Ultra Clean Holdings, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the ultra clean first quarter 2023 earnings call and webcast. All participants will be in listen only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on a touch tone phone. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rhonda Bonetto, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today are Jim Schollhammer, Chief Executive Officer, and Sherry Savage, Chief Financial Officer. Jim will begin with some prepared remarks about the business, and Sherry will follow with the financial review, then we'll open up the call for questions. Today's call contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. For more information, please refer to the risk factors section in our SEC filings. All forward-looking statements are based on estimates, projections, and assumptions as of today, and we assume no obligation to update them after this call. Discussions of our financial results will be presented on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP can be found in today's press release posted on our website. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to Jim. Jim?

Thank you, Rhonda. And good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter 2023 conference call and webcast. I'll start with a high-level overview of the first quarter that Sherry will expand on in our comments and follow that with the steps we are taking to manage through this downturn and conclude with our view on the longer-term prospects of our industry. As expected, industry demand remained under pressure in the first quarter as OEM customers continue to cancel or push out orders against a backdrop of inventory surplus and ongoing geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty. End market demand remains weak. Therefore, UCT's revenue is likely to remain constrained in this environment. Pulling from our playbook from the last downturn, we are focused on aligning our operational efficiencies and cost structure with the prevailing business environment. Our objective is twofold, to mitigate the impact of the downturn as much as possible and prepare to outperform the market again during the next expansion phase. While we are slowing down some of our global capacity expansions in both products and services to align with our customers' roadmaps, we are moving some projects forward to be ready for the inevitable ramp in volume that follows every semiconductor downturn. We saw growth in our fluid solutions business in the first quarter and continue to expand production in our Malaysia plant, which will improve our profitability and deliver performance down the road. In the services business, we are developing higher-value solutions, such as special yield-enhancing part coatings and cleaning methods to support ongoing node transitions. We are one of the few large, purely semiconductor-focused manufacturers with the proven ability to support the dynamic product demand and stringent quality levels required for advanced chip manufacturing. We are extremely confident about the industry's upward trajectory over the long term, driven by emerging key sectors such as automotive and industrial automation, high-performance computing, and especially for artificial intelligence and machine learning. To add some perspective, today's average electric car has doubled the chips of a non-electric vehicle. Even more impressive is the phenomenal growth of Microsoft's AI Chat GPT, which requires massive amounts of memory and data processing chip technology. When launched last November, it attracted one million registered users in just five days, and only two months later, it had registered more than 100 million users. It is by far the fastest-growing chip-dependent consumer application in history. Leading-edge technologies like this are in the very early stages of widespread deployment and have only touched on the exponential growth in commercial use cases, which should drive the semi-industry towards the trillion-dollar mark this decade. While it feels like we are in the doldrums at the moment, we believe it is temporary and we couldn't be more excited about the future. UCT has been enabling technology and supporting the lifecycle of chip manufacturing for over 30 years. We indirectly touch nearly every chip on the planet and are ideally positioned with the expertise and capacity to fully capitalize on opportunities during the next upturn. I would like to thank our employees and our shareholders for their continued support through all our phases, and I look forward to updating you on our next call. With that, I'll turn the call over to Sherry.