Kulicke and Soffa Industries, Inc.

And welcome to the Kulik and Safa fourth quarter 2023 results conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the call over to Joe Elgundy, Senior Director, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone, to Kulik and Safa's fiscal fourth quarter 2023 conference call. Fuzhen Chen, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Lester Wong, Chief Financial Officer, are also joining on today's call. Non-GAAP financial measures referenced today should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or in isolation from, our GAAP financial information. Complete GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation tables are included within the latest earnings release and earnings presentation. Both are available at investor.kns.com, along with prepared remarks for today's call. In addition to historical statements, today's remarks will contain statements relating to future events and our future results. These statements are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Our actual results and financial condition may differ materially from what is indicated in those forward-looking statements. For a complete discussion of the risks associated with Kuehl-Gonzalfa that could affect our future results and financial condition, please refer to our recent and upcoming SEC filing, specifically the 10-K for the year ended September 30th, 2023, and the 8-K filed yesterday. With that said, I would now like to turn the call over to Fuzhen Chen for the business overview. Please go ahead, Fuzhen.

Thank you, Joe. Before discussing our business performance, I want you to first reference the humanitarian crisis in the Middle East. Like many of our industry peers, we have had a long-term presence in Israel, where we develop and produce our precision capillary products. Our team based in our Haifa facility have delivered meaningful innovation and leading products over the years. And we are pleased to report that they are not in a high-risk area. However, we continue to hope for a quick and a peaceful resolution. As a global company with a diverse employee and the customer base, we are committed to strengthening our diversity and the inclusion initiative to foster collaboration, mitigate inherent bias, and create growth opportunity. Earlier this week, we successfully host our inaugural Abilating Women in Engineering and the Tech Summit in Philadelphia. These well-attended events feature several keynote speakers from KNS, as well as esteemed members from the external community. We are grateful to be able to host this type of event, which stands as a testament to our dedication to enabling change and exercising leadership within our local communities. Coming to our business, we have seen clear sequential improvement In key markets, although broader market recovery will be greater, we anticipate the sequential change into the December quarter being largely seasonal and in line with our long-term average. Furthermore, based on discussions with customers, external forecasts, and gradually improving utilization data, we anticipate a moderate demand improvement into the March quarter and a stronger second half-driven recovery. Since our prior March quarter, we have seen significant improvement in the general semiconductor end market and some recovery within LED. At the same time, automotive and the memory continue to be sub-near-term. Regardless of near-term industry condition, we remain very aligned with the major technology transition and are actively and intensively engaged in qualification for our advanced packaging, automotive, dispense, and advanced display solution with multiple industrial leading customers. Coupled with ongoing improvement in the board bonding business, this focused engagement will create more traction and momentum in the second half which we anticipate will be sustained through 2025. We have also increased our repurchase activity and remain optimistic as we execute on several key long-term projects. We recently announced the fourth consecutive annual dividend raise, and we continue to maintain the highest dividend yield relative to U.S. industry peer. For the September quarter, we delivered $202.3 million of revenue, $23.4 million of net income, and $0.51 non-GAAP EPS. We continue to see improvement in general semiconductor, which increased 50% sequentially, providing another clear indicator that we are well beyond 12 market conditions. This sequential improvement was primarily due to higher demand for our rapid-series ball-bounder platform, which is best suited for the most complex wire-bounding application. We have also seen a pickup in demand for emerging vertical wire applications increasingly deployed in mobile and IoT-based applications to mitigate RF interference between bands. We look forward to ongoing technology-driven change and improving conditions within the key world bonding market. Separately, we are well positioned to further optimize our high-volume business with the recently introduced PowerCom and the PowerNext platform. This new system will provide additional value and margin opportunities as they ramp over the coming years. Within LED, we have also seen sequential improvement in the general lighting which we associate with the US incandescent van that took place this past April. With advanced display, we continue to make technical progress with the Luminex platform and are approaching 5th, 9th year, and we also continue to execute towards Project W deliverable. For automotive and industrial, network dynamics, including high interest rates, have impacted end-user demand and also near-term industry capacity needs. Our automotive and industrial business remains a very early enabler of battery assembly and power semiconductor applications, which are supporting long-term electric vehicles and the sustainable energy transition globally. We have recently assessed an order of 120 battery assembly systems, which will be recognized primarily in March and the June quarter of 2024. Finally, As indicated in last week, in recent weeks, the memory market remains challenging in the near term. We currently see improving price dynamic as well as specific technology treatment opportunities within next generation high bandwidth memory and continuing to execute on emerging vertical fan-out or VFO application. As briefly discussed last quarter, VFO is being deployed as an alternative to through C-Conveyor or TSVs to assemble low-power dynamic RAM in a 3D format. This cost-effective and flexible