Ichor Holdings

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to I-Corps' first quarter 2024 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we'll conduct a question-and-answer session, and instructions will be given at that time. To ask a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I'd now like to introduce your host for today's conference, Claire McAdams, Investor Relations for I-Corps. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and thank you for joining today's first quarter 2024 conference call. As you read our earnings press release and as you listen to this conference call, please recognize that both contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control and which could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. These risks and uncertainties include those spelled out in our earnings press release, those described in our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2023, and those described in subsequent filings with the SEC. You should consider all forward-looking statements in light of those and other risks and uncertainties. Additionally, we will be providing certain non-GAAP financial measures during this conference call. Our earnings press release and the financial supplement posted to our IR website Each provide a reconciliation of these non-GAAP financial measures to their most comparable GAAP financial measures. On the call with me today are Jeff Andreessen, our CEO, and Greg Swite, our CFO. Jeff will begin with an update on our business, and then Greg will provide additional details about our results and guidance. After the prepared remarks, we will open the line for questions. I'll now turn over the call to Jeff Andreessen. Jeff?

Thank you, Claire, and welcome to our Q1 earnings call. As expected, our Q1 revenues were similar to Q4 levels at $201 million, reflecting the relatively stable demand environment within the wafer fab equipment market. Q1 gross margin of 12.2% increased sequentially from Q4, but not quite as much as we had forecast due to a combination of mix and cost. Revenue mix was slightly less favorable than our earlier expectations for Q1 revenues. Q1 was a particularly back-end loaded quarter, with about one-third of our revenue shipping in the final three weeks of the quarter. The high volume of shipments at quarter end were highly weighted to gas panels compared to components, and our overall mix of higher margin components decreased compared to Q4, versus our prior expectation for sequential growth in our components businesses. At the same time, we witnessed a late quarter slowing in build rates for EUV gas delivery associated with order delays and leading edge logic. We remain on track with our strategy to drive gross margin improvement through greater integration of proprietary components and continued cost reduction initiatives. In Q1, we achieved a sequential uptick in proprietary content that was aligned with our expectations, but with higher than expected costs as we begin to ramp these products. With continued execution of our gross margin improvement strategies, we are driving further expansion of our margin profile at the similar revenue levels expected in Q2. Our earnings for the quarter came in below guidance because of a combination of gross profit impacts as well as a change in the tax provision, as Greg will cover shortly. We completed an equity offering in early March that yielded net proceeds of $137 million. We paid down the entire balance of our revolver, vastly improving our leverage ratio and cutting expected interest expenses by over half. With this transaction, we believe we have significantly improved the company's capital structure, as well as our earnings leverage and overall flexibility to execute against future strategic objectives. Now I'll turn to our outlook for the year. Expectations for industry demand in 2024 have remained relatively stable year-to-date, Within an overall WFE landscape that is expected to be similar to modestly up from 2023, the current revenue baseline for I-Corps continues to be fairly stable at the $200 million level. The midpoint of our Q2 guidance is slightly below that baseline because of some isolated softness in a couple of areas, namely in our silicon carbide gas panel business, which has slowed a bit as the industry digests the capacity installed over the past few years as well as a slower-than-expected EUV system build rate through mid-year, given certain order delays and leading-edge logic. We remain optimistic for an improvement in the second-half revenue volumes as the demand profile begins to build in advance of a stronger 2025 spending environment. That being said, our visibility remains limited to approximately three months, given the return to normalized lead times in the supply chain. And with our current visibility, we are not yet seeing a meaningful uptick in demand for new systems serving the NAND market. The recovery in this market remains in the very early stages, and recent reports indicate that the improvement year to date is chiefly focused on technology upgrades. Given the strong etch and deposition intensity characteristic of the NAND market, we look forward to a more meaningful improvement in NAND demand driving a strong growth year for us in 2025. In other semiconductor end markets, the emergence of new technology drivers and process inflections such as gate all around and high bandwidth memory require an increasing use of applications that are highly dependent on the accuracy and repeatability of the fluid delivery systems. These include applications such as selective etch, ALD, deep silicon etch, ECD, and more. We have a role providing fluid delivery to all of these applications. And while the expected pace of EUV deployments has resulted in a current slowing in the build rate for 2024, as we move into 2025, we expect a significant increase in gas delivery deployment for Litho as well. Outside of semiconductors, specifically for our IMG business, we are also seeing improvement in the overall demand forecast as well as incremental share gains ahead within IMG's customer base in aerospace and defense, as well as certain commercial markets. As each of these markets and applications continue to expand, we see opportunities for I-Corps to increase our revenue potential and continue to add breadth and diversification to our customer base. All of these factors build a strong story for I-Corps' revenue growth as the industry recovery accelerates. But it's our proprietary products, including our next generation gas panel, that we are most excited about. as our key initiative to drive overall gross margin expansion within our business. And this period of muted demand has enabled us to make steady progress penetrating our new products into the market. I'm pleased to report that we recorded our first revenue on some of our initial shipments of next-generation gas panels during Q1. By mid-year, we will have over 20 next-generation gas panels shipped and installed in the field, with most supporting our customers' evaluation tools that have shipped to device manufacturers. Our new gas panel contains about 80% proprietary I-Core content compared to around 10% today, which will drive significant expansion of our gross margin profile. These tool evaluations typically take about nine months to complete, so the earliest these will be completed and production shipments can begin is the fourth quarter for the initial shipments. We have been qualified on three applications and are now expecting to complete a fourth application qualification by mid-year and have four active customer engagements. Our strategy to expand overall proprietary I-Corps content extends to our components businesses as well. We are now customer qualified on fittings that are used in our weldment business, substrates used in our gas panel, as well as seals and valves. These are all critical components used in the existing gas panels that we assemble. All of these component qualifications can be deployed to our existing gas panels that we build today, as well as being designed into our next generation gas panel. These specific products are now qualified at three customers and began shipping in the second half of the first quarter. We expect our proprietary component content will continue to increase within our build-to-print gas panel business over the next several quarters. These applications have significant opportunities to drive margin accretion as we further integrate them into our gas panel business. In summary, I'll remind everyone here today that our revenues tend to recover more sharply when industry spending rebounds. Furthermore, our business model and financial profile tend to generate significant operating leverage as revenues grow. Given the current industry expectations for WFE remaining relatively stable at these levels through 2024 in advance of a strong 2025, we also expect our revenue run rate to continue around the $200 million level until the beginning of a revenue ramp. We look forward to ramping revenues back towards the $250 million to $300 million plus level in 2025. We expect to be able to deliver significant earnings growth as revenue volumes increase, which is why we continue to make critical investments in our business in support of future growth. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg to recap our Q1 results and provide further details around our Q2 financial outlook. Greg?

