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spk04: Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the PDF Solutions' fourth quarter and year-end 2021 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. Four instructions will be given at that time, and I would now like to hand the call over to Mr. Joseph Diaz of Latham Partners. Please go ahead, sir.
spk03: Thank you, operator, and thanks to all of you for joining us today on this call. We appreciate your time and your ongoing interest in PDF solutions. As the operator indicated, my name is Joseph Diaz. I'm with Litham Partners. We're the investor relations consulting firm for PDF. If you do not yet have a copy of today's press release, it's available on the company's website at pdf.com. Some of the statements made during this conference call will be forward-looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. including statements regarding PDF's future financial results, performance, growth rates, and demand for its solutions. PDF results could differ materially. The forward-looking statements and risks referred to on this call are based on information available to PDF today. The company has no obligation to update them. You are advised to refer to the section titled Risk Factors on the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2020, and similar disclosures in subsequent SEC filings. With that, I'd like to introduce John Kabarian, PDF Solutions President and Chief Executive Officer. He will be followed by Adnan Raza, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. At the conclusion of management's prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions. Let me now turn the call over to John Kabarian, President and CEO of PDF Solutions. John.
spk09: Thank you for joining us on today's call. If you've not already seen our earnings press release and management report for the fourth quarter and the full year, please go to the investor section of our website where each has been posted. As Adam will discuss in more detail, 2021 was a record year for total revenue and a year where our analytics business achieved tremendous growth. Also exciting is the foundation that we have laid to establish stronger business in 2022 and beyond. In the fourth quarter, we celebrated our 30th year in business. So today, in addition to summarizing the progress we made in Q4 and 2021 and providing our expectations for the coming year, I'll provide some perspective on our journey, what has gotten PDF to this point, and what we believe will position us for continued long-term success. During our 30 years, we have been a leader in analytics for semiconductor manufacturing, demonstrating consistent and persistent innovation. We have advanced the application and capabilities of our products and solutions by combining a team with extended longevity and deep knowledge of the company with a continuous addition of new team members that bring unique perspectives. Besides our dedication to manufacturing analytics, Virtually everything else has changed over the years, including our customer base, selling and marketing strategy, and fundamental business model. For many years, our business was defined by the integrated yield ramp, or what we call an IYR. In that business, we accelerate our customer's yield ramp by combining analytics with our characterization systems that provide the missing quality information that enable yield engineers to make the best improvements. By the end of 2014, we realized that drivers of the IYR business, robust geometry scaling, and competitive foundry market were waning. However, we believe that the future drivers for the semiconductor industry would benefit from new applications of our manufacturing analytics. Where the IYR business had a handful of customers and a unique business model, the new opportunities are across the entire industry and affect every aspect of chip manufacturing, not just the foundries ramping new nodes. Today, PDF's customers number over 300. They include equipment companies that use our software to control their tools and communicate data from their tools to the fabs, fabless and system companies that use our systems to qualify new products faster, control yield and drive test quality, and IBMs and foundries that use our software to control their way for fabrication and increasingly package processing. Many of these customers benefit from our cloud offering where the systems are managed by PDF for better availability and performance. The business model, once tied primarily to the ramp up of new nodes, is now primarily subscriptions where customers pay radically for access to, whether to the cloud or on-premise systems. Q4 and 2021 demonstrate the success of the evolution that we have been making over the many years. In particular, analytics is now the vast majority of our revenue. The customer base is much deeper and broader than before. Development and manufacturing of new nodes is still an important part of our business, as evidenced by the new yield ramp and the leading edge analytics engagement signed in the second and third quarters of 2021. However, the majority of our Accenture customers use our analytics platform for products that are built from more mature nodes. Overall for 2021 bookings were up substantially over year over year and grew faster than chip industry revenues. As we increase the value that we deliver to our customers from our cloud deployments and applications of CV and DFI systems for leading edge. Our business with equipment vendors also grew faster than the market as more companies vetted from our advanced control and communications options for symmetric software. The synergy between Symmetrix