Weebit Nano Limited

Okay, good afternoon and welcome to the WeBitNano Meet the CEO Investor webinar. My name is Danny Younis and I help with investor relations for WeBit. With me this afternoon, in fact, in the morning in Tel Aviv, we have the CEO of WeBit, Kobi Hanock. Hi, Danny. Before I hand over to Kobi, just to note that we'll be having a Q&A session at the end. If you have any questions, please type them into the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen. We're expecting a lot of questions to come through, so preference will be given to questions with a name attached to them rather than anonymously. I would now like to hand the webinar over to Kobi. Please go ahead.

Hey, Danny, and hi, everyone. Good afternoon. I'm glad to have you all join our quarterly Meet the CEO. I think last quarter was really a great quarter. We've gone through a tough 2024, as everyone knows. trying to get deals done with some of these big foundries, big IDMs for a long time. It's been a challenge. And I'd actually like to, before I focus on the last quarter, I'd like to go through a little bit of history and a little bit of what's going on and where the market is actually. And many of you know, it's a long time ago, over 15 years ago, the market already realized that Flash is basically going to hit its limits. And since these technologies take so long to develop, there were a lot of attempts to develop a replacement for Flash. And, you know, in those days there was FE RAM, there was PCM with different variants of 3DX point and Optane, and there was MRAM and there was CBRAM and there was, you know, all kinds of technologies and of course, ReRAM. Over the years, what we saw is one by one, these technologies kind of fell off the table. There's always someone who's still trying to make things work, but in general, the ferroelectric RAM, the PCM and all the different variants of it, Today, you might see one company trying to still make it work, but it's not really anything that the market is considering serious. The two last technologies standing were actually MRM and DRM. Now, MRM You know, five years ago, it was already in mass production. It was in a good position. I think the market basically assumed that's it. We found our winner. We found the technology that's going to work. But, you know, as they started to manufacture, they realized it's very expensive, you know, much more expensive than flash and definitely even more expensive than re-ramp. There are all kinds of other issues with it. It uses rare earth materials and things like that. But I think the key issue came up once these products hit the road and they were used in the market. The M, as everyone knows, stands for magnetic, and you'd be surprised how many magnetic fields we have around us. So some of these products ended up failing in the field. And they basically had the memory erased by some magnetic field somewhere. And that triggered the biggest consumer companies in the world to basically say, hey, our products are going everywhere. We really can't control where they are. This is a big risk. And they passed a very strong message to the market that they're not going to use MRAM. Now, the way that this was reflected in the market was just a year and a half ago when TSMC released their NVM roadmap, it was still all MRAM with re-RAM just as a side note. But last June, it was basically updated and now their NVM roadmap is all re-RAM with NVM as a side comment. And I think that reflects the whole transition in the market. We've gone a long way. But we finally reached the point, and it's really last year, that the market understands ReRAM is really it. It's not like MRAM is going to disappear. MRAM has its place, and people have already invested, and it's going to be used. But ReRAM is much cheaper. It doesn't have all of these issues with magnetic fields and so on. It has the long list of advantages that we've talked about so many times in power and endurance and all these other things. And now it's ready for mass production. TSMC already has it in mass production. WeBit has qualified both at Atleti, which is basically ST Microwafers, and at Skywater. We have agreements also with DB Hightech. We demonstrated it on GF Wafers. So the market is basically waking up and saying, wow, this is the technology of choice. This is where we're going. and we bit has a good technology and last year we also demonstrated it already working at high temperatures and and we demonstrated high endurance and so on um and uh you know everything was uh basically lining up now the And we are, you know, if you look at the re-RAM space during these years, you know, the other re-RAM players, if it was the other smaller companies like Crossbar, Odesto, etc., you know, they basically disappeared. If it's the big players, you know, it's not a secret that even Intel and Samsung tried to develop re-RAM and ended up giving up. ReRAM is not an easy technology to develop and you really, really need a very strong team that will develop it. You need the strong device guys and process guys and analog and digital and test and characterization and everything. And you need them all to work very closely together. You need to have a very focused management. That's where the Intel and Samsung guys had their issues. You really need to have a very focused management that is driving this, that is working together, that is defining what to do with with trade-offs and so on. Webit really is, I think, the only company in the world which has all of these things together with that big focus. This is what we do. This is really our big focus. I mentioned it several times, we have 13 PhDs, actually the number is going to grow soon, focused on developing this technology. And today we are the only independent supplier of free