Thanks, Jeff. To begin, I would like to emphasize that the P&L metrics discussed today are non-GAAP measures. These measures exclude the impact of share-based compensation, amortization of acquired intangible assets, non-recurring charges, and discrete tax items and adjustments. There is a useful financial supplement available on the investor section of our website that summarizes our GAAP and non-GAAP financial results, as well as a summary of the balance sheet and cash flow information for the last several quarters. First quarter revenues were aligned with our earlier expectations at $201 million, remaining relatively steady from Q4 levels. Gross margin improved 180 basis points sequentially to 12.2%, driven by improved factory efficiencies, as well as the pass-through revenue event from Q4 not repeating this quarter. While gross margins improved meaningfully compared to the Q4 trough, we were about 100 basis points shy of forecast due to less favorable product and customer mix versus forecast, as well as higher costs for our internally produced proprietary products. Q1 operating expenses came in below forecast And we're up slightly from Q4 at $22.1 million due to the resetting of labor-related taxes and benefits. And our operating income for Q1 was $2.4 million. Our net interest expense was $4.1 million, and our non-GAAP net income tax expense was above our forecast at $800,000 due to higher international profits and the elimination of our ability to recognize a U.S. tax loss benefit. The change had approximately a 3-cent impact on our EPS within the quarter. The resulting net loss per share was 9 cents. Now turning to the balance sheet. At the end of the quarter, our cash and equivalents totaled $102 million, a $22 million increase from Q4. We generated $4.8 million in cash flow from operations, and after deducting $4.5 million of capital expenditures, our free cash flow was roughly neutral. Accounts receivable increased from year end due to the back-end loaded revenue profile of the quarter, and our DSOs were 33 days. Inventory decreased $5 million during the quarter. To end the quarter, $241 million. And inventory turns increased to 2.9. During the quarter, we completed an equity offering that raised net proceeds of $137 million. The proceeds were used to pay down $115 million of our revolver balance. Our total debt currently has an outstanding balance of $133 million, and our net debt coverage ratio improved to 1.9 times. Now let's discuss our guidance for the second quarter of 2024. With anticipated revenues in the range of $190 to $205 million, we expect our gross margins will improve to a range of 12.5 to 13.5%. We expect Q2 operating expenses to be approximately $22.2 million or roughly flat to Q1. We expect operating expenses to remain at similar level for the remainder of the year. Net interest expense for Q2 is expected to decline to approximately $1.8 million. Looking beyond Q2, we expect our net interest expense to continue to decline as a result of the declining term loan balance, as well as improvement of our leverage ratio and the applicable spreads associated with the leverage ratio. For modeling purposes, you should model net interest expense for the full year of 2024 to be approximately $9 million. We expect to record a tax expense in Q2 of $500,000. For the full year, we are forecasting a non-GAAP effective tax rate expense of $2.5 million. Finally, our EPS guidance for Q2 reflects the higher share count of 34 million shares. Operator, we are ready to take questions. Please open the line.