products and the Accentio platform enables PDF to advance the standards for new kinds of process equipment information and provide new analytics applications. For the fourth quarter, we extended many of the trends we experienced in the previous quarters. Again, Accentio Cloud and on-premise subscriptions were important contributions to our bookings. Symmetrix runtime license activity with our equipment OEMs was also strong as they shipped our software with their tools. In the fourth quarter, we also signed another Quick Start contract with a leading-edge customer, this time to apply our CV systems and design for manufacturability applications. We anticipate the Quick Start to convert to significant business in 2022. During the quarter, we also announced our partnership with Siemens EDA, to link Xcensio with Tessent diagnostic products. Customers on the Xcensio cloud will be able to use Tessent to further their root cause understanding by leveraging the market leading logic and memory diagnostics capabilities from Siemens EDA. Coupled with our partnership with Adventest and Xcensio's new product introduction module, we believe Xcensio customers will be able to bring up their products faster and achieve entitlement yields, which are critical in this supply limited world. Following up on our December announcement, we had our first webinar for the Siemens partnership in January and experienced strong interest from engineers at IBM, Fabulous, and system companies. This builds on our collaboration with IBM for interoperability between SciView and Accentio. Our Advantest, Siemens, and IBM partnerships, as well as our strong partnerships with all of our Symmetrix OEMs, build on the foundation of PDF as an open and collaborative platform for semiconductor industry analytics. They all stem from our core belief that analytics is more valuable to each of our customers when our capability is integrated with the world's semiconductor processing equipment, is available at any manufacturing facility in the world, whether owned by a direct customer or one of their suppliers, and is linked with the other software systems such as EDA and MES. We believe that analytics, besides being useful when there are mountains of data to train algorithms, like in the case for mature nodes, also can aid our customers for new process nodes, new assembly processing, and products for which conventional machine learning techniques are inadequate. As we begin in 2022, the semiconductor environment remains robust, and demand for integrated circuits is broad-based. We anticipate continued demand for our analytics platform, particularly on the cloud, from a broad-based cross-section of customers, including equipment companies, fads, OSATs, fabless, system companies, and tier one auto suppliers. Governments, car makers, and tier one suppliers, and system companies are all realizing the importance of semiconductor supply chain. This is driving interest in PDF's products and services. Given the industry tailwinds I just summarized, we anticipate continued revenue growth. At our 2019 Analyst Day, we set a long-term growth target for analytics at 20% compound annual growth rate, and we have subsequently reconfirmed this. We met this target in 2021, not only for analytics revenue, but for total revenue also. In 2022, we again anticipate overall company revenue to grow above 20%, in part due to strong 2021 bookings, and continued momentum in new bookings. For 2022, we also anticipate lower gainshare levels for the year as we see the full year impact of the gainshare contracts that concluded in the second quarter of 2021. Our confidence in total revenue growth over 20% with full year of gainshare decline implies that we anticipate analytics going meaningfully above our 20% target again. Overall, we expect 2022 to be a year of continued revenue growth. I started off this talk reflecting on the past 30 years and the evolution we have made in our business over the last eight years. I want to take this time to remind our stockholders, employees, contractors, and customers what this experience has reinforced in our culture. We have demonstrated that we are willing and able to reinvent just about every aspect of our company, to make sure PDF solutions can serve our customer needs. While reinventing our business, we remain true to our values, employees, and partners, while respectful to our stockholders. For example, over these last years, we have developed the ability to serve our customers' test floor control, e-beam characterization, equipment data collection, and assembly manufacturing, all while building a SaaS business model from whole cloth. We have accomplished these things by believing in our team while welcoming new teammates and entire companies so we can deliver the solutions our customers need. This was accomplished by anticipating the changes our customers were going to see and make sure we could be there for them in advance of their needs. Executives at our customers tell me that this anticipation and persistent investment for their future needs is one of the key reasons why they select PDF as a critical supplier. Moving forward, we will build on both our ability to sustain our differentiated capabilities while developing and adopting new solutions that will enable us to serve our customers' present and future needs. Finally, I want to thank all of our PDF employees and contractors for their efforts during what has been an exceptional year. We managed to work in tight concert, executing our largest bookings and revenue year in the history of the company. Now we'll turn the call over to Adnan, who will review the finances and provide his perspective on our business.
