ASE Technology Holding Co., Ltd.

Hello, I am Ken Shum, the Head of Investor Relations for ASE Technology Holdings. Welcome to our second quarter 2021 earnings release. Thank you for attending our earnings presentation today. Please refer to our safe harbor notice on page two. All participants consent to having their voices and questions broadcast via participation in this event. If participants do not consent, please disconnect at this time. I would like to remind everyone that the presentation that follows may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to a high degree of risk and our actual results may differ materially. For the purposes of this presentation, our dollar figures are generally stated in new Taiwan dollars unless otherwise indicated. As a Taiwan-based company, our financials are presented in accordance with Taiwan IFRS. Results presented using Taiwan IFRS may differ materially from results using other accounting standards, including those presented by our subsidiary using Chinese GAAP. I'm joined today by Dr. Tian Wu, our COO, and Joseph Tang, our CFO. For today's call, Dr. Tian Wu will first give a mid-year update. I will then be going over our financial results. Joseph and Tian will then be available to answer questions during the Q&A section. I would like to now hand the floor over to Dr. Tian Wu. Thank you, Ken.

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining our conference call. 2021 has been an exciting year for all of us. I wish everyone safe and well. For today's conference call, I would like to give you a brief report on two items. First, I would like to give you a business update, including the second quarter and the first half achievement. Then the third quarter and the second half outlook, which will touch on business sentiment towards 2022. Second, business outlook, short term and long term. In the past weeks, there has been reports from several key customers and key partners with some conflicting signals, possibly some speculation about the current state of business and the landscape. I would like to give you ASC's perspective so you have another angle in solving the puzzle. To begin with, I would like to give you our business update. Our second quarter 21 and the first half 21 revenue and margin are both on track. Second quarter 21 ATM revenue grew 8% quarter over quarter in U.S. dollar terms. First half 21 ATM revenue grew 20% year over year. If you exclude the EAR affected revenue, it will be 48% year over year. First half 21 test revenue recovered ahead of schedule. First half 21 revenue grew 54% year over year if we exclude the EAR affected business. So starting from third quarter, we will see assembly and test business both grow. Second quarter 21, whole coal revenue grew 77% quarter over quarter. First half 21, whole coal revenue grew 28% year over year. First half 21, whole coal operating margin improved 2.7 percentage points year over year. Let me talk about the second half 21. We expect third quarter and fourth quarter, quarter-to-quarter revenue and margin improvement, as we have previously indicated. We're seeing very strong ATM demand than our previous target. Our last guidance, we estimated Semiton Doctor will grow 10%, and we will do better than twice of that. Right now, our sentiment is better than our previous guidance. The momentum, will last into 2022. First half 21 ATM gross margin at full year target of 25%. In other words, we have achieved a full year target in the first half. Therefore, we do expect further gross margin expansion in second half Q3 and Q4. Local 2021 operating margin target should exceed or at a high end target of 2.5 to 3% as we previously guided. Let me turn to the business outlook. I will first talk about the short term. Demands indicating a strong 2022 with another better than seasonal first quarter. As you know, First quarter of 2021 has been stronger than all of our expectation. We're looking forward to another strong Q1 in 2022. Many of the customer are extending the long-term service agreement beyond 2022 into 2023. Let me comment on the expansion, which has been, many people ask about it. The capacity expansion needs to consider holistic and balanced supply continuity across the complete material, equipment, and process ecosystem. Our estimate, the earliest balance of demand and supply will be sometime in 2023. In other words, in 2022, we still need to be very smart and be very efficient in managing the bottlenecks. Next people ask about a double booking. And inventory control, which may exist. However, that in fact should be localized and temporal. with the overall demand profile with very little impact to the overall business momentum, at least from ASE's OSAP perspective. Next page, I would like to comment on the business outlook longer term. What I'm trying to do here is to share with you ASE's perspective and maybe ASE's OSAP perspective on longer term outlook. On this page, I have a diagram of a pyramid. What I'm trying to do is to illustrate a conceptual concept about the current state of semiconductor business. As you know, semiconductor business mainly driven by innovation. If you imagine innovation is driven by technology, which is at the tip of the pyramid, As the innovation becomes more pervasive, the pyramid becomes taller. In order to support a bigger and taller pyramid, the length, the width, the height, all need to increase proportionally. This is not the exact mathematical description of our ecosystem. However, conceptually, you can see that. What we're seeing today is we have two driving forces. So let me comment on each one of them. The first one is what industry already for the longest time, including 5G, AI, EV, IoT, smart manufacturing, and all et cetera. Now, for this type of innovation to be pervasive in scale, you need to develop a new infrastructure, which will incur instigated new demand for system and therefore demand for all semiconductor devices. However, in the last two years, unexpectedly, we had a COVID-19 impact. What the COVID-19 did is actually similar to this, It's not a new innovation. However, it put a step function or a sudden increase of demand on the existing systems without asking for any new infrastructure. The industry is very used to building a capacity at a slower pace while we're developing infrastructure, we're also cranking up new systems. But the COVID-19 effect is leveraging on the existing infrastructure, the only demand for a large quantity of new systems. So the industry is caught off guard. And this is what we're talking about now. The COVID-19 impact can be two years, can be five years. We actually do not know how long that will last. What we do know is we are in a short, Therefore, the industry react accordingly by building up wafer capacity. We're also building up the assembly and test capacity. The whole supply chains are building all of the capacity accordingly. The comment I would like to make here is this is a great incentive for the industry to start developing a manufacturing infrastructure because even if the COVID-19 impact dissipates, the next two to five years the new wave of innovation which will be a much much longer lasting impact to the industry signified by 5g ai ev iot smart manufacturing we are seeing a huge demand on the iot devices for example on the electric vehicle on the autonomous driving all of this new paradigm will require new infrastructure and a brand new system. So our perspective is semiconductor is very healthy. Short term, we have a great incentive to build our capacity to accommodate the system requirement by the COVID-19, while we are building up the needed capacity to accommodate the future increase of demand driven by