, as even small changes to end markets, if one has the ability to act quickly, could have a disproportionately positive impact on near-term results. For the fourth quarter of 2023, we expect revenue of $350 million, plus or minus 5%. We are active and committed to creating sustainable value for all of our stakeholders. As we stated at our last investor call on September 5th, Tower is actively embedding excellence in everything we do which we define as effective, efficient, and at the highest quality. Tower is extremely efficient, as measured by the 10-point drop from gross margins to operating margins, reflecting total OpEx of about 10% of revenue. Effectives can be measured by gross margins, which mean value-added offerings at manufacturing scale. Our offerings are value-add. A bit later, our CFO, Mr. Oren Shirazi, will discuss the long-term financial model, showing the result of increasing our manufacturing scale, reflecting Tower's present capacity footprint and the additional capacity capabilities resulting from our investments in the Agrate facility and in the New Mexico facility with ST and with Intel, respectively. These technologies that create value, almost by definition, are those which serve exciting high-growth markets. Within the analog world that we serve, we are focused on three megatrends, seamless connectivity, served by our RF roadmaps; green everything, served by our power platforms; and smart systems, served by our sensors and display offerings. We are committed to continue to advance the platform serving these trends, which in turn empowers us to meet the demands of our customers and remain at the forefront of industry trends. Our RF Mobile business is primarily composed of handset RF components, such as switches, antenna tuners, and low-noise amplifiers, built on our RF-SOI technology. As you know, the handset market has been weak in 2023, although there are signs of potential recovery, as evidenced by potential quarterly revenue gains through all of 2023, from a bottom in Q1 ’22. Longer term, we anticipate a market recovery, along with increased adoption of 5G in developing nations, to contribute to further growth. To accelerate internal growth that outpaces the market, we have invested in advanced RF-SOI technology with the recent release of design kits for [QT10], our 10th generation process, offering the industry's best Ron Coff figure of merit, striving improved reception and battery life in handset. This technology is prototyping today in 200 mm and we are releasing design kits in a 300 mm version this quarter. We have significant prototyping and design activity and anticipate this new technology to contribute meaningfully to revenue, with design wins already with two of the top five front-end module providers and active engagements with multiple others. Our RF infrastructure business is primarily composed of Silicon Germanium and Silicon Photonics for optical transceivers and data centers, artificial intelligence clusters, and telecom networks. Over the past three months, we have met with most all of our major customers throughout the world. One thing that was striking is that the near-term move to 800G data centers appear to be much more aggressive than is depicted in analyst reports, resulting in a stronger cycle ramp for the industry as Silicon Photonics plays an increased role at 800G and beyond. For your reference, please see Slide 6. Tied to this, we are seeing increased orders for Silicon Photonics, with customers forecasting a substantial ramp continuing through 2024 and beyond. Currently, we have over 50 active SiPho customers serving datacenter telecom, automotive LiDAR, and optical computing. In the third quarter, we announced a multi-generation partnership with InnoLight, the worldwide leader in datacenter optical solutions. This partnership highlights the strength of our offerings, with the end customers representing the core of all hyperscalers, enabling cutting-edge technology to support the growing demands of data centers including AI and next-generation telecom networks. For our Silicon Germanium business, we are seeing significant first-year design wins for linear pluggable optics, LPO components, which promise to replace costly DSPs in advanced optical modules. For your reference, please see Slide 7. LPOs integrate some additional functionality into traditional Silicon Germanium drivers and trans-impedance amplifiers to eliminate the need for costly and power-hungry deep digital, digital signal processors in many 400G and 800G applications. This new innovative technology offers improved cost, reduced power consumption, and reduced latency for data center, including for AI applications. We have also seen design wins and first orders for retimers used in active copper cables built with our Silicon Germanium technology, serving top data center hyperscalers and hyperscaler providers. It is an alternative to more costly pluggable optics, particularly for short-reach applications, further expanding our Silicon Germanium total available market. Finally, and also of significant importance, we see increased activity towards the newer market of satellite internet service using silicon germanium phased array, offering the best performance and cost tradeoff in terrestrial receivers employed by these systems. For your reference, please see Slide 8. This application space promises to meaningfully increase the Silicon Germanium’s total available market over the next several years, as each receiver requires, on average, 250 silicon germanium phased array ICs, with a major win having been awarded to us this past quarter. Turning to our Power IC business, in the past few months, we had two very major wins. Firstly, from a premier power management integrated device maker for the next generation 65-nanometer BCD, and secondly, from a leading analog fabless company with a design win with their first tier end customer. These activities are forecast and aligned with at least one end customer to grow to several tens of thousands of wafers per month, and is a major catalyst for entering the New Mexico fab manufacturing agreement. In the imaging market, we continue our focus on creating highly differentiated technologies for industrial, medical, and automotive use, scoring a major win in Q3, where we partner to provide sensor technology to an iconic mirrorless camera company. For your reference, please see Slides 10 and 11, which define this market. In the Industrial segment, we gained an entire next generation line with a leading imaging provider. The display market is undergoing a revolution with the rapid growth of the VR and AR markets. Technology-wise, in order to meet these markets' revolution and brightness requirements, a shift from the traditional LCD-based displays to organic LED on silicon is required. For your reference, please see Slide 12. We have developed a 5V platform and are currently at advanced stages of creating a 10V platform for even higher brightness, and are engaged with leading display suppliers in Korea and China. This is the next big thing in the display area, and we are technologically well positioned to take a substantial market share at this exciting new market. Providing a revenue breakdown for the third quarter of 2023, Sensors and Displays represented 18%, RF Mobile business represented 26%, RF Infrastructure represented 10%, Power IC business 21%, Discrete business 17%, Mixed-Signal CMOS about 6%, with about 2% Miscellaneous for this period. Automotive, which has served through several of the above-mentioned technologies, was at about 17%. I'm pleased to announce two strategic organizational changes we just implemented. These changes have been carefully designed to enable our next series of steps to achieve the next peak in our progress. Dr. Marco Racanelli was promoted to serve as Tower's President. As such, he is responsible for all business unit and sales activities and organizations. Dr. Avi Strum was promoted to be Tower's Chief Technology Officer, responsible among others, for a four-to-six-year accretive technology roadmap with associated activities and all M&A activities. I believe that these organizational changes will enhance Tower's value proposition and continuous profitable growth. Please join me in wishing Marco and Avi much success, Godspeed. Oren, please.