spk02: Thank you, John. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to speak with you again today, and I hope all of you and your families are well and enjoyed a great football weekend. We're pleased to review the financial results of the full year and the fourth quarter of 2021. We posted our earnings release and a manager report in the investor relations section of our website. Our Form 10-K with final results will be filed with the SEC in early March after review by our auditors. Please note that all of the financial results we discuss in today's call will be on a non-GAAP basis, and a reconciliation to GAAP financials is provided in the materials on our website. As John indicated in his comments, 2021 was a strong year for PDF solutions. We generated record revenue of $111 million versus $88 million in 2020, a 26% year-over-year increase. While 26% year-over-year revenue growth is remarkable in of itself, it is worth noting that the analytics business grew in 2021 at a rate well in excess of that. The growth of analytics more than compensated for the expected decline in IYR revenues, far outgrowing our 20% analytics revenue growth targets. Analytics revenue increased 63% on a year-over-year basis and accounted for 84% of total revenue. Non-GAAP gross margin for the full year was 64%, compared to 63% for the prior year. Earnings per share on a non-GAAP basis came in at 8 cents versus negative 2 cents in 2020, a 10 cent per share profitability improvement. Bookings were up more than 40% compared to full year 2020, and recall that 2020 was a record year for bookings. Our backlog also increased 66% versus last year. The increase in bookings and backlog give us confidence that 2022 will be another strong year for us and sets a meaningful base for total revenue growth into 2022 and beyond. We believe we can continue to grow total company revenue at more than 20% for full year 2022, which means that analytics is expected to grow faster than our long-term target model, just as it did in 2021. For the fourth quarter, total revenue was $29.9 million, up 34% from the comparable quarter last year, and slightly better on a sequential basis from Q3. Analytics revenue was up 88% to $27.3 million versus $14.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, and also slightly better on a sequential basis from Q3 2021. Non-GAAP gross margin for the fourth quarter came in at 65%. Turning back to the full year 2021, I will now provide detailed comments. For the full year, analytics revenue increased 63% to 93.4 million versus 2020. Our transition to become the leading analytics software provider to the global semiconductor supply chain is now taking hold. Analytics is now the dominant component of our overall business. The number of large customers adopting our Accenture platform on the cloud continues to be strong. We look for that trend to continue in 2022. We are also very pleased with the Symmetrix contribution to the analytics results for the year. From a strategic standpoint, Symmetrix has been complementary as we are able to capture more data from the equipment to drive machine learning applications. Notably, our full year 2021 analytics revenue was more than the 2020 total company revenue from just a year ago. For 2021, IYR revenue was $17.6 million, down as expected from $30.8 million in 2020, and represented about 16% of overall revenue. As we expected and mentioned in past earnings calls, in 2021, some of our key IYR contracts came to the end of the gainshare period and contributed to the large year-over-year decrease of IYR revenue from 2020 to 2021, as expected. The focus of our company remains analytics. However, for select engagements where we see possibilities of high margin long-term royalties, we will capture those opportunities for our shareholders via an IYR model to benefit us for many future years. On a non-GAAP basis, gross margin for 2021 increased to 64.4%, up from 63% in 2020, as revenue growth and expense management initiatives throughout the year contributed to the 140 basis point improvement. We're proud that we accomplished this gross margin expansion against the backdrop of the end of high margin gain share revenue. We continue to target a long-term gross margin of 70% as shared during our 2019 analyst day and see a path to achieving it. Bookings for full year 2021 increased more than 40% compared to full year 2020. This is growth on top of the remarkable booking year of 2020 where we had the large $50 million Adventist bookings. Backlog at the end of the year totals $179.5 million, up 66% compared to the prior year. Cost of sales increased 21%, driven by a combination of Symmetrix and our increased cloud expenses to support the growth of our