Kulicke and Soffa Industries, Inc.

Greetings. Welcome to Coolick and Soffa's third quarter 2026 conference call results. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to Joe Elgindy, Senior Director, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you. Welcome, everyone, to Kuelken's Office Fiscal Third Quarter 2026 Conference Call. Lester Wong, Interim Chief Executive Officer and Chief Financial Officer, also joins me 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. GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation tables are included within our latest earnings release and earnings presentation. Both are available at investor.canis.com along with prepared remarks for today's call. In addition to historical statements, today's discussion contains forward-looking statements regarding our future performance and outlook. These statements are made under the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and involve risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially. For a complete discussion of the risks associated with Kuehl and Soffa that could affect our future results and financial condition, please refer to our latest form 10-K and upcoming SEC filings for additional information. With that said, I would now like to turn the call over to Lester Wong for the business, market, and financial overview. Please go ahead, Lester.

Thank you, Joe. Good morning, everyone. Demand continues to improve at a faster pace than previously expected, and our operational teams are aggressively ramping production to support customer capacity and technology requirements. Our own capacity expansion plan here in Singapore also remained on track. This new production space will support the growth of our advanced solution segment over the coming years. We were able to support our customers' near-term needs by ramping our flexible production capacity and driving a 36% sequential revenue increase during the fiscal third quarter. Overall market strength continued to be led by January semiconductor and memory applications although we are pleased to note that utilization rates have improved sequentially in all regions and in all end markets. Growth in artificial intelligence applications remain the driving factor behind data center expansion. This growing data center opportunity, in turn, drives meaningful increase in demand for both our thermal compression and wire bonding solutions. It is increasingly evident that most performance-oriented logic and memory applications will continue to adopt more complex and others. Adoption of more complex assembly approaches directly benefits our current thermal compression business and steers our investments in R&D and production capacity. While emerging AI applications are a clear catalyst to accelerate high-volume growth of new advanced packaging and heterogeneous assembly approaches, we expect we're still in the early stages of this much longer-term technology transition. We continue to anticipate this more-than-more driven technology-centric transition will continue to advance semiconductor assembly and benefit K&S well beyond this current cycle. In addition to the needs of most performance-oriented applications, data center expansion also requires new and increased capacity for established assembly technologies which support networking, communications, power management, and storage requirements. We estimate that the data center market relies on wire bonding technology at least as much as, if not more than, traditional semiconductor markets such as smartphones and PCs. As the leader in wire bonding technology, we are primed to support this growth. In addition to our involvement to support data center related technology and capacity needs, we are also encouraged to see positive momentum continuing within the automotive and industrial markets, which has recently increased demand for wedge products as well. During the June quarter, company revenue increased by 36.2% sequentially through focused global coordination and operational execution. While we are not immune from global supply chain constraints and macroeconomic conditions, we again exceeded expectations as we ramped production aggressively this quarter. Revenue recognized for our advanced solution segment, which includes our leading flux of thermocompression solutions, has exceeded last quarter's record revenue by 20%. In addition to supporting customers' emerging production requirements, our advanced solution teams remain focused on driving innovation in both panel-level and hybrid bonding platforms with a heightened emphasis on increasing our production capacity for advanced solution offerings. We are maintaining our target of over $100 million in advanced solution segment revenue for fiscal 2026 and continue to prepare for significant sequential growth in fiscal 2027. This growth is supported by performance and process readiness of our flexible, highly capable thermal compression platform provided to customers. We remain closely engaged with a broad base of IDM, OSAT, and foundry customers as heterogeneous packaging approaches become mainstream. While AI applications are accelerating the transition to more complex assembly today, we're still relatively early stages of this advanced packaging transition. Today, emerging packaging solutions such as FTC, vertical wire, direct copper to copper, hybrid and panel