Aixtron Se Unsp/Adr

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Good morning and good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Axtron's first quarter 2020 results conference call. Please note that today's call is being recorded. Let me now hand over to Mr. Guido Pickard, VP of IR and Corporate Communications at Axtron, for opening remarks and introductions.

Thank you, operator. Let me start by welcoming your excellent presentation of our Q1 2020 results. I'd like to welcome our Executive Board, represented by Dr. Felix Grauert and Dr. Bernd Schulze, as well as our VP of Finance and Administration, Charles Russell. As the operator indicated, this call is being recorded by X1 and is considered copyright material. As such, it cannot be recorded or rebroadcast without permission. The participation in this call applies to a concept to this recording. Please also note that our safe harbor statement, which is included in our results presentation, applies throughout the call. This call is not being immediately presented via webcast or any other medium. However, we will place an audio file of the recording or a transcript on our website at some point after the call. I would now like to hand you over to Ben Schulte and opening remarks. Ben?

Many thanks Guido and let me welcome you to our first quarter 2020 results presentation. Let me start by giving you an overview of the key developments in the quarter. We had a solid start to the year with orders in Q1 coming in at 68.8 million euros, which is 28% above the same quarter in 2019. and 15% below the very strong Q4 of last year. In Q1, revenues came in at 41 million euros, which is low due to the depressed order intake in summer last year, and it's slightly below our planning for the quarter, as the delivery and the commissioning of some of our tools into Chinese customers were delayed into Q2. That said, we do not see at this point significant influence on our business from the coronavirus. But to be clear, we cannot rule out that an extension of the restrictions that apply worldwide could at the very end also affect our business. In the first quarter, our other key financials were also largely in line with our plans, except the achieved gross margins at 36%, which was influenced by the delayed commissioning of a number of tools in China as a result of the pandemic. EBIT ended up being at the low negative side at 1.1 million euros, while free cash flow was at 3 million euros. We finished the quarter with an order backlog of 146.3 million euros which is 60% over the same period last year, and gives us the confidence that we can meet our 2020 full year guidance, which we communicated to you on our last call. Despite the pandemic, we continue implementing our strategy, a core part of which involves the renewal of our entire MOCVD product portfolio over the next 18 months. We remain confident about our prospects for two reasons. We do see continued customer interest in our products to further build out critical communications infrastructure, contactless sensing, energy-efficient power electronics, and innovative displays. Secondly, our focused investments into next-generation deposition tools for the compound semiconductors and OLEDs will open new market opportunities for our equipment and get our business in the future in an even better position. At this point, let me now hand you over to Charles for a more detailed overview on the Q1 2020 numbers. Charles?

Thanks, Bert, and hello to everyone. Starting on slide four, our income statement, Total revenue for the quarter at €41 million was lower than in recent quarters. This reflects both the generally low order intake in the relevant period of last year and a much lower level of system commissioning in China in Q1 because of the lockdown. These factors resulted both in lower utilization of installation personnel and lower utilization of production. Relative to Q4, the effect of the underutilization on gross margin was around 5%. Operating expenses at 16 million euros were less than the 20 million euros in the previous quarter. SG&A expense was 7.5 million euros compared with 6.8 million euros in Q4. The additional expense mainly relates to recruitment and additional IT costs. R&D expense of 14.4 million euros was 0.6 million euros less than in Q4 because of lower expenses for MOCVD projects. Net other operating income of 6.2 million euros was higher than the 2.3 million euros in Q4. Q1 income included the reversal of 2.9 million euros of impairment provisions against a building in Germany, 1.9 million euros of R&D grants, and 1.2 million euros of exchange rate gains. EBIT was a loss of 1 million euros compared with the profit of 14 million euros in Q4. Net income was also a loss of just under a million euros. Turning to the balance sheet on the next slide, inventories of 85 million euros include around 12 million euros of prototypes, both on site at customers and in our facilities. Receivables, 17 million euros represent 30 day sales outstanding, the same as at the end of Q4. Customer deposits increased to 60 million euros in Q1 compared with 51 million euros at the year end. This reflects the strong order intake. Moving to slide six, our cash flow statement, we had free cash flow of 3 million euros in the quarter, which brought our overall cash balance up to 300 million euros. And with that, let me turn it over to Felix.