the new paradigm shift. So going to the next page, let me talk about the other three tailwinds from our perspective. The first is consolidation. What the supply chain constraint has done for the industry is forcing everyone, our customer, our customer's customer, to accept more standard, flexible, and secure supply alternative. This is great for open platform service providers like Foundry and OSAT. In other words, what used to be proprietary now are being forced to accept the open platform alternative long-term. This is the thesis why OSAT and Foundry will be gaining more share and consolidation over proprietary suppliers. Let me talk about the third tailwind, Taiwan cluster. Taiwan cluster efficiency, economy scales, and supply chain flexibility has been known. What we're seeing for the last few years is Taiwan cluster has been investing capex in a very, very heavy way, including ASE. As a matter of fact, ASC spill merger and synergy is another example of the Taiwan cluster efficiency. So with efficiency in hand, with additional CapEx invested, with more customers choosing Taiwan sector as their preferred choices, this is forming a positive or a virtual cycle. Let me talk about the last tailwind, which is ASE HOCO. ASE holding company today has demonstrated a clear leadership in scale, market share, margin, efficiency. We have a very clear view about how the new wave 5G autonomous driving, smart manufacturing will demand heterogeneous integration, including silicon-silicon and silicon with non-silicon sensors. We have a very clear view about the future AI, big data driven, high quality and tracking manufacturing, which is done by the automation. We are today a de facto choice and indispensable manufacturing partner for the semiconductor ecosystem. With that, I thank you for listening. I will turn the floor back to Ken. Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Wu. I will now go more in depth into our financial results. First off, I would like to clean up an order of business that needs a bit of explanation for the sake of reporting transparency. As you all know, our subsidiary, U.S.I., completed its acquisition of the Steel Flash in 2000 of 2020. Given the complexities of the purchase price allocation process, or PPA, IFRS generally allows companies up to a year to complete this valuation process. After the valuation is completed, a retroactive adjustment is usually made. A steel flashes purchase price allocation was completed during the 2nd quarter accordingly. We have retroactively adjusted our balance sheet by 0.4Billion dollars representing 0.1% of our total assets as of the 1st quarter. On our P&L, the purchase price allocation results in incremental expenses booked into the first quarter, totaling $88.5 million or 2 cents per share. First quarter consolidated holding company reported gross margin has been reduced by 0.1 percentage points, while operating margin has been reduced by 0.2 percentage points. For the 2nd and future quarters, PPA impact to net income will be approximately 37M dollars per quarter impacts to future gross and operating margin will of course, depend on future revenues. But in the current period, such impact is considered negligible at less than 0.1%. This amount will be added to our quarterly adjustment. Please turn to page 7, where you will find our 2nd quarter consolidated results intercompany transactions between our ATM and businesses have been eliminated during consolidation for the 2nd quarter. We recorded fully diluted of 2 dollars, 30 cents and basic of 2 dollars, 40 cents. Consolidated net revenue increased by 6% quarter over quarter and by 18% year over year. This sequential increase was primarily driven by our ATM business. We had a gross profit of $24.8 billion with a gross margin of 19.5%. Our gross margin improved by 1.2 percentage points sequentially and 2 percentage points year over year. Both margin improvements are principally the result of higher ATM business mix offset in part by NT dollar appreciation. And T dollar appreciation had a negative 0.3 percentage point impact to sequential gross margin and a negative 2.1 percentage point impact to year over year gross margin. Our operating expenses increased by 0.6Billion dollars to 11.6Billion sequentially. Our operating expense percentage sequentially stayed flat at 9.2% and declined 0.5 percentage points year over year. For the year, we are now expecting to see an improvement from rather than targeting to maintain at last year's 9% level. Operating margin increased 1.3 percentage points sequentially and 2.6 percentage points year over year to 10.4%. During the quarter, we had a net non operating gain of 0.2Billion dollars. This amount primarily consists of gains related to our foreign exchange hedging activities, investments and asset sales offset in part by net interest expense of 0.6Billion dollars. Tax expense for the quarter was 2.6Billion dollars. The effective tax rate for the second quarter was 20%. For the third quarter, we expect to record our annual undistributed earnings tax for modeling purposes. Please use an effective tax rate of 21% for the third quarter to account for such tax impact. net income for the quarter was ten point three billion dollars representing an increase of one point nine billion dollars sequentially and an improvement of three point four billion dollars year over year On the bottom of the page, we provide key P&L line items without the inclusion of PPA-related expenses. Consolidated gross profit excluding PPA expenses would be $25.7 billion with a 20.3% gross margin. Operating profit would be $14.4 billion with an operating margin of 11.3%. net profit would be 11.5 billion dollars with a net margin of nine point one percent basic eps excluding ppa expenses would be two dollars sixty seven cents on page eight is our atm p l it's worth noting here that the atm revenue reported here contains Revenue eliminated at the holding company level related to intercompany transactions between our ATM and businesses as Dr, who indicated our ATM business looks very healthy for this year and heading into 2022. For the second quarter of 2021, revenues for our ATM business were $79 billion, up $5.2 billion from the previous quarter and up $9.5 billion from the same period last year. This represents a 7% increase sequentially and a 14% increase year over year. Our ATM revenues came in ahead of our expectations. On a US dollar basis, our ATM revenues grew by 8% sequentially. Gross profit margin for our ATM business was 25.6%, up 1.2 percentage points sequentially, and 3.9 percentage points year over year. Our sequential gross margin improvement was primarily due to higher loading. The year over year gross margin improvement was primarily the result of higher loading, improved efficiency, product mix, and a friendlier ASP environment. ATM gross margin improvement was accomplished despite NT dollar appreciation having a negative 0.5 percentage point impact quarter over quarter and a 3 percentage point impact year over year. We expect to be able to deliver quarter on quarter improvement in ATM gross margins in the last half of the year, even with ATM gross margin for the first half of the year already reaching our 25% full year target. During the second quarter operating expenses were eight point four billion dollars zero point three billion dollars sequentially and zero point five billion dollars year over year. The sequential and annual operating expense increase was primarily driven by increased employee bonus accruals, which are based on a profit sharing model. Our operating expense percentage was 10.6% down 0.4 percentage points sequentially and down 0.7 percentage points year over