bay architectures will be critically necessary for a much wider array of semiconductor production over the coming years. Through our technical leadership, ongoing investment in R&D and manufacturing expansion plan, we continue to build a strong foundation that directly supports these new advanced packaging approaches. Our capital expansion initiative here in Singapore is progressing well and remains on track. This new production space will allow us to support the growing capacity and technology needs of customers over the long term. We continue to target completion by the first fiscal half of 2027. Our close engagement, technology leadership, and growing production footprint all enable us to contribute to a higher level of process value across serve markets. Our wire bonding teams in both fall and wedge are also aggressively scaling production to meet strong customer demand and continue to develop and release new packaging solutions to a wide base of memory and power semiconductor customers. Turning to the end market review, general semiconductor revenue increased by 52.6% sequentially to $227.2 million, driven by high capacity and technology requirements for both fall bonding and advanced solution segments. While AI and data center has been the major driver, we are now also seeing broader base recovery in traditional markets as well. Memory shipment increased by 8.8% sequentially to $34 million after strong sequential growth in the second fiscal quarter. Our memory basis is currently focused on delivering NAND technology and capacity requirements. Based on our market understanding, data center is now currently the largest N applications across global NAND production. Beyond that, our vertical wire team continues to work closely with memory customers as they develop new forms of stacked DRAM applications. Automotive and industrial demand improved by 9% sequentially to $24.2 million after strong improvement last quarter. We continue to see robust demand for high I.O. and high volume power and mixed signal packaging, which tends to track for general semiconductors. During our fiscal third quarter, demand for our high-current wedge solutions also increased. As many of you know, our wedge bonding suite is a critical part of our automotive and industrial offerings. This market has faced industry-level headwinds for the past several years. Over this time, we continue to expand our portfolio and look forward to continuing recovery. We are pleased to see this sequential improvement and remain well positioned to benefit from long-term share growth in battery, and Plug-in Hybrids, which require new power semiconductor technology and capacity requirements over the long term. Aftermarket products and services also increase sequentially due to the higher level of production across the installed base. It remains an interesting and exciting time at the company and for our industry. We recently celebrated K&S's 75th anniversary and are proud of our legacy as a global leader and pioneer in semiconductor interconnect solutions. For three quarters of a century, our success has been grounded in the trust and strong partnership we have developed with customers, suppliers, and business partners around the world. Looking ahead, we remain confident in our ability to extend our platform through ongoing investments in innovation to support the next generation of advanced packaging solutions. With that said, I will now provide a brief financial update. My remarks today will refer to GAAP results unless noted. We again deliver revenue above guidance and continue to execute an aggressive production ramp through served markets. During the June quarter, overall revenue increased by 123% over the same period last year. Close coordination by our business segments, R&D, and supply chain teams remained essential to support our customers' immediate needs and also their future production requirements. Gross margins came in at 47.8% during the third fiscal quarter, and we delivered $1.07 of GAAP earnings and $1.20 of non-GAAP earnings. Total operating expenses came in at $89.7 million on a GAAP basis and $82.6 million on a non-GAAP basis. As explained last quarter, this sequential increase was anticipated and largely related to the increase in variable incentive compensation accruals throughout our second fiscal house. This variable expense was the primary driver, although we have also increased some fixed resources, which support our growing base of opportunities. Tax expense came in at $15.3 million, and we anticipate our effective tax rate will remain slightly above 20% over the near term. For the September quarter, revenue is expected to increase by 13.5% sequentially to $375 million, with gross margins of 48%. Non-GAAP operating expenses were a temporary increase of approximately $87.5 million. This sequential increase is temporary for the September quarter and is largely associated with the performance-oriented nature and quarterly accrual of our Variable Incentive Compensation Plan. We expect GAAP earnings per share to be $1.29 and non-GAAP earnings per share to be $1.42 for the fourth fiscal quarter. At this point, we remain opportunistic on both near-term and longer-term opportunities, and we continue to anticipate above-average demand will continue into fiscal 2027. This concludes our prepared comments. Operator, please open the call for questions.

Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. and for participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question is from Krish Sankar with TD Cowen. Please proceed.

Yeah, hi, thanks for taking my question and congrats on the really strong results and guidance. Lester, I have three quick questions. I'm just trying to wonder, you know, given the strong growth in September, are you seeing it across the board, like mid-teens growth for semi, memory and auto industry or is one

Well, Krish, I think, as we said, General Semi and Memory are leading the way. I think automotive and industrial has improved. You know, they faced quite a lot of headwinds over the last couple of quarters, but they're picking up a little bit. But still, it's generally General Semi and Memory that's driving the ramp.

Got it, got it. And then I think you also mentioned in the slide that the center is expected to last into fiscal first half. I'm kind of curious, like, you know, as you get more data center, how should you think about December and March quarter? In other words, should we see seasonality in March, or do you think there won't be seasonality this time?

Well, Chris, you know, our business is always a little bit of seasonality in our Q1, right, which is our December quarter. But I think, you know, based on what we see right now, you know, both the utilization rates are extremely high. In China, it's over 95%. End markets, both memory and general semi is around 90%. We are also seeing a lot of inbound POs even go extending into Q2. Usually that doesn't happen for us. We usually don't have POs that goes out that far. And also in conversations and visits with customers, particularly in China, we are seeing them to continue to, you know, build factories. So I think based on all those factors, we feel pretty confident that, you know, the strength in the business, in the traditional business, is going to continue into the first half of fiscal 27. In addition, for our advanced solution business, you know, we're engaged with foundries, OSAPs, and IDMs. So, again, we feel pretty confident we can take advantage of a lot of those opportunities, particularly in heterogeneous integration around logic for our Fluxus TCB.

Gotcha. Very helpful. And then a quick follow-up, Lester, just on the advanced solutions at TC business. You know, you said, like, over $100 million this year. Thank you very much.

For this year, we think we're going to beat $100 million. I think for FY27, I think for TCB, we are looking at somewhere in the region of $150 to $200 million. Great.

Thank you very much, Lester. Appreciate it.

Thanks, Chris.

Our next question is from Charles Shi with Needham & Company. Please proceed.

Hi, Lester. Congrats on the nice results. I think one thing is getting the prepaid. Yeah, one thing is You said in the prepared remarks, kind of sounds very interesting. You said the data center relies on wire bonding as much as the phones and the PCs. This is a part, I think we may have discussed this in the past, but can you kind of elaborate a little bit what kind of wire bonding packaging you're seeing the most in data center applications? And the one thing in particular I do want to ask is we would think there's a little bit more of the power devices there that could probably drive wedge bonding, but the wedge bonding looks like it's more still relying on the traditional industry, and you are seeing some sequential improvement, but a lot of what you consider data center demand seems to be driving ball bonding. So it's a little bit of an interesting comment there, and I wonder if you can provide a little bit more color. Thank you.

Sure, Charles. You know, so wire bonding in data center basically is, in fact, more than a majority of chips in the data center is actually traditionally packaged using wire bonding. I mean, these are for applications like general infrastructure, networking, communication, power, and, you know, storage. And also in storage is basically memory, and I think as I said in the remarks, you know, As you know, we're focused on NAND for now, and 40% of the NAND market now, it goes to its data centers. So obviously, we have exposure there as well. As far as wedge bonder in data centers, you're correct. Wedge bonder is still a little bit more focused on the automotive. They're high current, but it's more ball bonder in terms of for power management in data centers.

Got it. I think you mentioned about demand, mentioned about PO. You're actually starting to filling up the second fiscal quarter, if I hear you correctly, and the first half of the next fiscal year. I know it's kind of hard for you to project out for the entire year, next year. because you don't really have the POs, but I'm sure you have customer conversations who provide you at least some high level forecast. So can you kind of help us understand where you think next year's growth could potentially be and especially one of the things people like to compare is where you could go in terms of how high the revenue could be next year versus the prior Cycles, let's say in 2021 and 22, where you did hit that 1.5 billion per year level. Are you still thinking you're not going back to that level or maybe you could actually go back there and maybe exceed that level? Thank you.