Thank you, Charles, and welcome to you all. I will give you a short overview of the developments within our portfolio of our approach to handling the pandemic and of our outlook. Let me first speak about our OLED business, Apiva. We are going through the qualification process with our Korean customer and made good technical progress. Some technical challenges have been solved. Other topics are still a work in progress. The end of the Gen 2 project and the fifth decision about a follow-on project have come closer, but we are not there yet and a few months of work are still ahead of us. In our MOCVD business, we are seeing solid interest around our mini and micro LED solutions, both for large display applications and for small wearable devices like watches. Furthermore, in optoelectronics, we see growing demand for lasers, in particular for telecom applications. In power electronics, we see strong interest from multiple market segments, gallium nitrate power, gallium nitrate RF, and silicon carbide, which gives us confidence that this market is moving from R&D to large-scale volume production. Let me now give you some background information on how we handle the COVID-19 challenge. Our production is up and running without interruption or delays. Early on, we have enabled many of our employees to work from home. At our premises, we have implemented strict measures such as mandatory wearing of masks, shift work to reduce the risk of entire teams being killed, protective measures in our cafeteria and others. We are working closely with our supply chain to ensure uninterrupted inflow of materials for the ongoing production of our products. As part of these activities, we have pre-ordered materials for anticipated production capacities in the second half of the year. We continue to serve customers with spare parts worldwide, and we have created backup solutions for critical cases. In some countries with strict lockdown orders by government, we have obtained the status of critical infrastructure supplier with the help of our customers and therefore all our branches worldwide are fully operational. As a result of this, we can confirm and reiterate our guidance for the year 2020 that we have given in our last call. The Executive Board continues to expect revenue and order intake to be in the range between €260 million and €300 million, a gross margin of approximately 40% and an EBIT margin between 10% and 16% of revenues for the full year 2020. This expectation is based on a solid order book at the end of the first quarter and a healthy level of customer inquiry, particularly around LED-based display application, laser for optical data transmission, and next-generation power electronics. We have assumed for our budget this year an exchange rate of US dollar 120 per euro, and that the full results of our OLED business, Apiva, are consolidated. With that, I will pass it back to Guido before we take questions.

Thank you very much, Felix, Charles, and Bernd. Operator, we will now take questions, please.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press 9 and the star key on your telephone keypad. In case you wish to cancel your question, please press 9 and star key again. Please press 9 and the star key now to state your question. And the first question comes from Ms. Charlotte Friedrichs from Berenberg. Please go ahead.

Hello, thank you for taking my question. Three, if I may. The first one would be around the order intake. Can you tell us what the split across the end markets is here in the first quarter?

Yeah, thank you for the question. I think the strongest portion of order intake came for LEDs, for mini-LED and other displays, but not micro-LED applications. So this was about, I'd say, around 40%, and the rest was mixed between lasers, mainly for telecom, and a little also into power electronics, RF applications.

And around the slippages that you mentioned also in your press release this morning, can you give us an idea of what kind of an effect do you expect for Q2? Is it reasonable to assume that basically all of these will come into Q2, or could it maybe take later or some of them may disappear altogether?

Yes, so we mentioned that there was a small number of shipment delays of in China, where customers asked us to delay the shipment and move it from the first quarter into the second quarter. And also a couple of final acceptance says it could not be conducted in China. We now know that China is fully up and running, so these things will be done in the second quarter, so they just moved by one quarter forward. I think there's a good probability that in the second quarter, we know currently the Europe and the US are mostly affected by the pandemic. There's a certain chance that the same will happen to a couple of tool shipments for European and US customers and also a couple of acceptances with these customers. However, on top of those that we were expecting now, the ones from China are coming up, so it should come out as a wash. And then finally, not to be mentioned, those things from Europe and the U.S. may shift into the third quarter, but we are confident that we will conduct them within the year 2020, both the shipments as well as the acceptances, so that does not affect our guidance for the entire year at all.

Okay, understood. And then my final question would be around sort of the product mix across the year that you expect and sort of tying in with the feedback that you have received from customers on your silicon carbide tool and also now with smartphone shipments, perhaps also a bit about the 3D sensing and market what you're hearing here from customers.

Yeah, we're seeing, as we mentioned, I think, a very healthy mix across these different applications, as we mentioned in our speech and in our publication. So, certainly, we expect to see a growth into the area of innovative displays, meaning this includes mini-LEDs as a backlight solution for LCD. but also fine-pitched display for large display solutions, but also first investment into micro-LEDs, as we already have. So that is something that we see also a growing demand into power electronics, and they are both gallium nitride and silicon carbide, and certainly telecoms, Infrastructure build-up we expect to accelerate due to the current situation. And the only thing what we still wait to come back is the 3D sensing. As we mentioned in our last call, this is to be seen when this comes back.