year. operating margin was 15% improving 1.6 percentage points sequentially and 4.6 percentage points year over year. The strengthening NT dollar had a negative 0.5 percentage point impact quarter over quarter and 3 percentage point impact year over year to our operating margins. Without the impact of PPA related depreciation and amortization, ATM gross profit margin would be 26.7% and operating profit margin would be 16.4%. On page 9, you'll find a graphical representation of our ATM P&L. When we see our ATM gross margins here almost linearizing and hitting historical highs, I think it's fair to mention that we do not believe that our business is immune to future cyclicality inherent to electronics. But we do believe that having the scale synergies and the benefits of the 4 tail winds, as mentioned by Dr, we will be in position to achieve margins with gradually higher peaks. And shallower troughs on page 10 is our revenue by market segment. You can see here a decline in our communications market segment with share picked up by our automotive consumer and other products. Meanwhile, our computing segment has held roughly steady since 2020. Again, from what we can see here, our near-term performance has not been driven by communications-related devices. And more importantly, with such a decline in our communications segment, it would seem that speculated widespread overproduction of communications-related components to be somewhat less likely. Our near term performance has been driven primarily by growing consumer and general semiconductor expansion. This supports Dr. Wu's earlier statement that new technology and products create an expansion of more basic supporting devices. On page 11, you will find our ATM revenue by service type. There's generally too much noise and trying to understand each quarters individual movement here. However, when the chart is taken as a whole, it tells a more complete story. You can see here the gradual improvement and underlying strength of our wire bond related business. Meanwhile, services for advanced products have seen a gradual decline. Some of which has to do with the impact of the U. S. We do, however, believe that our advanced services will start a rebound in the back half of this year. On page 12, you can see the results of our EMS business and a graphical representation of our EMS revenue by application. The information we provide in regards to our EMS business may differ materially from the information directly provided by our subsidiary as they report independently using Chinese GAAP. As mentioned earlier, the 1st quarter have been retroactively adjusted for costs. Our 2nd quarter revenue usually represents the end of our seasonal trough. However, what is more unusual this year is that many of our customers are experiencing the impact of component shortages in the 2nd quarter. This is the main reason why we saw our revenues fall slightly short of our initial expectations. However, we do believe that the majority of this revenue shortfall gets pushed out into the 3rd quarter. The 2nd quarter expenses for EMS business tends to be characterized by training investment in preparation. readying our factory lines for the third and fourth quarters when things get up to full mass production speed. As is oftentimes the case, it's the quarter that requires spending of a more spontaneous nature for upcoming product ramps. This is especially true this year when we have two new factory locations ramping up during COVID spread. As such, We have incurred extra operating costs related to R&D, logistics, and factory startup costs in the second quarter to set the stage for second half growth. During the second quarter, EMS revenues increased by 3% sequentially and 24% year over year. Our EMS gross profit was $4.5 billion, increasing $0.5 billion sequentially and $0.8 billion year over year. The higher sequential and year over year EMS gross profit was the result of product mix. Gross profit margin for EMS business unit came in at 9.1%, which is an improvement of 0.7 percentage points sequentially and a decline of 0.3 percentage points year over year. The sequential improvement is primarily the result of cost differences from differing product mix. The annual decline in gross margin is primarily due to higher operating overhead. Our EMS business unit's second quarter operating expenses were $3.2 billion, increasing $0.4 billion sequentially, while increasing $0.7 billion year over year. Sequential operating expenses were primarily up as a result of increased R and D and factory startup costs. Annual operating expenses are up primarily as a result of a larger operating base. Our operating expense percentage increased 0.6 percentage points sequentially to 6.5% while increasing 0.2 percentage points year over year. The sequential operating expense percentage increase is primarily driven by higher R&D in factory startup costs. We expect our operating expense percentage to temper down during the back half of the year as our mass production revenues ramp up during our typically seasonal upcycle. Our EMS business has had a more challenging start this year as a result of worsening COVID operating conditions and component shortages. Quite simply, the underlying conditions have changed and it's now more difficult and expensive to run than expected. We do not see the component shortages or extra costs subsiding in the near term. Therefore, our target of a 4% operating margin for our EMS business has become more of a challenging one. On the bottom half of the page, you will find a graphical representation of our EMS revenue by application. The second quarter change here with consumer products declining 5% is seasonally driven while the increase in the industrial segment is more brought about by industrial products picking up after a year of COVID softness. On page 13, you will find key line items from our balance sheet. The only things we would like to add here are that our total unused credit lines amounted to 276.4Billion dollars and our net debt. To equity ratio dropped to 60%. On page 14, you will find our equipment capital expenditures amounts on this slide are denoted and us dollars. Machinery and equipment capital expenditures for the second quarter totaled $611 million, of which $450 million were used in packaging, $116 million in testing, $39 million in EMS operations, and $6 million in interconnect materials and others. As of the end of the second quarter, we are still running in a capacity constrained environment. And at this time, we continue to see our capital expenditures up from 10 to 15% from last year, although more on the higher end of this range. However, this year's capital expenditure timing may be more volatile than previous years. The timing of equipment may defer or accelerate. With that, we would like to provide our third quarter business outlook as follows. In US dollar terms, ATM third quarter 2021 volume is to increase 12% with ASB holding stable versus second quarter 2021 levels. ATM third quarter 2021 gross margins sequential improvement should be similar with the sequential improvement in the second quarter of 2021. For EMS business and U.S. dollar terms, EMS third quarter 2021 business level should be slightly higher than the average level of the third and fourth quarter in 2020. EMS third quarter 2021 operating margin should be around our targeted 2021 full year operating margin. With that, I'd like to open the floor for questions. We're doing it slightly differently this go round. We have people scattered throughout different rooms and such. When we get the question, I will repeat the question and then I would direct it over to Joseph and Tian. So, question please.