VFO approach enables higher-density DDR, which supports large and established markets such as power-efficient mobile devices and other edge-based applications. We are currently engaged in evaluation with several memory leaders and are well-prepared coalition to support these emerging 3D-based memory architectures. Both emerging HBM and BFO opportunity will add new layer of diversification to our memory portfolio over the long term. Next, I wanted to discuss our participation within broadening artificial intelligence application. and provide brief update on advanced display and the dispense. First on AI, similar to how PCs, smartphone, and the connected devices have increased the capacity need for the industry. Artificial intelligence applications are directly creating both unit and a technology-based growth opportunity for many of our businesses. To be very clear, we have taken shares with optical with high volume logic and also with leading edge heterogeneous devices. This new provision have all enhanced our ability to support long-term AI trend, which are very much centered on emerging assembly techniques. Considering our growing alignment with a key artificial intelligence trend, I would like to outline how we are specifically exposed to what we consider to be the three key building blocks of AI, machine learning, network infrastructures, and the device on the edge. First, machine learning has received most attention over the past few quarters. Here we see increasing multi-die applications such as high bandwidth memory, multi-die GPU-based applications, and emerging chip-led and heterogeneous-based CPUs. We continue to directly support leading heterogeneous application with our thermal compression portfolio and anticipate both high bandwidth memory and multiple GPU-based application will begin transitioning to finer and finer pitches, increasing the need for our precision solution. As both HBM and the GPU-based application continue to move to finer I-O pitches, we expect our solution to be increasingly competitive. As we work with several key customers, we continue to believe KNS is a significant enabler to the success of most leading edge applications supporting AI. Our tools in both qualification and production are extremely competitive and the customer engagement has strengthened over the past two quarters. We look forward to sharing more feedback on the current evaluation and qualification status. of our key leading edge logic opportunities over the coming months. Next, as AI becomes more integrated with existing user applications deployed at work, at home, and through the cloud, there is a growing need for higher bandwidth and more efficient networking solutions. This need is being met with emerging silicon photonics technology deployed in compact-piece optics devices. which are anticipated to grow at 66% bigger through 2033. Currently, our silicon photonics systems are supporting a leading customer's core package optics production, used to support network switching applications. These applications have unique assembly challenges, which our competitive systems support well, and have triggered the interest of multiple new customers. Today, we are engaged with seven different customers who are critically supporting this emerging silicon photonics opportunity and remain well positioned for future growth. Yesterday evening, we announced winning the first in a series of expected orders to support customers' aggressive silicon photonics capacity expansion. The momentum and the interest for our current solution is very high. This recent win serves to highlight our incumbent position and the technical leadership in this emerging silicon photonics and the core package optics market. In addition to machine learning and the network infrastructures, the AI trend will continue demanding higher complexity and a higher volume production of devices on the edge, such as camera, sensing, connectivity, and the logic-based application, which are deployed in power-efficient mobile, IoT, and other crime-facing applications. These applications will continue to leverage proven and cost-effective assembly approaches, such as system-impeccable applications in which wall and wedge bounding play a dominant role, as well as emerging opportunities for standing wire applications used in both connectivity shielding and power-efficient stack DRAM. Over the coming years, Ball, wedge, and thermal composition are positioned very well to directly support these three AI trends. More complex assembly requirements are increasing the value of our market-leading ball, wedge, and dedicated advanced packaging portfolio. Despite the gradual industrial recovery, customer interest for qualification and evaluation remains very strong. In addition to AI, we continue to make progress on our advanced display opportunity, supporting advanced backlighting and the future direct-initiate display. As mini- and micro-LED wafer production costs improve and the die size continues to shrink, end-market use cases will grow, and the efficiency and the capability of assembly will also increase. Our dedicated high throughput, high accuracy Luminex system is well positioned to support this upcoming market need. Additionally, we continue to execute on Project W and expect to provide additional visibility into Project W's outlook over the coming quarters. Finally, the integration of our new dispense business continues to proceed very well with key engagement across our extensive customer network. Market feedback on this new solution from multiple leading customers has been very promising. Our micro-dispense solutions are extremely efficient, capable, and accurate, which adds significant value for critical applications, supporting advanced display, battery, medical, and sensing trends. The market opportunities for dispense are broad, and I will provide more specific on our target application and evaluation over the coming quarters. Looking into fiscal 2024, we continue to anticipate a return to about average semiconductor innate growth and also anticipate taking share in the new market. We have very strong customer interest and momentum across our emerging portfolio, have already seen clear cyclical improvement in our core market and look forward to releasing a steady pace of new system new feature and also announcing a new customer and a technology win over the coming quarters. With that said, I will now turn the call over to Lester who will discuss all financial performance and outlook. Lester? Thank you, Fustan.