Okay. Thank you very much.

And the next question comes from Janadan Menon from Liberum. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Just to go back to the previous answer on the LEDs, the display side on the 40%, you said, would the biggest driver there be mini LEDs for backlighting? And I'm just wondering, can you give me a feel for how big you think that market could be? I mean, obviously, long ago, you had backlighting as a big driver of revenues at one point. I'm just wondering, is this a start of a new trend, and do you think that if this spreads across the LCD market, will this be a material driver of orders for you going forward, or do you think it will remain a contained thing and the growth will be more on the micro-LED and other areas? And I have a couple of follow-ups.

Thank you Jonathan. I think it is driving certain demand in particular for the red color dots simply because for blue and green there is a lot of installed capacity out there which has been installed mainly for general lighting applications but the red color certainly you need as many red color systems as well and also what we see now that LED companies who previously have focused, due to their focus on maybe solid-state lighting, and they're now looking into the mini-LED and pine-pitch LED application, they now want to have in-house supply of red LED. And that we're seeing really as a trend. And you know, our main market contribution into LED here for this application is the red color. And that's what we're seeing in the moment. Whether this is a huge application to continue is to be seen. But in the moment, we're definitely enjoying this trend.

Understood. And you've talked about the renewal of your portfolio, how it's across the various segments you're renewing it. I'm just wondering, would that have a positive impact on gross margin? Is cost reduction of the bill of materials a key part of the renewal? And if so, when would we start seeing all that coming in through the numbers?

Thank you. Very good questions. So our products, our new products across all the different application segments will be released step by step. The new silicon carbide product we brought out in the fall of 2019. Sometime later this year, a product called Power Electronics will follow later on products about the laser and the red micro energy. So step by step this is going. You know, typically in our industry, when we bring out a new product, we first bring out a so-called beta tool to two or three customers, lead customers, to qualify the product and to gain field experience based on valuable customer feedback. And only after that phase, we then go into volume production for the broad market. So it's a step-by-step process. And that step-by-step process is concluded only at the point when you really go into the volume product, rolling a volume production, roll out the new product for all customers, then we will see the impact in the gross margin. And yes, for sure, we bring out the new product generation to significantly increase our competitiveness and, of course, maintain market share in these growth markets, but also the increased competitiveness brings a significant increase in value for the customer And part of it, of course, we expect to translate into gross margin improvement, which you will then gradually see coming to the timing within the year of 2021, but not in 2020.

Understood. Very clear. And lastly, just a question on how you expect the revenues to come through. You started quite low in Q1. You said that's because of the nature of the order intake last year. Is this going to be quite a second half loaded year or will you see a good snap back in Q2 itself to meet your full year targets?

Can I just guide you to the last slide here in our presentation? There you see the typical pie chart what we expect and you see that we need about 40 to 80 million euros of new system orders in the second quarter, or maybe even early Q3, which are shippable within this year to be within the lower or higher range of the guidance. And, you know, I'm glad to say that in the moment we've seen continued healthy discussions with customer and inquiry levels continuing. So we feel quite confident that we will be in the range. The only thing that is the final risk is our supply chain state to be as good as it is in the moment, but we are quite confident and we have taken the most possible measures you can do. So I think we feel quite good about this.

Okay, understood. Thank you. And the next question comes from Uwe Schupp from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.

Yes, good afternoon, gentlemen. Also two or three questions from my side. Firstly, on the export licenses, please. I remember that this was an issue on some of the previous calls. I was just wondering whether the situation has improved here. Obviously, the main reason is that there may be a work from home attitude also in the Berlin departments of that particular area in the public sector. I was just wondering whether this has an ongoing impact on your business. Secondly, speaking of work from home, is that a warm rain currently for you because of higher demand from Datacom customers? And then lastly, Felix, just on silicon carbide, just a brief update, please, there on the program. We are seeing some push-outs here and there on the silicon carbide side from Q2 into H2 for various reasons. Obviously, COVID being not the least one. Just the number of beta customers would be interesting, and what do you generally judge the level of interest at the current stage? Thank you.