Thank you. At this time, if you'd like to ask a question, please press the star and one on your telephone keypad. You may remove yourself from the queue at any time by pressing star two. Once again, that is star and one to ask a question. And we'll pause for a moment until our question is the queue. And we'll take our first question today from Brian Chin with Stiefel.

Hi there. Good afternoon. Thanks for letting us ask a few questions. Maybe just first, maybe a clarification. Historically, I have not been aware of I-Corps having material exposure to semi-equipment OEMs that are based in China. I guess, can you firstly maybe just confirm whether that is the case? And then maybe just, you know, since we're on the topic of China, indirectly through your larger U.S. OEM customers, do you have any sense of China spending is sort of growing or at least sustaining this year?

Hey, Brian. It's Jeff. No, we don't sell directly to the China OEMs. So we don't sell to NARA or AMAC or any of those guys. So we do not have a China channel. Second part of your question is, what are we seeing in China? I think China was still pretty strong. I think it's going to remain at relatively decent levels or good levels, I mean, in the first half. but indications are that the back half might be a little bit slower, but some of those are going to be offset by high bandwidth memory and some of these other areas that are going to start to continue to kind of grow quarter on quarter and year over year. So we don't think China will stay at the same levels in the second half is kind of our view today.

Got it. And maybe kind of for my follow-up, maybe a bit of a hodgepodge on sort of second half and sort of how various dynamics maybe impact sort of this kind of high-level outlook. I thought it was kind of interesting you mentioned how business could kind of either sustain maybe at sort of the 200 level that you're sort of guiding reported in first half per quarter, or kind of when revenue ramps, maybe it kind of goes up to 250. So it almost seems sort of like a binary potential outcome, maybe out to like Q4, right? Like a 200 or a 250 situation, but kind of, maybe that's not the right way to think about it, but what sort of, uh, what kind of inventory layer I think still exists maybe with some of your larger OEM customers that you're still maybe work they're working through and maybe what will be a little bit of a, a kind of, uh, throttle on revenue maybe over the next few quarters as that sort of burns off? Is that maybe the right way to think about that? What is sort of the gross margin dynamic in terms of not being able to capture maybe a normalized mix if there's still some of this inventory layer to burn off through the next couple quarters?

