Russell Ellwanger
Analyst · Benchmark StoneX
Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our call today. I'm truly excited to share with you the status, progress and future outlook potentials for Tower. The second quarter was quite significant, setting substantial company records across all key metrics. These results continue to validate the growing value of our technology portfolio and the powerful operating leverage embedded in our business model. Our revenue is on a fervent growth trajectory with an accelerated flow through into earnings. Second quarter revenue was $460 million, with a particularly positive profitability, 30% gross margin, 20% operating margin and 20% net margin, all being company records, excluding nonrecurring accounting items and representing, respectively, 58%, 55% and 55% quarter-over-quarter contribution from the increased revenue. These results stand as the first step of continual margin expansion we expect over the next years, driven by market-leading customer partnerships, which dictate a very rich product mix backed by strong operational execution. Looking ahead, we guide the third quarter of 2026 midrange revenue to be $520 million, representing an annualized revenue run rate of above $2 billion. We began the year stating that Tower will have a very strong second half as the previously announced capacity investments become qualified and converted into shipments. Beginning the second half of 2026 with a $2 billion run rate turns the page into multiple new exciting chapters for the company. The strength of our customer demand our growing partnerships, our proven execution capabilities and the strategic investments that we have and still continue to announce provide a powerful catalyst to accelerate our short, mid- and long-term growth. Due to direct and growing customer demand representing the scale of the market opportunity and more importantly, our ability to capture it, we have updated our 2028 model to be $3.6 billion in revenues, $1.63 billion in gross profit or 45% gross profit margin and $1.2 billion in net profit or 33% net profit margin. Please see Slides 4 and 5. Very important, the profitability gains we delivered in the second quarter are not a one-time achievement, but rather just an initial step towards profitability expansion and cash generation as represented in our updated 2028 model. Equally important, as can be seen in Slides 4 and 5, this growth is accompanied by even greater efficiency. Today, we operate at about a 10 percentage point difference between gross margin and operating margin, a highly efficient structure for a company investing strongly in future growth. As revenue expands, we drive greater efficiency with operating expenses as a percentage of revenue, lowering to approximately 7%, 30% lower than current levels. This improvement is not the result of limiting investment in R&D. To the exact opposite. The model includes an increase of R&D investment by over 40% against present levels. Rather, this improvement reflects the enhanced efficiency achieved through our support functions as we grow scale. Speed and execution are one of the primary differentiators for high-tech success. We must continue to invest in R&D. This is a core capability. But as well, there must be a focus to streamline context, all of the SG&A functions. We are doing this and likely with numbers that rival or exceed the otherwise best in the industry, efficiency, driving the speed of execution, of course, yields strong margins. But more importantly, it enables sustained business success through the speed of execution. 3 weeks ago, we announced a dual-track 300-millimeter capacity strategic expansion in Japan for our silicon photonics, silicon germanium and advanced optical packaging capabilities, having gained the support of the Government of Japan through the Ministry of Economics, Trade and Industry, METI. By combining Tower's specialized technology leadership and our best of the best worldwide workforce into Japan's unparalleled manufacturing expertise and quality output, its world-class research institutions and deeply committed workforce, we are building a strategic platform that will drive innovation, economic growth and Semiconductor leadership for decades to come. Track 1 of this dual track add significant new 300-millimeter silicon photonics capacity with full production readiness expected during the fourth quarter of 2027. It consists of repurposing the Arai facility, formerly Fab 6, for 300-millimeter silicon photonics capacity and advanced packaging capabilities and as well as maximizing the company's Fab 7, 300-millimeter output in Uozu. This Track 1 is the driver for updating the 2028 business model. Track 2 will commence in parallel with the first track and consists of constructing an additional 300-millimeter manufacturing facility adjacent to Fab 7. This facility is expected to provide a 4x increase in our Japanese 300-millimeter manufacturing output, focusing on silicon photonics, silicon germanium and related advanced optical packaging, positioning Tower to continue to support our accelerating customer demand for emerging AI and data center applications, driving next-generation optical connectivity requirements and is planned to provide a seamless path for Tower and our customers for continued growth post 2028. Moving to our businesses. Please refer to Slide 6 as referenced for Q2 revenue breakdown. Our RF infrastructure revenues for the second quarter represented 49% of corporate revenue with approximately 43% of quarter-over-quarter growth and over 140% year-over-year growth. Silicon photonics revenue itself increased by over 60% quarter-over-quarter and over 270% year-over-year, hitting a Q2 annualized run rate of over $680 million, targeting a $1 billion run rate in Q4 '26 as the previously announced capacity expansion continues to be qualified. The full ramp of wafer starts in these investments is anticipated to occur within the fourth quarter of 2026, creating a wafer start capacity over 3x higher than the second quarter silicon photonics revenue shipments with full financial effect anticipated to be in the second quarter of 2027. After kicking off the year with several breakthrough technology milestones, the second quarter was about further propelling Tower's leadership position in silicon photonics as an added foundation to the next phase of growth. We focus on expanding capacity, advancing our technology capabilities and deepening our engagements with strategic customers aligned to their long-term road maps. The data center industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation as AI performance is no longer defined solely by compute. It is increasingly determined by how efficiently data moves between processors. High bandwidth, low latency, energy-efficient optical connects have become a critical enabler of AI infrastructure. While geographically