Yeah. Let me start with the third question, the export licenses. Honestly, I certainly am not in the position to give you like an efficiency rating of the German government. However, in the moment, we do not have issues with export licenses, but this can be simply a timing effect or just, you know, the orders we're currently shipping. So in the moment, it's no issue. And you speak about whether basically the demand in data rates and telecom speed rates and so on can give us a boost in the business. The answer is yes, but it's not immediate. This is, you know, when there's a position to increase infrastructure until our customers get orders and then build up new capacities that take a while. But overall, my expectation definitely is it will give us additional wind from the bank.

And let me come to the question relating to the Silicon Cardad program. You're right. From the market to the side of our customers, a couple of tool decisions in the ramp-up has been pushed out. I would say roughly we heard throughout the year 2019 that customers were planning to make decisions, tool decisions, and start to build out of their factories in the fourth quarter of 2019. And this has been moved out, I would say, to what's the second quarter, third quarter of 2020, so maybe six to nine months of a delay coming from the market due to slightly lower demand in the market. automotive market and so on and so forth. On our side, this fits our schedule even better. So we see that as a benefit. We like that effect simply from the fact that in terms of number of beta customers, we have our automated tool on the ground with four or five customers where we are in the qualification phase. And we do see a strong and healthy demand for this tool And we have orders for the tool from additional customers where we had to say we don't want to take too many betas at once until the qualification phase is continued. So we have taken orders for the tool in the manual operated mode with giving the customer the chance to later switch on and add the automation piece of it. And this delay in the volume ramp, the delay of tool decisions, has helped us a bit because it better fits to our schedule of the qualification of the silicon carbide program. So all over all, the effect is there, and it fits in our interest, but we do not see the demand disappearing or the trend not coming. We rather see customers discussing potentially even larger expansion plans coming in the future. We see also now Chinese customers kicking in in the market and additional demands coming from China that have not been on the radar yet. So the overall situation is healthy.

Very helpful. Thank you.

And the next question comes from Tej Feisal from Bankhaus Lanzer. Please go ahead.

Yes, thanks for taking my questions. If I may, the first one would be on some of your comments regarding gross margin. So you said underutilization had an impact on gross margin of roughly five percentage points. I was wondering at what revenue level do you see them disappear and how that's going to shape up for the rest of the year? That would be the first question and a few follow-ups.

Hi. So, yes, the 150Q4, the underutilization had an effect of 5% on the gross margin. And in terms of what level it would get back to a normal amount of underutilization, if you like, I think that would be when the revenue is around 55 million or so.

Okay. And then on the OPEX, Q1 was flat versus Q4, so around $22 million. Is that something we should model in for the upcoming quarters as well, or some one-offs there?

Well, you should not model in the repeat of the exchange gain or the repeat of the release of the impairment provision of $2.9 million. So there's $4.1 million there, which It's not necessarily repeatable, but otherwise I think the level of OPEX is pretty representative.

Okay. And then one question regarding your power business. So in Q1 you had roughly 11 million sales in power. And I was wondering what was the split silicon carbide versus GAN. And then on GAN, a little color around current market momentum or demand momentum. So TSMC seems to have secured some designs they invested a few years ago. Do you see them investing in new capacities, and how is the investment behavior regarding GAN in China? And then a final question regarding the OLED. Felix, you mentioned during your presentation a few months' work still to be done, so an update there. Can we expect a decision still in first half? Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Quite a number of questions. Let me get started with the power electronics one. So, order intake in the first quarter was about 20% gallium nitride, both power and RF combined, and about 20% silicon carbide. So, power electronics amounting to a total of 40%. You're right regarding and commenting to the market momentum. The gallium nitride is now really gaining traction. You may look and analyze, for example, across the Chinese smartphone market and see what models have been launched, a significant number of them being based on gallium nitride-based quick chargers. You can open them up and do a reverse engineering or buy the appropriate reports of that. Then you'll see who the makers of these are. A big part of that of that supply chain, some of them are Fabulous players, pointing then again back to Fabulous, to foundries, one name we mentioned, that are producing and who see the demand picking up. So what you stated is in fact also what we see when we look into the market, especially in Asia, especially in China. That being said, the volume ramp for which in 2019 we have seen and we have commented in this place to see a pickup moving from the R&D stage to a volume ramp stage. That volume ramp is now really ongoing with consumers being able to buy the product in the Best Buy, in the media market, whatever these laws are called. That is happening. With that, we do see orders from customers for volume and factory expansion coming. Both the named and established players, one name you mentioned, and beyond that, we do see quite some momentum from smaller players and startups. which are enjoying a very healthy investment both by venture capital and also by government entities in China. So China and Taiwan are really strong in this trend that we're seeing. And of course, we also see that the Western players, they may not be yet in the smartphone models, but they are, I think, very fast to follow this trend. Let me put it this way. So the gallium nitride power electronics runs is now in the early phase. With that, I would like to switch over to the OLED question. I mentioned earlier on that we are making good progress. We have concluded and completed a number of the development topics. Think about this between us and the customer in the green checklist of topics that need to be worked on and the specifications that need to be fulfilled. A couple of these points have been fulfilled and agreed that they are closed and done. A couple of other action items are still open and still need work. I would not want to comment now about the exact timing when that is done. You asked the question, is it going to happen the first half? That would give us two more months precisely from today. I think that would be over-optimistic, but I think it's a couple of months ahead. Thank you.