business. SG&A expenses for the year totaled $30.8 million, representing a 17% increase from 2020, with R&D up 30% to $8.7 million. Both primarily driven by the Symmetrix business, which carries high gross margins and therefore carries the majority of costs in operating expenses. For the year, we took a $3.2 million write-down for prior generation older equipment as required by rules for GAAP purposes only. CapEx for the year totals $4.1 million versus $7 million in the prior year. For the year, we generated positive cash flow of $4.2 million as we successfully increased revenues and carefully managed expenses. we are pleased with another year of positive operating cash flow generation consistent with our history. Turning to the balance sheet, we ended the year with cash and equivalents of approximately $140 million compared to $145 million in the prior quarter, and we carry no debt. In terms of major cash uses during the year, we made stock buybacks of approximately $4.5 million, paid for the Symmetrix acquisition, remaining holdback of $3 million, and funded capital expenditures of approximately 4 million. Coming off a robust 2021 performance, we head into 2022 with the business very well positioned for another solid year. As I mentioned earlier, we believe we can grow total revenue in excess of 20% in 2022, even while experiencing a full year of IYR revenue decline, which means that we expect analytics revenue to grow faster than our long-term target model, just as it did in 2021. We have also successfully embedded our Accenture platform into a critical mass of our core customers. We can now seek to manage our resources and cost of sales and shift our spend towards sales and marketing to expand our market footprint, leading to expanding our gross margins. We remain committed to our gross margin goal of 70% and believe we can make consistent incremental progress in the coming quarters and years ahead. With growing revenues, expanding gross margin, and positive operating income contribution margin, we believe we can deliver another profitable year for our shareholders this year. With that, I'll turn the call over to the operator to commence the question and answer session. Operator?
spk04: Thank you, presenters. And at this time, for the participants to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. And if you would like to withdraw a question, you may press the pound key. And we have our first question from Christian Swrob from Craig Halem. Your line is open, sir.
spk07: Hey, guys. This is Tyler. I'm for Christian. Thanks for letting us ask a couple questions. First, I guess a point of clarification, the quick start contract that you signed here in Q4, I just want to make sure that's with the same customer that you booked a couple previous contracts with over the last couple quarters. And then if so, You know, previously you were talking about these being multi-year type contracts. I was wondering if you could maybe frame the magnitude. You know, would you expect this customer to be a 10% customer in 22? You called it significant revenue, but any frame you could put on that would be helpful.
spk09: Yeah, sure. This quick start was a similar size to the previous quick start. The follow-up contract, we expect to be slightly smaller than the last one, but a similar duration. In part, the mix-up. Podware and software elements is a little bit different this time than the previous one. In terms of, we're always very, very careful about talking about customers. So we really won't comment about what specific customers that are there. We do expect that there will be at least one 10% customer for us in 2022.
spk07: That's great. Appreciate the color. And then maybe a little bit of a modeling question. Your OpEx in Q4 was down 1%. um, sequentially 700,000 or so, I think mostly due to selling or SG&A expense being down. As we look to 22, you know, just wondering if you could help us think about OpEx, you know, should that SG&A stay at those similar levels and R&D ramp modestly as we invest for growth or was there any sort of one-time, um, things in Q4 that we should be aware of?
spk02: No, look, I mean, from a operating profit perspective, just like we alluded in our comments, we would expect those margins to expand. I think we also commented that we would manage the cost between our cost of sales and our operating expenses so that we can invest more in the sales and marketing side. Specifically on the total spend, we would expect that to expand less than our total revenue growth rate, thereby increasing the operating margin. On the SCNA and the R&D spend, I think we're feeling comfortable where we are, but we'll continue to work towards expanding the operating margins.