Our first question is from Mr. Goku Hariharan of JP Morgan. Goku?

Yeah, thanks for taking my question. My first question is on what Dr. Wu mentioned in terms of Demand supply balance coming in 2023. Could you talk a little bit about what you expect pricing trends, margin trends to be next year? Looks like you're still going to be in a similar situation as 2021. So how should we think about this? Secondly, could you also talk a little bit about how book-to-bill is looking as we head into early 2022? You talked about Q1 being better than seasonal and you did allude to double booking, which is a very big topic for investor focus. How do you estimate double booking within your order book and how does that affect your book-to-bill when you think about next year demand supply? That's my first question.

Okay, Goku, I have here that you were asking about pricing contacts for next year and also a outlook for 2022. And then somehow circle back over to concepts of double booking. Generally, we're trying to keep the number of questions for two questions per go round. So let's go with the first two, the pricing and the outlook for 2022.

All right, so our first priority is to make customer delivery and fulfillment. And we have been very efficiently handling all of the customer requirements throughout 2020 and 2021. We will continue to do that. Now, occasionally we'll get into a situation where we need to make pricing adjustment, either the higher material cost or the expedite fee. I believe for the second half of 2021, as well as the whole year of 2022, we will continue the current trend. It is very difficult to give you a quantitative estimate for what the pricing is because this is very dynamic. A further priority is to make expedite delivery. However, the pricing environment remains to be very friendly. The second question about the overbooking, we have seen some customers making adjustments. We have also seen some equipment delivery were making a timing adjustment. However, that might not be completed due to the business slowdown. I mentioned about a supply chain. continuity. Sometimes there's a BGA substrate shortage, sometimes there's a leaf frame shortage. It makes no point to have over capacity on one equipment or process while at the same time you do not have the materials. So the comment that I made in 2023 sometimes we will see a more of a holistic and balanced capacity supply demand balance, but definitely will not be in 2022. And hopefully in 2023, we will have an easier time to execute the customer delivery. Thank you.

Got it. Just one clarification. So on the guidance for this year, I think it sounded like you are looking at 20 plus percent growth for ICATM on a USD basis. Just wanted to clarify if I got that right. That's correct. Okay. Thank you. I'll queue back up. Thank you.

But I do want to mention that, you know, this is on top of the recovery of our. Effective business about the U. S. E. A. R. So, as, uh, as, uh. I will mention in his presentation, you know, if we exclude that part of the business. From the equation, our actual 1st half. The overall ATM growth was 48%. And also in the, uh, in terms of tests. not only that we are ahead of our schedule and making a full recovery in the first half rather than the later part of the year, also if again excluding the EAR affected business, the actual growth is about 54%. So we're seeing a very, very strong growth momentum in terms of our ATM business at this point. And it seems that it's gonna also leading to 2022.

Next question.

Next question is from Mr. Randy Abrahams of Freddie Swiss. Randy?

Okay. Yes, thank you. Okay, I'm on the phone line. Hopefully you can hear me. Yeah, the first question, back to the comment about the tightness until 2023, how do you see, I'm just curious, the supply side, we've seen pretty heavy industry bookings for equipment, and lead times are stretched out, but I assume those equipment would get delivered in the next year. So I'm curious, one, on the supply side, how you're viewing it, if you think that bottleneck on the back-end equipment, gets resolved moving through next year. And then from the demand side, how are you factoring parts of the environment? There's the fear about some of the COVID-related consumer PC, home electronics coming off a high base. So I'm just curious what you're reflecting for next year, if those factors ease the supply or what gives the comfort of tightness continuing to 2023.

So Randy, you're looking for a question regarding the situation or the relating to back end equipment tightness and also looking for an impact on next year's overall market demand and whether we see changes in overall market demand structure.

Okay, yeah, just to give the confidence for tightness all the way to 23. well, let me talk about the machine delivery.