All right. That's a good question with seven parts, Brian. I'm going to take it on right now. So, The way I think about the second half of the year is I don't think we wanted to give you an indication we're going to be absolutely flat through the end of the year. What I would tell you is we're now four months through the year. We're not really seeing as much of an inflection as we would have anticipated yet, but that's not saying that 2025 timing is clear to us and maybe to our customers at this stage. So we still view 2025 as is an up year, year on year. The timing of when that is will have the biggest effect on our fourth quarter. Second part of your question is really around where are we at with the inventory burn off. I think we'll go through largely through the end of the year with some of the components still needing to be burned off. Largest impact is probably to our weldment business and then machining second, I think. From gas panels and stuff, they're kind of more normalized, I would say. We've been running flat now for six quarters, something like that, going through last year. You know, we did. So I think most of those things have been gas panels are just kind of in the normal range of whether something falls out of a forecast and needs to be reconfigured. I don't think there's a pileup of gas panels. So it's all in the component side of the business now. Having said that, thinking about the gross margin, our qualifications that we've had that we just finished kind of describing in totality will have an effect on the gross margin. And we typically create margin kind of quarter over quarter on revenue of about 25%. It might be a little bit better than that. But our view of the fourth quarter, I would say, not regardless of revenue levels, but even at revenue levels like this, you're seeing our guidance, the gross margin is going up. A big portion of that is as we start cutting these things in and as we come up the learning curve and get the efficiencies in the factories and things like that worked out, we'll get behind some of the cost headwinds from Q1 and we'll see the margin continue to accrete at similar revenue levels. And as you know, once we inflect revenue, you know, we generally will outpace gross margin. So, I mean, the view we gave you on the last call, I think, is relatively intact from our view of our cost initiative to drive gross margin.

Okay. Thanks for all the detail.

You're welcome.

Our next question will come from Craig Ellis with B Reilly Securities.

Yeah, thanks for taking the question and all the color so far, guys. Jeff, I wanted to start just by following up on a comment that you made in response to Brian's question. So with regard to the point that you're not seeing as much of an inflection in 24 as you might have thought three months ago, which of the businesses, gas panels, weldments, et cetera, is that having greater impact on or is it impacting all of those about equally as you think about where we are and where we could be in the back end?

Well, I think, you know, gas panels is still pretty close to two-thirds of our business, or 60. I don't know the exact number. And then chemical integration. I mean, they're going to be the ones that we need to see inflect. But the biggest impact to drive gross margin would be recovery in our component side of the business as well, because they'll bring through more incremental margin on a per-revenue basis. And so... Those are kind of the drivers, I think, that we see. And our visibility, I think I mentioned it, is really kind of three months with, I would call, good visibility. I think after that, there are pockets where it's really well understood, and there's other areas where we're not seeing the visibility, and largely because the industry's kind of pulled back to normal lead times and visibility. Okay.

Yep. Yeah, sure. So some of that's just a cyclical artifact. Got it. Okay. And then, Greg, just turning to gross margins versus our expectations, we're tracking around 100 basis points lower than we thought in the first half of the year. As you look at the business and the way it can trend in the back half, and admittedly, we have a hard time seeing beyond maybe 3Q, but how do we think about gross margins? Are Are you thinking that we can execute to fairly steady gains that 20 to 25% incremental margin, I think Jeff referred to, or is there either any cost item or mix item that can give us more of a step up as we think about second half trends? Thank you.

Hi, Craig. So as Jeff said, right, we, We expect that, you know, as we drive incremental revenue, the 25 percent flow-through is still where we believe we're driving to and expect to see. You know, so that will continue as we move through the year. The other thing is, as Jeff talked about, is we've got our proprietary side that will start to drive some incremental margin improvements in the second half of the year. How much, we're working through all of that. For now, you know, the 25% flow through is what you should still model.

Hey, Craig, maybe just to follow on is I think our view of our, I'll call it internal proprietary products that we're now integrating into our existing gas panel business, not necessarily our new generation of gas panels, is tracking to what we expected as we kind of entered the year. I'd say With the exception in Q1, revenue was very similar, but we just kind of, we were too low down the learning curve in cutting some of these new fabricated parts, but they'll quickly overcome it.

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you very much, guys.

You're welcome.

Our next question will come from Chris Sanker with TD Cowan.

Yeah, I think this is a good question. Jeff, I had a couple of them. One is, you know, when I compare or contrast it to your closest peer, as reported last evening, they've been kind of growing revenues for the last couple of quarters. You guys have been kind of flatlined. Is the Delta as simple as they have more tiny Semicap OEM exposure? You have more silicon carbide? Or is there something fundamentally going on with, you know, the top large US Semicap OEMs?