spk07: All right. That's great. I appreciate the color. That's all from me, guys. Thanks.
spk04: Once again, to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. We have our next question from Tom Diffley from DA Davidson. Please go ahead.
spk05: Yes. Good afternoon. Thanks for the question. Adnan, I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of detail on an organic basis for things like bookings or revenue for the year?
spk02: Yeah, I think the color that we're providing is that, you know, look, first of all, growth continues to be strong this year. Obviously, there's an uplift that we had for the Symmetrix acquisitions. Now it carries a full year impact. But even without that, we feel pretty happy about where the Accentio and the rest of the business species growth is coming in. In terms of bookings, I think we made the comment that it is up over 40%. In terms of backlog, we made the comment that it is up over 66%, around 66% for the full year basis. So feeling pretty good about those two aggregate numbers and also within the components of the business. Maybe John can highlight some deals.
spk09: One other point, Tom, I make is recognize that the Symmetrix runtime license is mostly a turns business, right? So it doesn't really impact our bookings much more than the revenue that's there. So, you know, if you kind of take your estimate of, you know, some metrics revenue and subtract that from the bookings, you'd say that, you know, the vast majority of the bookings came from what you would have declared as organic business.
spk05: Okay. That's helpful. Thank you, John. Also, John, when you look at the DFI business on a go-forward basis, is that a business that will be ramping on a quarterly basis? Are you kind of at a set run rate with at least the initial – quick start customer at a current level that should maintain through the year?
spk09: Yeah. You know, besides that customer, we have other activities going on. We do anticipate it ramping through the year. I don't know that linearly through the year, it's kind of lumpy in the way that it would come on. We do expect to ramp it through this year. You know, timing exactly, I would say, you know, between the second and third quarters.
spk05: Okay. And between your traditional customer and it sounds like the two new customers, How many tools do you think you could have in the field by the end of this year?
spk09: Yeah, I don't think we're limited. We'll be limited by our ability at some point to put machines in place. But, you know, our goal would be to have no more than two or three installed in the world by the end of this year.
spk05: Okay. And then finally on the gain share piece, so are you completely done with your older traditional customers and The current gain share is now just relatively new, largely aging customers?
spk09: That's correct. And, you know, as we said in the previous – we said in our prepared marks, right, because we have a full year without the historical contracts, you know, gain share will be down. But as we said in the previous call, on a quarterly basis, This level that we saw in Q3 and Q4 is roughly a floor and expected to slowly build back up.
spk05: Okay. I guess one more question for Adnan quickly. When you look at the DFI expansion, does that change anything in the operating model?
spk02: No. I think you're seeing the benefit of all of the business pieces. Symmetrix has done really well for us. Accenture is growing strong, as well as the leading-edge pieces, which is why you're hearing this optimism in our tone of talking about You know, increased revenue growth in the face of the decline of the IYR impacting on a full-year basis, number one. Number two, you're hearing from us, you know, gross margin, we're starting to feel confident, and then, therefore, that should carry to the operating expenses and operating profit expansion, which is why we're saying another profitable year for this year.
spk05: Great. Well, thank you both for your time today.
spk02: Sure thing.
spk04: Once again, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad. We have our next question from Gus Richard from Northland. Please go ahead.
spk06: Yes, thanks for taking the question. Just curious on the Quick Start contract you signed in the quarter, is there a DFI component of that?
spk09: Yeah, this is for... as we said, for DFM, for foundry phallus interface. So it's really just about software and characterization for design rules, really for design and foundation IP primarily. So it does not include DFIP to it.
spk06: Okay. And so it's CVs and that sort of thing.
spk09: And also, yeah, Accentio and systems, there's a layer of Accentio that pre-analyzes foundation IP and looks for weaknesses in foundation IP and helps the engineers optimize that. So it's all geared around, you know, foundry phallus interface.