I think the machine delivery lead time right now is as bad. As our last conference call, it's not improved. The lead time is stretching. And I believe the lead time will start to improve, not this year, sometime in 2022, we might see the lead time becomes better. But once the lead time gets better, you still need to have a balanced capacity expansion. Right I talk about the material process and everything surrounding that. So, I believe the reasonable capacity build up. Uh, will be some time throughout between. 6 months ago all the way this year as well as next year. And I believe in 2023, we will probably see more of a balanced profile. okay the second comment is a little bit more difficult to answer the demands now we have seen some adjustments uh for example some sector the customers are making some the uh push out in delivery however because of the over demand on the overall situation it is very easy for ase on the assembly and test side to switch the necessary equipment into the other application, which is clearly a very, very strong demand. Our wafer bank whips stood very high. So right now we're not, terribly concerned about some of the inventory correction due to whatever reasons. But I think each end customer will have their unique reasons why they are making some local adjustment. Right now, actually, the local adjustment is kind of welcome because now our delivery situation has been in this tight spot, which is really not healthy mentally for everybody. So I think the demand will continue to be strong second half. It will be strong for the 2022. I talk about the pyramid. I struggled for a long time. How do we really conceptually articulate what is going on right now? COVID-19, without asking for any new infrastructure, they just have a sudden increase of systems. And therefore, all devices are short. This is the problem we're addressing. When people are talking about the COVID-19 impact will dissipate, we don't see that. Of course, we do understand sooner or later this will disappear. However, you have the following multiple waves of AI, IoT, smart manufacturing that we're aggressively building up the infrastructure, which will, in turn, uh require a lot of new system which demands semiconductor devices all levels so i think industry will be in short and this is a comment that the foundry guys are making i mean the 2021 2022 29 new facts are being deployed everybody sees this but the industry has no incentives to build the manufacturing infrastructure ahead of the curve. This is standard practice. The COVID-19 gives you a very good short-term incentive, even though we do not know this impact will be three years, four years, or two years. However, we have enough belief and vision that all of the capacity will be needed and will be good for the world. And this is what our view is.

Next question, please. Okay, no, great. In the second question, okay, yeah, in the second question, and one clarification to the first is the local adjustments, if you think those are all driven by the constraints up and down the chain, or are you seeing any pockets of application weakness. That's kind of just a clarification. And then my second question, just on the guidance, I know you mentioned the first quarter above seasonal. For fourth quarter, you're coming off above seasonal third quarter. Do you expect to grow in the ICATM in fourth quarter? And then the other part on pricing being stable, I know you talked about there's expedites and a friendly environment. So I'm curious, given we're in the peak season, what's kind of keeping price stable or why you're not seeing a little bit of a sequential improvement on pricing?

Randy, so you're looking for a fourth quarter, somewhat of a fourth quarter outlook and also a pricing environment commentary for the rest of the year.

Okay, I think the first comment is we're seeing some local adjustment. And we do not know the reason why there are local adjustments. It could be business related. It could be a component shortage related. However, those are very localized and temporal. We're seeing the adjustment down and adjustment up right away. So at this point in time, I think the best comment we can give to you is it does not affect the overall business momentum. At least this is what we can see now. The comment on the Q3 to Q4, yes, we are expecting Q3 growth. We're expecting Q4 growth, just like last year. The comment about Q1 of 2022, of course, I'm hoping to see another record that Q1 is better than Q4 of the previous year. However, I'm not going to say that right now, but this is what I'm hoping for. And I believe if we have a clear, a good optimistic Q1 in 2022, that momentum will carry throughout the 2022. And this is our current view. And then we'll deal with 2023 at a later date.

I think on the also, if this is Joseph here, I'd say also on the margin side, we will see sequential growth on a quality basis for the second half of the year as well as we continue to see volume expansion as well as continuous effort in efficiency improvement, including our automation that is being aggressively brought online. And for next year, we're still seeing, you know, there's also room for improvement further in terms of margin. And we're seeing a very, very healthy development in our overall financial performance going forward.

I mean, there's one comment. I will not talk about the overall pricing comparison. However, pricing is given by the market. I mean, it's not defined by any individual supplier. Under a constant pricing profile, if you make that assumption. Then you look at the margin improvement quarter to quarter. And we are doing a detailed analysis based on the last eight quarters. How much efficiency improvement is from synergy? How much efficiency improvement is from the automation? All of this number will add up to the confidence. When we said that in 2022 and maybe in the future, Kenshan made a comment. Now we are looking for a more solid baseline going forward. Thank you.

All right, the next question. Okay, thank you.

Our next question is from Mr. Bruce Lu of Goldman Sachs. Bruce?

Hello, can you hear me?

Yeah. Yes.

Okay, thank you for the great result. My question is regarding to your long-term contract agreement. As I know that you're big in business, it's actually very complicated. You have wire bound, you have different kind of wire bound, you have, you know, free chips. How does that work for your long-term contract? How much of your capacity is secured by this long-term contract?

So your first question relates to the character of our long-term contracts.

Yes. Help me to understand.

Well, I think the comment I can give it to you is that we have a large majority of customers covered by the service contract. I don't think I can give you anything more specific. I mean, a very, very large percentage.

I mean, this contract is actually secure in most of their capacity or only for the incremental capacity?

for all of the capacity, not incremental. And also, I think the comment, and I keep referring to it, you have to look at when people secure assembly capacity, whatever that is, there is intrinsic, inherent assumption that assembly capacity will have the needed leaf frame, molding compound, substrate, and all of the processing materials to go with it. That today is a big assumption. So the long-term service contract not only secures the assembly capacity, it also support the customer as well as ASE, as well as our supplier partner to secure the needed overall balanced supply continuity. beyond 2021 into 2022 and 2023. And this is a part of the overall efficiency and flexibility management I was referring to. If you're really asking for the real or the effective competitiveness You have to look beyond the assembly and test per se. You should look at the overall supply from wafer materials, the whole nine yard. And this is what we're seeing. We're seeing the campaign between the open platform service provider versus proprietary. We're seeing the regional competition and we're seeing the ASC competition against our peer. But if you follow the same analogy, you will be able to understand the number and the meaning behind it. That's what I was referring to.