Well, Charles, as you said, you know, you've followed the industry for a long time. Like for us, visibility actually is usually not even as far out as what we have in the first half of fiscal 27. So, I mean, it's very volatile. So I think it's difficult for me to kind of say what FY27 would look like as a whole. But as I said, based on utilization rate, based on POs, based on customer conversation, we think the first half of 27 will be very strong. As far as do we think they'll go back to 21-22 levels, I mean, those were, you know, extreme levels. That was like a global pandemic, right? And, you know, growth was around the world as people work from home and play from home. So that's a very high bar. I think we're pretty confident that the first half of 27 will look good. And then as we, you know, in our November call, I think we'll probably give you more color on what the second half looks like.

Thank you, Les. Thank you.

As a reminder, this is star one on your telephone keypad if you would like to ask a question. Our next question is from Dave Dooley with Steelhead Securities. Please proceed.

Yeah, thanks for taking my question. Lester, I was just wondering if you could help us understand what your current total capacity is for You know, the wire and wedge bonder business. You're running at pretty high run rates here with your guidance at $375 million a quarter. Perhaps just help us understand what your total capacity is and how much you're increasing the core business capacity at this time.

Thanks, Dave. Well, we actually have significantly increased the capacity for the traditional business, the wire bonding business, right? I mean, from about two quarters ago, we have now increased capacity 4X, right? We have a very, very flexible manufacturing model. We've been doing this for a long time. As I said in my remarks, you know, this is our 75th anniversary. So, you know, our supply chain teams, our operations team, our logistics, as well as our, you know, engineering teams work very closely together to meet, you know, customers' near-term needs, as well as, you know, more mid-term demands, right? So, again, We're very focused on not losing market share because of capacity issues. So we're pretty comfortable where we are at.

Would you be able to support a $450 million kind of quarterly run rate at this point?

Well, Dave, I don't see a $450 million run rate at this point, as I said. We don't guide you on the quarter. But I think if we need to get – we've had supported $400 million quarters before. And if we need to, as I said, I think, you know, we are we're very dynamic, flexible manufacturing model and we need to ramp some more. We'll do what we need to do to make sure we take care of our customers.

Okay. And then a different topic. Could you just talk a little bit more about your investments that you're making outside the thermal compression bonding in the advanced packaging area? Like I think you've mentioned hybrid bonding in the past and then also panel level Perhaps just talk about what your opportunities are in those two areas.

Yeah. So, Dave, we're seeing a lot of interest in panel, right, from customers, both IDMs, as well as the foundry, as well as the OSATs. We are actively engaged with multiple customers on panel. Obviously, panel is the future, just given the geometry, right? You can fit a lot more dye in a rectangle than you can in a circle. So there is a lot of interest. We are investing significantly in our panel project. And then as far as hybrid bonding is concerned, yes, we also are in hybrid bonding. We have been pretty active. We accelerated the program over the last year. We think our hybrid bonder has some unique features that is not currently in the market. So we are planning to deliver a hybrid bonding tool to a customer in the first half of fiscal 27.

And as far as the panel opportunity, just remind us exactly what you're going to do. Are you going to pick and place dye and put them on the interposer, or what exactly will be the application that you're focused in on there?

Well, I think, Dave, right now we're talking to the customer and we're focusing on, you know, Multiple applications at the panel level. So I think, you know, as we develop the program, we'll promote more color in our future calls.

All right. Thank you and congratulations on a nice quarter.

Thank you.

There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back over to Joe for closing remarks.

Thank you, Sherry, and thank you all for joining today's call. As always, please feel free to follow up directly with any additional questions. This concludes today's call. Have a great day, everyone.