spk06: Okay. I understand. And then is, you know, any color on what process node it's for?
spk09: You know, um, Yeah. I don't think that, you know, that that's kind of protected the confidentiality of the customer. So I don't think I can say which note it is. Typically, of course, these things are applied to newer notes.
spk06: Okay. All right. Got it. That's very helpful. And then just, you know, looking at the other end of the process spectrum and, you know, I'm wondering what you're seeing from, you know, trailing edge fabs and their need to improve their productivity and, and throughput in their FABs. Is there anything that, you know, Extensio can do there to help those guys out? And if so, are you seeing any demand?
spk09: Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think not just on the FABs, but on the test floors and test operations. And, you know, we're seeing this across the customer base. So I was on a call probably a month ago with kind of a QB, quarterly technical review with an SVP of one of our customers that does, you know, trailing edge testing. what's considered trailing edge chips or chips that are industrial and automotive and things like that. And they were going over the ways that the Accenture test operations that improved their output on their test floor and what they were able to get out and further deployments and rollouts across more floors and more facilities. We see that on the front end as well, too, with some of the new capabilities that Accenture process control offers for the ability to look for, prevent predictive maintenance issues on equipment and identify when you can continue to run a tool or when you need to be more thoughtful and schedule downtimes. So, yeah, a lot of the Xtensio, as I said in my preparing remarks, the vast majority of the Xtensio usage is trailing edge stuff. We see that quite being a very robust part of the business. Throughout 2021, a lot of the cloud deals were for trailing edge guys. And looking into 2022, we expect that to be the same as well. And so I think, yeah, it's going to be a continued good opportunity to help customers get more productivity out of this app. fabrication assets.
spk06: Okay, and then just the write-down of equipment in the quarter, any more color on what that was?
spk09: Yeah, we had put a number of E-Probe 150s into the field. There were some spare parts and components that we had purchased in part of all of that as those machines We've completed the usage of those machines, the extra components that we had associated with those machines we wrote down.
spk06: Got it. All right. That's it for me. Thanks so much.
spk04: Once again, to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. We have our next question from Andrew Reiner from Sam Joe Capital. Please go ahead.
spk08: Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Adnan, I want to make sure I'm sort of thinking about the math correctly. If I take the back half of 2021 on the IYR business or the legacy business and even assume like a modest, you know, increase from that run rate through the balance of 22, to get to a minimum of 20% growth, it implies a minimum of 30% growth in the analytics business. Does that set you up? I assume I did that math right?
spk01: At the risk of stealing John's comment from a few calls ago, your SAT math scores must be really good.
spk08: And then second, John, I was maybe hoping you could talk about whether or not you started to see any revenue contribution from the Siemens relationship. If not, when you'd expect that and, you know, how, you know, we should think about the size of the opportunities perhaps, you know, or, you know, or whether it's more of a commercial opportunity versus building a moat. If I think about the IBM partnership and the Siemens partnerships.