RAM. So last year and even before that, in 2023, we were already engaged with so many of these big foundries, big IDMs, and they were evaluating and testing and even negotiating deals. But there was always that big concern about it's a new technology. It's a young company. They never showed their technology in mass production. And so everyone stayed on the sidelines. Yeah, it was driving me crazy. you would see that everyone was asking me, where is the deal? Where is this big deal? You're saying that you're talking to all these big guys and where is that deal? Well, you know, we were and we are continuing to work with these guys, but for them, it was a really big perceived risk. And so they were trying to do everything they could to continue to work with Flash and wait for someone else to make this step. Now, we ended up, you know, with last quarter, we were uh we were i think it was a great quarter for us it started with the semiconductor australia conference which i i really enjoyed going to um you know it continued with the race that we did uh you know i have to say an unexpected race kind of i wasn't really planning to do a race but When a broker comes and says, I have all this money underwritten at a premium over market, etc. I think it was a good raise for us. It really gave us now several more years of quiet so that we can really focus on... uh, on, on doing the work and, uh, you know, at the end of the quarter, as everyone knows, um, on semi ended up being the first one to cross the line. They, they announced their trio platform, uh, which is, uh, you know, a very nice advanced technology at 65 nanometer BCD. Uh, I mean, they, you go back, I don't remember when exactly, but, uh, several months ago, they, they had that big announcement. And they need advanced memory. You know, that's when you announce a new platform and everything already moving forward, you don't go back to a technology like flash. And so, you know, we had talks with them, you know, of course, just like everyone else, they had their concerns, but I think they saw that WeBit has such a strong team, is capable of really resolving any issues that will come up, et cetera. And I'm very glad to say we signed this agreement. This past month since we signed the agreement, has been phenomenal. They are so focused. This is such an impressive company. They are taking this project so seriously with so many people involved and we're running forward in parallel with the device and the process and the design side and the test characterization, everything. We have so many meetings and so many things going on in parallel. It's been great. And in addition, of course, the impact on the market has been great. The way that the market perceives Webit now has really changed. Last week, I got a phone call from a VP in one of the biggest foundries. I always call him up. Yes, we have good discussions. Yes, his team is really interested in our re-ram. you know, it's been more than a year that we're talking and analyzing and checking and, and they're hesitating. And suddenly he calls me up and says, Colby, you need to send us a plan. How do we, how do we ramp up on re-ramp? And, you know, that's like, wow, you know, suddenly they're pushing instead of me, you know, or they're pulling if you want to look at it. Um, so it's, it's that kind of thing. You know, I have so much travel now planned to meet so many of these, um, foundries and IDMs, etc. So the way that people are looking at WeBit is really changing. People are obviously now someone already took that first step. So it's not like everyone is rushing and everyone's now standing in line to sign the agreements, but they're definitely moving forward and things are moving easier. We were at the CES conference in early January. CES is a huge conference. I don't know if you can imagine a conference where 150,000 people get together in one place. It's a whole city just coming together. And we had amazing meetings there. uh with uh with people in the industry you know i got to meet uh of course uh a lot of the on semi guys there the ceo of on semi etc uh but you know other customers our potential customers to be exact uh we met many customers many bankers the leading bankers in the world um were there there was a lot of excitement around it you know i I had one analyst actually last week tell me, for so long, there were so many players in this, emerging nvm space and and i've been following it for so many years and suddenly you know it's it's we bit you know it's uh so it's exciting times uh i'm really excited about um uh on semi they're an amazing partner uh we're continuing of course to work with db high tech and and they are a great partner and and we really uh are are enjoying the work with them and moving forward uh and i think 2025 started with a blast and there's so much going on. It's known that my entire compensation, equity compensation for this year is tied to closing deals. And I definitely plan not only to achieve my target, but to even go over it. And I think there is a potential for that. We're very focused on this. We have the team is all excited and ramped up. So yeah, I think 2025 is going to be an amazing year. Yeah, so I don't know. I think at this point, I know many people have questions and I'll open the floor to questions. I'll be glad to answer.

Sure. Thank you, KB. We will now move to the Q&A session, as KB said. Look, once again, if you have any questions, type them into the Q&A box at the end of the screen. We do have a healthy number of questions coming through and I will try and ask them all. A reminder, we will be giving preference to non-anonymous type questions. Okay, Kobi, the first question is around global foundries. So can you maybe just give a brief update on WeBit's dealings with global foundries?