Aixtron Se Unsp/Adr

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the conference call regarding the results of the fourth quarter and of the financial year 2022 of Extron SE. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to your host, Guido Pickert.

Thank you very much. Welcome to our Q4 and full year 2022 results presentation. I'd like to welcome our CEO, Dr. Felix Grabert, and our CFO, Dr. Christian Daniger. As the operator indicated, this call is being recorded and therefore considered copyright material. As such, it cannot be recorded or rebroadcast without permission. Your participation in this call implies your consent to this recording. Please take note of our safe harbor statement, which can be found on page two of our results presentation slide deck, as it applies throughout the conference 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 our CEO, Felix Grabert, for opening remarks. Felix? Thank you, Guido.

Let me also welcome you to our full year 2022 presentation. I will start with an overview of the highlights of the year and then hand over to Christian for more details on our financial figures. Finally, I will give you an update on the development of our business and our guidance. Let me start by giving you an overview of the key business developments in the year on slide 2. Demand for our equipment was very strong. resulting in an order intake of 586 million euros, up 18% year-on-year, driven by the strength of the end markets our customers are serving. In fact, the 2022 order intake was the second-best order intake in the 40-year history of Ekstrom. I'm very pleased that the area of silicon carbide and gallium nitride power electronics has been the strongest demand driver, representing the majority of our equipment order intake for the year. Orders for our silicon carbide power solutions have more than tripled year on year. This strong development is a result of major capacity expansion activities of our customers, but also a great success of our new G10SIG multi-waser system. This product is being adopted by our customers in an amazing speed since the launch in Q3 of last year due to its excellent cost per wafer proposition. This is a huge team success, and we now have a highly competitive tool in the market. With this, we very much look forward to the wafer size transition from 6-inch to 8-inch, as this is a trigger point for many customers to look into their tool installations and tool base in new. I think we can say that for silicon carbide and extron, we have also now reached a tipping point of broad market adoption, similar to what we have seen for gallium nitride some years ago. While we have seen an acceleration of demand for silicon carbide, orders for gallium nitride power electronics also continue to grow year on year, reflecting our customers' aspiration to replace the incumbent material, silicon, with gallium nitride-based solutions in more and more applications. In summary, the biggest demand drivers for the quarter are our systems for silicon carbide and gallium nitride power electronics. Demand for laser tools in the area of optoelectronics also remains strong. Demand for tools to produce LEDs is mainly driven by micro-LED production orders. more than offsetting lower demand for traditional red orange yellow led tools as a result of all that and of the delayed export licenses last year due to which we are not able to ship all tools we had produced in 2022 we can report a strong order backlog of 352 million euros up 64 year on year overall we could grow our annual revenue 8% year on year to 463 million. Our cost margin ended up at 42% and our EBIT margin at 22%. With this, we have successfully mastered the global supply chain issues of the year 2022 and also maneuvered around some of the delays in export licenses that required us to shift some production slots back and forth within the year 2022. In this place, I would like to express a strong gratitude to the entire Extron team that had made all these achievements possible in a difficult year 2022. Namely, that we fully delivered on our upgraded 2022 growth guidance in all aspects. Now, I will head over to our CFO, Christian Dunninger. He will take you through the full year 2022 financials.