spk09: Sure. Yeah. So we, when we did the webinar in January, uh, Andrew, we announced that, uh, we were, uh, having early access partners or customers, uh, join Siemens. And, uh, what that means is, uh, They will use the beta version of the product. There is a small charge for that. It's not huge revenue, so we do expect revenue in this year associated with those early access customers. And then what they get beyond access to the software and the ability to use it to debug and bring up their new products, they get some ability to influence the roadmap of the product as we in Siemens finalize the feature set. And then in terms of beyond that, you know, how it generates revenue for us. Siemens EBA's fault diagnostic products are market leaders. And so they have, from what we can tell, the largest share in the market. There is a good overlap of customers, but when we look at the attendees of the webinar, there were a number of companies on that list that were not previously Accenture customers. And then even the companies that were Accenture customers, it was parts of the organization that that historically not been, you know, users of Accenture have been using probably the diagnostic tools. So we do expect it to grow the customer base, both within our existing customers as well as with new customers. And I think the same will be true for Siemens as well. In terms of, you know, why I brought up the comments about IBM and what we heard, if you listen to the questions that we got asked by the engineers on that Siemens webinar call, as well as the comments we get from customers about IBM and some of the other software systems that we look to partner with. Customers that are used to working on their phone and working on the cloud just expect apps to work with each other. The old-fashioned days of, okay, now I've got to go do all of my own work to integrate software systems together to make them work is kind of a wave of the past. It's not what people... expect. It's what still goes on greatly in companies, but it's not what people expect. So many of the questions we got asked on the Siemens call were, wow, does this really just work out of the box? Can I just circle those dots on the Accentio graphics and automatically fire off a test and job? And then when I look at the results back in Accentio, can I just click and see automatically the snippets of the design where the fault might be? And that's all handled in the background by the software and pre-integrated. We did the same thing with the way we integrated IBM's side view with Accentio so that the engineers can pass data back and forth without having to do any direct connection, themselves do their own configuration. And the more and more we move Accentio and our partners to the cloud, the more we can make those integrations work out of the box for our customers. And that's really a big part of the collaboration that we're doing with Siemens, with IBM, and with others.
spk08: So along those lines, John, we've talked a lot about in the past the importance you've view of building, you know, partnerships, sort of an ecosystem. What are the, what potential holes would you, you know, from a partnership perspective, would you like to be able or look to fill in 2022? Yeah.
spk09: Well, I don't want to blow any thunder on that stuff. One of the things that we'd like to be able to announce them with some excitement when we announce them, Andrew, but I can say this, if you just, Think about the way companies work. Obviously, and as Gus's questions alluded to, there's a lot of issues about understanding my supply chain, where my parts are, what's going on, what's my prediction? If my yield dropped, what does that mean downstream? Am I going to have a problem making unit shipments? If a test floor is bottlenecked, what is the implication of that? If I add more testers, will that get me more capacity out? Will I be able to ship significantly more units? So there's a lot that customers want to be able to do to combine engineering from a semiconductor engineering with what we would have called industrial engineering or operations research. So there's a lot of activities there. That then touches what you want to do in finance. As you look at product bring-up and product diagnostics, there's a lot to do there too. Most customers redesign products with lots of reused IP. When you have a challenge on one product, you'd like to understand what the impact is across a wide variety of things. So all the ways of being able to answer questions much more quickly. You can think of it as like when I was a kid and I wanted to know something, I had to nag my parents to take me to the library so I could go look stuff up. My kid just takes out his phone at dinner and looks at Google and searches up stuff. We had a debate if cilantro and cumin were really, cilantro and, no, I'm sorry, coriander and cilantro were the same thing, and he just looked it up on his phone. I would have to go to the library for that as a kid. So those same kinds of questions that our customers want to be able to ask, whether they have a financial implication, an industrial engineering implication, a product design implication, or chip manufacturing, we want them to be able to answer those questions without having to go and wrangle lots of data.
spk08: Okay. And as you build this out, I mean, is that tied to the deployments of the DEX networks?
spk09: Of course. Yeah. Right on. Because you want to then say, okay, well, where do I have equipment that this would be exposed to or I want to change my screening criteria. You've got to take action. To take action in our world means changing what goes on in equipment. It's not enough just to know it's different. You've got to do something about it. So Dexone is an important part of that. But that's why, you know, overall we see the platform as this platform for the industry, for the industry to collaborate, like we're having Adventest collaborate with its customers, and in a way that lets people cross kind of operational boundaries so you can get the most productive results capacity in the world, and that gets at Gus's questions around, you know, in this environment, how do I get more chips out, which many of our customers ask us all the time.
spk08: Great. Thank you.
spk04: Once again, if you would like to ask a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad. There are no further questions at this time. I will turn the call over back to Mr. Kibarian for closing remarks.
spk09: Thank you for participating in our Q4 call. We look forward to talking with you again soon. Have a great day.
spk04: Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's presentation. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.
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