GlobalFoundries Inc.

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Global Foundry's second quarter 2023 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there'll be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you'll need to press star 1-1 on your telephone, and you'll then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Sam Franklin, VP of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Global Foundry's second quarter 2023 earnings call. On the call with me today are Dr. Thomas Caulfield, CEO, David Reeder, CFO, and Neil Zanderskoff, Chief Business Officer. A short while ago, we released GF's second quarter financial results, which are available on our website at investors.gf.com, along with today's accompanying slide presentation. This call is being recorded and a replay will be made available on our Investor Relations webpage. During this call, we will present both IFRS and adjusted non-IFRS financial measures. The most directly comparable IFRS measures and reconciliations for adjusted non-IFRS measures are available in today's press release and accompanying slides. I'd remind you that these financial results are unaudited and subject to change. Certain statements on today's call may be deemed to be forward-looking statements. Such statements can be identified by terms such as believe, expect, intend, anticipate, and may, or by the use of the future tense. You should not place some due reliance on forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements, and we do not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements we make today. For more information about factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from forward-looking statements, please refer to the press release we issued today, as well as risks and uncertainties described in our SEC filings, including in the sections under the caption Risk Factors in our annual report on Form 20F filed with the SEC on April 14, 2023. We'll begin today's call with Tom providing a summary update on the current business environment and technologies. following which Dave will provide details on our end markets and second quarter results and also provide third quarter 2023 guidance. We will then open the call for questions with Tom, Dave, and Niels. We request that you please limit your questions to one with one follow-up. I'll now turn the call over to Tom for his prepared remarks.

Thank you, Sam, and welcome, everyone, to our second quarter earnings call. I'm pleased to report second quarter results that are at the high end of the guidance we provided in our first quarter update as we continue to deliver consistent financial performance against the backdrop of prolonged macroeconomic and cyclical uncertainty facing our industry. Let me start by providing a brief update on the current business environment. Similar to others in the industry, we believe that semiconductor inventory levels across several end markets are coming down more slowly than previously expected. Certain end markets that we service, such as smart mobile devices, communications infrastructure and data center, as well as the lower end of the consumer and home electronics markets, are being impacted by a combination of increased inventory levels and lower year-over-year demand. Consistent with the discussion in our first quarter update, we continue to believe that the return to more normalized inventory levels in the consumer-centric end markets is forecast to happen more slowly than previously anticipated, and based on our discussions with our customers, will at best occur towards the end of 2023. Though we still expect sequential quarter-on-quarter revenue growth throughout 2023, we believe that the rebalancing of demand for these markets will also extend later into the year and will continue to be impacted while the global macroeconomic and consumer demand outlook remain challenged. Now, despite these headwinds, we continue to see healthy demand in faster-growing end markets, such as automotive, industrial IoT, and aerospace and defense. We have announced some exciting partnerships, which I will comment on shortly, and we are working closely with our customers to support these critical, important markets. Let me now touch briefly on our results, which Dave will discuss in more detail later in his commentary. Revenue in the second quarter increased sequentially to $1.845 billion, which was at the high end of our guidance range. We reported adjusted gross margin of 29.6% in the quarter, which exceeded our guidance range. This better-than-expected performance was primarily driven by the favorable timing of positive manufacturing variance, which is expected to moderate in the second half of 2023. I'm also pleased to report that we delivered adjusted earnings per share of 53 cents, which as well was at the high end of our guidance range. Let me now provide you with a brief update on some of our recent customer and partnership activity. Starting with automotive, we remain highly committed to supporting the transition of the industry from internal combustion engine models to ACE, autonomous connected electrified vehicles. In addition, Our product portfolio is well-placed to support the faster pace of uptake from automotive manufacturers, seeking to compete on differentiated driver experiences and features, as well as on the electronics architecture to comply with evolving safety and security standards. In smart mobile devices, we continue to drive leadership products to remix our business towards the premium tier handset market, where we've seen greater resilience in demand. We also delivered a comprehensive set of features on our 8SW platform, our leading RF silicon on insulator-based product line for front-end module components. Finally, we delivered enhancements to our 28-nanometer High-K metal gate platform, which is purpose-built for the image sensing and processing segment, where we continue to see content growth associated with a trend towards more cameras and pixel processing in mobile devices. Meanwhile, in IoT, We continue to innovate our differentiated technologies focused on enhanced power efficiency and embedded memory for secure intelligent solutions at the edge. We are also proud to have collaborated with Cadence Design Systems to support the development of the industry's first binaural hearing aid systems on chip prototype to create the smart hearing aid processor which will utilize GF's 22FDX platform. In Communications Infrastructure and Data Center, our customers have indicated they are working through inventory levels more slowly than anticipated, which we expect will continue well into the second half of the year. As a result, we've been able to remix some of our capacity service demand in more durable and growing segments, such as automotive. In June, we also announced a strategic collaboration with Lockheed Martin to advance U.S. semiconductor manufacturing and innovation and to increase the security, reliability, and resiliency of domestic supply chains for national security systems. Collaborating with GF will enable Lockheed Martin to more quickly and affordably produce secure solutions that increase the capability and national security of the United States. We are proud to collaborate with Lockheed Martin to address the growing need for a reliable supply of trusted, feature-rich semiconductors for mission-critical security systems. Additionally, Our 300-millimeter FAB in Malta, New York, was recently accredited as a Category 1A trusted supplier by the U.S. government with the ability to manufacture secure semiconductors for a range of critical aerospace and defense applications. This week also marks the one-year anniversary of the signing of the CHIPS Act, and our collaboration with Lockheed Martin directly supports the Act's objectives of increasing traceability, provenance, and onshore production of critical semiconductor technologies to strengthen national and economic security and domestic supply chains. To summarize, I am pleased to report financial performance at the upper end of our guidance range as our dedicated teams around the world continue to execute on the targets that we set out to deliver for our customers and all our stakeholders. With that, over to you, Dave.