distributed deployment has become equally important to hyperscalers and the communities, these trends align directly with Tower's core strengths. As AI clusters scale from thousands to hundreds of thousands of XPUs, electrical interconnects are rapidly approaching their practical limits. Silicon photonics has emerged as a leading platform for 800G and 1.6T pluggable optical interconnects, which have, for the most part, already replaced copper for scale-out connections outside the rack. The next frontier is enabling optical interconnects for scale up, either within a single rack or across multiple racks and once again, silicon photonics with Tower is well positioned to lead this transition with several near package optics, NPO deployments planned over the next year and many more in design. NPO delivers much greater bandwidth density and reduced energy per bit compared to pluggable optics, and yet it leverages the same established ecosystem as pluggable overcoming the reservation from hyperscalers and data center operators about reliability, serviceability or multisource flexibility. We announced customer contracts representing approximately $1.3 billion of silicon photonics revenue for 2027 with even higher growth for 2028. With what we've stated about Track 1 investment, substantial additional 300-millimeter capacity will be added throughout 2027. This added 300-millimeter capacity is already requested by and committed to several lead customers, reflecting their confidence in Tower's ability not only to scale manufacturing capacity rapidly but to continue to execute on highly differentiated technology road maps required for future networking architectures. To support the long-term growing demand, we announced the Track 2, a most significant expansion of our manufacturing footprint in Japan, which is expected to more than quadruple its 300-millimeter capacity, positioning tower well to support not only today's workhorse pluggable optics and our rapidly growing near package optics, but also the additional future market for co-packaged optics. Capacity alone, however, is not enough. Our future growth will also be driven by the next generation of enabling technologies that are already moving through development pipeline. Over the next 1 to 2 years, we expect several of these technologies to transition into high-volume manufacturing, including and especially heterogeneous integration of III-V materials on silicon photonics for integrated lasers, advanced modulators and optical signal processing. In support of this road map, we entered into a multiyear epitaxial wafer supply agreement with IQE securing a strategic supply of III-V epitaxial material while continuing to internalize key manufacturing steps that enhance both performance and supply chain control. Our long-standing collaboration with Marvell reached an important milestone as the number of SiPho-based coherent optical modules crossed over into multimillion. This achievement demonstrates Tower's ability to manufacture some of the industry's most complex silicon photonics ICs at high-volume production scale. Looking ahead, coherent photonics is expected to play an increasingly important role in scale across AI architectures where multiple data center campuses operate as a single AI factory while distributing power, cooling and infrastructure requirements across geographically diverse locations. Our silicon germanium business continues to benefit from growing demand for low latency, low power efficient analog drivers and transimpedance amplifiers across traditional pluggables as well as linear pluggable optics and linear receive optics architectures. Our 100G per lane and 200G per lane products are in high-volume production across all three 200-millimeter fabs as we advance towards near package optics as well as 400G per lane solutions requiring tighter electrical IC, photonics IC integration and codesign. We're also seeing strong customer pull for our next-generation 300-millimeter silicon germanium platforms. Our RF mobile revenue represented 12% of our second quarter corporate revenues. As we discussed last quarter, our RFSOI business is undergoing a strategic transition from 200-millimeter to 300-millimeter manufacturing, enabling higher performance, greater integration and stronger value for our customers. In addition, we are consolidating 300-millimeter RFSOI manufacturing to Fab 7, freeing up -- I'm sorry, to Fab 10, freeing up Fab 7 capacity for a rapidly growing SiPho and silicon germanium business. These factors resulted in a 14% decrease in our 300-millimeter year-over-year RFSOI revenues. Looking forward, we have realized a very strong design win momentum for our 300-millimeter platform, particularly for premium smartphones. A road map replete with best-in-industry figures of merit has gained market excitement and engagement, driving an expected 3x RFSOI increase and 300-millimeter wafer starts by mid-2027 against the Q2 '26 shipments. Tower management revenue for the second quarter represented 14% of corporate revenues with year-over-year revenue growth and strong demand for both our 200-millimeter and 300-millimeter BCD offerings. Our technology focus on power delivery for high-performance computing, gives us a leadership position in load gate charge and low RDSon LDMOS devices. Our latest generation power technology enables our customers to develop high frequency, high efficiency, DC to DC converters for a variety of growth segments. During this quarter, we experienced increased demand from existing customers and also saw very strong new customer acquisitions across our power portfolio. This momentum is primarily driven by growth sectors where power density and thermal efficiency are mission-critical. Through close collaboration with our lead customers, we continue to advance our next-generation power management road map. Sensor display for the second quarter represented 12% of our corporate revenue in our image sensor business year-over-year revenue is predominantly flat. However, we're seeing a sharp surge in demand, particularly in the machine vision market for high-end, high-resolution sensors used in semiconductor inspection, driven by the accelerated build-out of DDR and HBM memory assembly lines. And as well in the automotive industry, especially for EV battery inspection. This strong demand is expected to continue to grow over the next 2 years. We are well positioned to support it with a range of products. Our lead customers have developed on our state-of-the-art global shutter 300-millimeter platform. Looking at utilization. During a period of high capacity ramp, Fab 2, Fab 3 and Fab 9, 200-millimeter fab operated utilization rates between 80% and 85%. Fab 5 in Japan was at 75% utilization. Fab 7 continues to be fully utilized, well above our 85% utilization model. Now I'd like to turn the call to our CFO, Mr. Oren Shirazi. Please, Oren. Thank you.