Well, I don't want to speak for my competitors, but we overlap around 40%. I would say largely I don't see much deviation where we compete. Having said that, obviously some of his upside was this China revenue base that I don't have a channel for, or we don't chase it as well. His services business is different. They recently required a Another kind of, I guess I'd call it a sub-fab gas delivery business as well. So we don't overlap as much as people see, but where I think we play, I don't really see if the bottom line question is, are we seeing share shifts? We don't see it. And so the profiles are just a little bit different because the businesses are not apples to apples.

Sorry, Jeff. And then you kind of spoke about EUV delays for leading edge. I'm kind of curious, can you just talk to the mechanics of when your EUV customer ASML gets a booking to when they ship a tool to when you get the order and when you ship it? Can you just talk us through the timeline? Because I'm just kind of curious how to figure it out compared to this year versus next year and given their build-out profiles.

We ship about five months before a tool can be shipped by them, and then I'm not going to purport to know their revenue recognition on the other end, but we go in about five months before they deliver a tool. We did see, again, some modest reduction within the quarter from the entry point of the quarter, and then we've seen a kind of You know, when we talk about the midpoint being down a little bit quarter over quarter, it's probably about half silicon carbide and half EUV. And then they have taken down some of their build plans, and I think they've been pretty straightforward with their comments. And so that just flows through to us. And all we're seeing is it going into 2025. So it sets us up for a good growth year in 2025 as I look out to EUV right now. And... You know, the other thing we're doing is we've had this relationship now for probably six or seven years. I think we're starting to pick other sub-assemblies up and things like that that are helping us kind of increase the content we get on each EUV tool as well.

Got it, got it. And one final question, if I can just squeeze it in. If you kind of spoke about on the inventory side to Brian's question, how gas pump inventories are kind of normalized, but Weldments and machining are still pretty high. I'm just kind of curious, if you look at your product, where would you say is the stickiest market share to the lowest? I'm guessing gas panel is probably high market share, or it's pretty sticky compared to machining and weldments, which could be more fungible. Just your thoughts on that would be helpful. Thank you.

Yeah, I would say certain portions of the addressable market within weldments are highly fungible. We call it orbital welding, a little more of a less skilled. When it comes to TIG and more sophisticated combinations of weldments and sub-assemblies, they're a little bit sticky. I mean, in the long run, nothing's sticky, to be honest. But I think with machining, it's fairly sticky. Those take long qualification periods. So once you have a machine shop, you know, that becomes fairly sticky in the long run. And obviously with gas panels, You know, we still view ourselves as the largest market share, somewhere around 30s, low 30s, I would say, percentage of market share kind of globally. So that's pretty sticky as well. And, you know, new entrants are fairly rare. Maybe one in the last five years has come in.

Got it. Thanks, Jim.

You bet.

Our next question will come from Tom Diffley with DA Davidson.

Yeah, good afternoon. Appreciate the chance to ask a question. Maybe, Greg, first a clarification on the cost side. For the components, was it material cost? Was it expediting? What caused the variance in the cost this quarter?

So on the component side, Tom, so... Really, it was, I would say, more of a mix within the customer mix there, not... Well, that was about half of it, right? Yeah, yeah, about half of the mix on the components. Not expediting. We're not seeing any of that now in the market from supply chain on fees and things like that. It's more about the customer mix with inside of the components.

Specifically in machining... When you're starting to ramp up, you're doing smaller lot quantities, so you're not getting as much throughput. So it almost equates to like a learning curve. And the more volume you get, the lower the average cost per unit will come down. And we just didn't hit what we thought we could coming out of the gates.

Okay, that's helpful. And then when you look at the proprietary products that you have going forward, you know, weldments, fittings, precision machining, Which of those do you think is the biggest market for you ultimately? And is there any type of a margin difference between the three?

I would say from the least sophisticated, more ubiquitous types of parts, they're probably in the low 30s and you might get into the low 40s. So the range is not that far off from them. I would say... You know, the markets that we address today in precision machining and things like that are kind of measured in billions and components and things like that. So they're big opportunities. Individually, I'd say the flow controllers are the ones that can help move the needle the most in the long term. But in the near term, it's definitely going to be the components I mentioned on the conference call because those are going into existing gas panels we manufacture today. So they're also going on the new stuff. but the new stuff obviously is in early stages of qualifications.