I see. Do you believe that your competitor also has secured a reasonable long-term contract? Or is it pretty much the supplier who can ensure this kind of long-term contract?

I don't know the answer, but as a good competitor, I have to assume they do.

Or on the other hand, you know, how much your customers, you know, their demand is fully secured by this long-term contract.

I think the customers, the motivation can be best illustrated by the long-term service agreement. as well as all of the future technology development. If you are the de facto choice by the customer, not only you will have the short-term, long-term loading, you will also have all of the future pipelines. when we make statement about de facto versus our key customer uh or you know whether i see system uh or automotive you know i'm actually referring to the existing loading as well as the future pipeline and everything that i just talked about it you know the all-inclusive i see

Okay, so my next question is for Joseph. I mean, for the growth margin for ATM, you know, again, thanks, you know, congrats for the great result, but I'm a little bit greedy that a lot of the semiconductor companies already posted that, you know, historical high growth margin. And, you know, when do you expect you exceed your, you know, historical high growth margin as a consolidated basis?

Well, if we... Well, no, if you use the performa basis, you know, if you, you know, add spills or gross margin in aggregate, not yet. No, that's what I'm saying. Even including spills on a combined basis, we have already passed the... If we add back the FX fluctuation as well as the PVA that we have to bear, we already passed our historical peak.

So how do we... If you already surpassed that, how do we know what is the new norm for the gross margin? How do we... Because... how do we see the value proposition increase and to fully reflect to your gross margin?

In fact, you know, if I may, I'm even more greedy than you are. I mean, on a nominal basis, if I don't count the effects, if I don't count the PBA, I'm still heading to reaching the historical peak on an annual basis. We have reached, back in 2014, our highest gross margin was about 27%. And, you know, on a quarterly basis, I think in the second half, we will be passing that. And I'm pretty confident that next year, on an annualized basis, that historical record will be broken.

Okay, thank you.

Next question, please.

Next question is from Mr. Rick Hsu of Daiwa Securities. Rick?

Can you guys hear me?

Yes, we can hear you.

Go ahead. Okay, great. Yeah, just two little questions. The first one is the housekeeping question for Joseph. So what's your utilization raised across the board for wide-bound for achievement testing in Q2 and was it all in Q3?

In Q2, in terms of assembly, we're about 85%, and for test, it's close to 80%. In third quarter, I think assembly-wise, we will be over 85 for assembly and over 80 for tests. As we mentioned, we're running relatively on full capacity now.

Okay, great. The second question is about your pricing, about your friendly pricing. So for Q3, and I presume it's going to be the same trend for Q4 and maybe into next year, and it's pretty much across the board, or just more specifically for your wire bonding?

Rick, you're asking about... whether we've raised prices or plan on raising prices across the board or on just wire bonders.

Is that- Yeah, that's right. Yep. Thank you.

Our utilization will be full for Q3. We're already full in Q2. In Q3 and Q4, we'll start ramping up the SIP product. So the factory will be very busy. The pricing adjustment is not a concept. You know, we have to follow the business dynamics based on need and requirement. I am not, I don't have the privilege and I will not answer. However, we want to raise price across our pipeline. However, there is a possibility that we might do so. Sorry.

Okay, yeah, that's good enough. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Next question, please.

Our next question is from Mr. Sihou Ng of China Renaissance. Sihou?

Hi, good afternoon, gentlemen. I have two questions. The first one is that before the merger, the company would give out the substrate self-sufficiency ratio. I'm not sure if you have the number ready for the latest quarter.

Can you repeat that question one more time?

Yeah, the substrate self-sufficiency in the past you gave out before the merger with Spiel. I'm not sure if you have the same percentage on hand that could share with all of us.

You're looking for our substrate sufficiency percentage.

Right, exactly, yeah.

Well, it was hovering around 22 to 25 percent and

Okay, all right.

Do you think it is still around that? I think the current type of the materials or substrates in the sense actually give us an additional edge over our competitors because of our stronger buying power and also our in-house capability or capacity.

Oh, sounds great. That's my second question. Yeah, you already answered. Okay, and also the other question, could you provide an update on the Y bond delivery schedule? Last time you mentioned that the company's planning to add roughly 3,000, 4,000 Y bonds this year. So just wondering if that would be upside to that number.

Well, in the second quarter, we added close to 1,500 founders, 1,482 to be exact. And on that slide, we added 139 I think the delivery is still ongoing, and we're seeing we are still maintaining our target for the year. And hopefully, second half, we will have a full delivery.

Okay, great. Delivery, I can remember last time you mentioned roughly October timeframe, right? Before delivery, I mean.

Yes, but as Ken mentioned, things are very dynamic at this point, so that's the target, but we'll see how it goes.

Okay, all right. Okay, great. Thank you very much. Congratulations. Thank you. Next question.

If you have a question, please raise your hand now. We have a question from Mr. Goku Hariharan of JP Morgan.

Thank you for taking my question again. Could you talk a little bit about how you think about capital spending? Looks like this year is going to be at the high end of the 10% to 15% range, so closer to the $2 billion mark or even higher. Do you feel next year also CapEx is going to remain in this high range given supply is still going to be quite tight and customers are willing to sign up for longer term agreements? That's my first question.

So you're looking for an outlook on our capital expenditure plans into 2022?

Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

Well, for this year, we are still maintaining our previous plan of maybe, but you're right. I think the actual will be at the high end of the range, more than 15%. And by the way it's going, I don't preclude the possibility of raising our capex for this year again. Uh, I think it's a little bit, a little bit too premature to talk about 2022. Uh, it really depends on the market overall market situation. Although we remain confident that next year.

There will be additional demand just the, uh, this can I just want to give you another angle and, uh. For example, yes, we are talking about high CAPACs for ASE and OSAP for 2020 and 2021. But at the same time, it will be very interesting to look at all of the IDN CAPAC for the backend. I believe you will see a very, very different scenario. The reason I want to make that statement is, now keep in mind, in 2022 and 2023, there will be incoming waivers from all of the new fab that has been started since 2020. So all of the new wafer age or 12 inch, who will be the backend service provider for all of the wafer? If there is a system demand, infrastructure demand. If there's no demand, that's a different scenario. But in case there are demands, if the IDN are investing less for the backend, then the consolidation thesis will guide it. The OSAP needs to double down in order to make up the Delta. Therefore, in 2022, even though it is a little bit earlier to say, but depending on the business dynamics for 2021 and the early part of 2022, By working with all of the IC and system customer, we will have a much better view about the overall system demand and the back-end demand, as well as all of the other substrate and different supply. And that will be a dynamic process. We will give you a much, much better number in terms of the CAPEX scenario.

Understood. Maybe one follow-up on that front. Could you talk a little bit about how you think about returns on that CapEx now that your gross margin is clearly gone up? How are these LTAs being structured and how are you thinking about CapEx in the future? You talked about bulk of a lot of capacity being spoken for in LTAs. So how should we think about returns? And just to give some context, I think historically OSAT has been seen as more cyclical in terms of margins and returns. Is there something that we can talk about that is through the cycle where your returns are likely to be higher or much higher given what we are seeing with the pricing dynamics and willingness of customers to commit much more longer term contracts.

Gokul, you're asking about how we evaluate CapEx, especially in the context of this tight semiconductor supply environment, right?

could give a ROIC or a ROE kind of, what are the threshold or hurdle rates that you use when you think about CapEx and investment in general?

Well, I think it's very apparent that the return is getting better as we continue to have margin expansion. Although the FX does have some impact and negative impact on the overall return situation. But as you mentioned, the ROE that we are looking at as a threshold is good for about 20 to 45%.

45% for new investment, right?

That's correct.

Got it. Thank you. That's very clear.

Next question.

Next question is from Mr. Roland Hsu of Citigroup. Roland?

Hi, can you hear me? We can hear you. Go ahead. Okay. Sorry, I dialed in late. So excuse me if my questions were asked. First question for me is TSMC has several plans to build new fab overseas. So are you considering to increase your global presence as well to catch the business opportunity from the newly built wafer fab worldwide? And if we want to do so, how will it impact your cap expanding plans in the mid to long term?

So your question relates to our longer term thought process in terms of our global footprint expansion.

Yes. All right, to answer that question is no, if you look at the ASE footprint, I believe ASE is by far the most diversified manufacturing company in OSAT world. We have factories, across the three continents and japan korea singapore malaysia as well as u.s and china of course taiwan so in terms of the global diversification we are already there okay So the next question is under the geopolitical sensitivity, as well as the US incentive as it was a China initiative, how do we respond to like TSMC or Samsung or Intel initiative in building up the different capacity in different part of the world? And I think the short answer of that is it really goes by the business dynamics. If I want to be a little bit more specific, you will look at the overall semiconductor demand, which is given by the pyramid picture that I gave to everyone. Then you dissect the pyramid into two portions. You ask, which part of the pyramid are cost sensitive? And you will develop your manufacturing in a massive scale to offer the most cost effective, flexible delivery to that part of the pyramid that are cost sensitive. After that, you will have a little piece or smaller piece, which is national security sensitive, technology sensitive, or location sensitive. Then you will look at who are the end user, who are the service provider. For those service provider and end user, which portion of the assembly and task can we contribute to add efficiency to the alternative route? So this process sounds very complicated, but actually it's very, very simple. So if any of the foundry partner wants to build a FAB anywhere in the world, we look at the output, we look at the assembly and test requirement, then we ask the question, does it have to be ASE? If it does, what will be the volume that is required compared to any other alternative route? When all fails, we will make the investment accordingly based on the business need. So right now, we already have a globally diversified footprint, but to make adjustment on the footprint by adding different service portfolio will really depend on the business. And by the way, that business requirement as of today is not clear for the assembly and test. It's a very, very long answer to a short question because we have been asked this question by everybody in the world. Thank you.

Understood. Thanks. My second question is for your testing business. In the past two to three years, you have the goal to try to grow your testing business. But I think last year probably was not a good year for your testing because of Huawei's, you know, have been banned in the supply chain. So how do you look for your testing business now and going forward? Are you still planning to further grow your testing business in terms of the percentage of the total ICAD and revenue?

Yes, I think the first half of the year we were kind of busy in terms of realigning our testing. capacity to serve the other customers. And we have done so fairly successfully, as I mentioned. We have fully recovered our test business in the first half of the year, have had our schedule. And going forward, we will continue to make, we'll start to bring the test business back to a growth mode. And we will be making the necessary investment further to to further expand our test business going forward.

Do you have a specific target of the percentage of the revenue from testing?

Well, I think right at the peak, we were on 8%, and I think that's the first thing that we need to go back from.

Okay, thanks. Thank you. Yeah.

Our next question is from Mr. Randy Abrahams of Credit Suisse. Randy?

Okay. Again, thanks for the follow-up. Yes, and my follow-up was on the SIP. If you could give an update, the contribution now for ICATM and the USI, what percent it is, and then could you give an update just how the pipeline is looking for expansion next year, both at your primary customer and also diversification into additional customers.