The next question comes from Jürgen Wagner from Maine First. Please go ahead.

Yeah, thank you. I'm sorry to come back to OLED. How much of your guidance for this year is OLED driven?

You mean revenue or order intake?

Yeah, both.

Well, it's both within our guidance.

Can you quantify or would you want to quantify? No, I would not want to do that. Okay, but the way it works, if it's further delayed, even if the order comes in Q4, you would still recognize part of it as revenues, is that right?

I think that would be very difficult. If the order comes in Q4, You know, this is not really the classic tool building business that we are in, but it's a large-scale anlagenbau, which we announced in this place that we will record according to the PSC method, so percentage of completion method. So think about a project which lasts 12 months or 18 months. So after one month, you can record as revenue only the percentage of the total that you have concluded in one month, and that would be a relatively small portion of it. If an order comes, for example, on the 1st of December, within one month, it's a very small portion that you can complete.

Okay, understood. Thank you. And the last question comes from Malte Schaumann from Warburg Research. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon. Just for – on all that again, but you could confirm or do you have to confirm that there will be a decision within the year 2020, so maybe not the first half, but somewhere in the second half at the latest point in time. Would that be right to assume?

Yes, definitely.

Okay. Okay. And then a question that's on the current pipeline, order pipeline. You mentioned that discussions are quite healthy with the customers. Is there a difference across the applications? So are there areas where you see a certain form of weakness or is everything, most of the target applications, quite stable and healthy at the current stage?

Yeah, it is pretty much what I said in the first question. The The good thing is we're seeing several areas getting high interest. Certainly one is for this innovative displays, meaning here the micro LED, mini LED application. So we see definitely customers are getting, preparing potential demands for production. but also for power, and when we speak about power, we mean both silicon carbide and gallium nitride. Felix just mentioned about the gallium nitride and the silicon carbide grant. We not only have beta customers, we have also existing customers who are ordering tools, and they do so, and they continue more or less as they announced. So that is going on. And we're seeing demand for the telecom build out of infrastructure, which I mentioned already that we expect not to slow down and maybe even to accelerate due to the current situation where everybody appreciates a high-speed internet connection at home. So, these are the main drivers and as I said, as expected, the 3D sensing market has not yet returned and we all know that the cell phone market in the moment is not at its best. However, all the cell phone makers will come out with new models. And I think it's no surprise that all the new models will have a kind of 3D sensing solution built in. So, of course, the high-end models, they're typically not the high-volume sales, but we've seen that customers in 3D sensing are pretty high. pretty busy. When that then gets into orders, I told you last time I expected earliest end of the year, and I think that statement still holds.

Yeah, okay, so no recent, even no, no change even in the recent weeks of the overall pattern. The final question is on the competitive situation. One of your competitors launched a photonics-dedicated tool earlier in the year. Do you see him gaining traction somewhere, or do you feel quite confident, especially then? I mean, you will launch new tools as well. So any change in the overall competitive environment for your applications?

Well, I mean, in the moment, I think the situation is unchanged. as in the past, certainly we're watching also the performance of the new tool of the competitor, which certainly is still in the market, not yet qualified, but eventually it may be qualified. And then we have to see the situation then. But I also want to refer to what we said previously. We don't stand still. We spoke about our new product introduction programs, and that certainly includes next generation of tools for lasers and gallium arsenide-based materials. So we will come out by end of the year, early next year, with our next generation tool and we feel quite confident that we can at least maintain our market share.

Okay, good.

Thanks. Thank you very much for your questions. Let me hand back over to you to pick up.

Thank you very much. With that, we conclude today's call. You know where to find us in case you have any follow-up questions. Please all stay healthy and goodbye. Thank you.

The conference is no longer being recorded.