Okay, that's helpful. And then finally, when you talk about some inventories that you need to burn off, at what point do you need to start building inventory for gas panel, and how far before revenue do you start to see that?

Well, I would say maybe the way to think about it, Tom, is that we'll know the inventory burn is... largely gone when we see our component business start to inflect because they have the longest lead times. I mean, our contractual lead times are three weeks, four weeks for gas panels. They're longer than that for the EUV gas delivery, but the volumes are much, much smaller, obviously. So we usually see it on the component side first. And that's still running fairly sideways for us in the first half of the year.

Okay, thank you.

You bet. Thanks, Tom.

Our next question will come from Ross Cole with Needham & Company.

Hi, thank you for taking my question on behalf of Charles Shee. So in the past, you had mentioned that you expect the two largest OEMs to reach a restocking point in the second half this year. Do you still think that's the case, that they might not want to wait until inventory get back to historical normal levels? Or do you think that a management and those companies will still want to maintain a higher inventory buffer than they have in the past?

I would say I don't know what levels of buffers. I know that we're carrying higher levels of buffers, which should alleviate their need to do it. So we've added safety stock to be able to handle bursts and things like that. And so I think once they get through their inventory normalization phase, in those particular pockets of our component business that they'll be back to normal lead time ordering.

Great, thank you. Yeah.

Our next question will come from Christian Schwab with Craig Holland Capital Group.

Great, thanks for taking my question. Would you say that on your utilization rates, on gas delivery systems that you're keeping your workforce in the factory a little bit elevated with the hope of being able to gain market share when the recovery starts in 2025? Or have you kind of leaned that down?

I would say we have right-sized our workforce, but we leave enough excess such that we can burst think of it as in the 10 to 20% range. So while we've lowered our, I'll call it the direct labor workforce quite a lot, we still keep some excess capacity such that we do get pockets and we have to address those. And then I would say definitely on the component side because those are tougher skill sets to acquire as you ramp though.

Okay, perfect. That makes great sense. And then my last question, you know, kind of regarding, you know, a NAND recovery, right? I mean, the NAND manufacturers, you know, are just finally coming out of, you know, kind of almost an unprecedented money-losing situation given such a consolidated marketplace, and they have a whole lot of money to get back for the money that they lost to make future investments. Did you think that there'll be a substantial improvement in your NAND business in 25? And I guess if it is, is it more 25-weighted? It seems to me that without a material increase in smartphones or PCs, that we kind of need that in order to see a material improvement in NAND. Or am I thinking about that wrong?

No, I think you're largely right. I think NAND inflecting will... be very beneficial to ICOR. I think our position with our largest customer who had the largest share of the NAND market, as soon as it begins to inflect, and I think the view is that it will inflect in 2025. I'm not the expert on AI and all of this, but NAND is used in that as well because they need the storage near the new AI, generative AI and stuff. So I think that's helping NAND as well. Obviously, we're seeing that with some strengthening on the DRAM side and things like that. So, but I think you're right. I mean, NAND is at its lowest levels and I don't want to say forever, but it's pretty close, all-time lows. You know, and I would say recently somebody talked about the kind of the material side, engineering side of this being less than half of WFE for the first time in history too. And you've got, you know, you've got the litho guys being a significant percentage of it. And so while we have a position there, obviously the ASPs on that are significantly bigger than process tools. So our percentage of their content is much lower than a process tool. Right, right. Great. No other questions. Thank you. Thanks, Christian.

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now turn the call over to Jeff Andreessen for closing comments.

I want to thank all of you for joining us on our call this quarter. I'd like to thank our employees, suppliers, customers, and investors for their ongoing dedication and support. We look forward to the opportunity to meet with investors during several upcoming investor conferences, including the B. Reilly, Craig Hallam, and Cowan conferences taking place later this month, and the CEO Summit in early July. Please feel free to reach out to Claire directly to follow up with us. We look forward to updating you on our Q2 earnings call scheduled for early August. Operator, that concludes our call.

Thank you. This does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.