So you're looking for basically an overview on SIP, its contribution from our EMS and our ATM entity, and also potential view on the pipeline?

Yeah, that's correct.

I think in terms of overall SID business, last year we had a 50% growth. And so this year, I think the growth rate will start to, will come down a bit. But overall, I think the momentum is still there and we'll continue to make the necessary investment to continue to grow our SID business. In second quarter, I think the overall SID business represents about 17% of our overall business from the holding standpoint. And for EMS, about 40% and for assembly and test is about four. And all these ratios will grow in the second half.

Okay. And for the EMS business where you're a little bit, it sounds like a much better environment for semis. relative to EMS right now with the tightness. So is that 4%? I mean, does it feel like that's difficult until we get back to a better balance or there's kind of program in place to improve that? Or you have a bit of, like you're doing in ATM, a little bit of pricing to offset the higher cost to get back to that type of margin target?

I think the, for the ATM, it will continue to grow in terms of percentage of overall business in third and fourth quarter. And for the whole year, it will be at a higher rate than what we're seeing in the second quarter. Were you asking about EMS margin? Yeah, EMS operating margin. Okay, we're still looking. Yeah, yeah, it's about the.

Yeah. Okay, so it's still 4%.

Yeah, we're still looking at 4%. Okay. It's becoming a more challenging target because of the overall logistic cost is rising. All the operating certainties is higher at this point. But still, we're maintaining that target.

Okay. And the last question I have, just on the advanced packaging for things like SOIC and TSMC SOIC, Intel has their Fiveros. If we get some move to the 3D stack, is that a market you see OSAT or CASC participating in? Or would that 3D, if we go to full 3D, I see it's, there's not as much for you to do. Or is there still like some final Assembly to substrate. I'm just curious if you see an opportunity in that area.

Well, the short answer is the, we have always been in development with key customer. Along the line of 2.5 D in the, for example, we're the 1st, 1 to launch the 2.5 D. With a key customer in taxes. And 3 D, I see that development. We never stop. But 1 of the thing that was trying to articulate is. We really have to understand the service. Versus the, uh, the business model, if we have any company. Providing a service that is proprietary. Serving unique customer. That is not all set business. The definition of OSAP business, you should have at least two alternative service provider. You should at least have two customers. So we have multiple customers with multiple open platform that becomes a viable OSAP business with a sustainable volume. Whatever comes into the OSAP world, and there are plenty of that, ASC will take a clear leadership in that. Now, when the 2.5D or the 3D IC or whichever chip-lit architecture becomes OSAP, in other words, there are multiple foundries offering that service and there are multiple people accepting alternative process achieving the same architecture and similar cost and performance. ASE absolutely will be a participant. And I believe this kind of open platform versus the proprietary, and not only OSAT is driving it, Everybody in the world, including our end customers, eventually would like to see that. So I think the macro trend is very clear. But in terms of how do we take one step to another, the reality is very complicated. You really have to have a foundry development. You have to have an architectural development, a material process, the mechanical thermal, and all of the things will take a unique company to put a lot of R&D resource to make sure they can define the standard for that. And I think that's what we're seeing today. I mean, the good thing is packaging is emerging as a more critical integral part for the whole semiconductor ecosystem, and that's welcome. But in terms of which technology will be more industrial-wise pervasive, And I think the time will prove that, but ASC will not be missing this part.

Great, thank you.

Next question.

Next question is from Mr. Bruce Lu of Goldman Sachs. Bruce.

Okay, I want to have a quick follow up for the CapEx. What's the CapEx location for testing, bumping, wire bonding for this year?

CapEx location?

Location.

So you're asking about basically planned CapEx for tests?

For everything. I mean, you know, what's the CapEx allocation? Yes.

I think for this year, the likely allocation will be around 65% for assembly, roughly 23% to 25% for tests, a little bit for material, and then roughly 9% to 10% for EMS.

Okay. So assuming that your equipment lead time right now is more than a year, So your CapEx for next year should be foreseeable. Because you already mentioned that the CapEx, you know, you couldn't lead time right now. It's more than a year, right? So basically all, you know, how many equipment you're going to spend for the coming like 12, 15 months already. So, which means that your CapEx for next year should have a very clear pictures.

Well, when we talk about CapEx, we're talking about required CapEx and not necessarily the cash CapEx that we're talking about.

Oh, I see. Okay. The next question is a quick question. Can you give us the revenue contribution from automotive or from the IDM in your ATM business?

Chris, you're looking for how much revenue the automotive sector represents?

Yes, in ATM.

Roughly, at 7.4%, it's around 6%, 5% to 6%.

Do you see a clear uptrend?

Yeah, well, I think we're pretty aggressive in terms of ramping up our auto business.

Do you expect it to be more than 10% in 2022?

Well, we'll see. We'll look at it. But it's going to be a little bit of growth this year, over 50% of growth.

Wow. Okay. So what is the IDM revenue exposure right now?

The IDM exposure?

Yes, IDM customers.

Yeah. Around one-third of all visits come from IBM.

I see. I understand. Thank you.

Do we have additional questions at this time?

There is no question.

Okay. I'll turn it over to Dr. Tianwu to wrap up the call.

Well, thank you very much for your patience and support ASE. 2021 has been a very challenging but extremely exciting year for us. Much of the EAR impact which plagued us last year has been resolved. And I would like to thank all of you for supporting us and I look forward to a successful 2021 and we'll talk to you next quarter. And in the meantime, please stay safe and healthy. Thank you. Thank you very much.