Aixtron Se Unsp/Adr

The conference is now being recorded. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Extron's fourth quarter and full year 2024 results conference call. Please note that today's call is being recorded. Let me now hand you over to Mr. Christian Ludwig, Vice President, Investor Relations and Corporate Communication at Extron, for opening remarks and introductions.

Thank you very much. A warm welcome to Extron's 2024 results call. My name is Christian Ludwig. I am the head of investor relations and corporate communications at Extron. With me in the room today are our CEO, Dr. Felix Gawart, and our CFO, Dr. Christian Danninger, who will guide you through today's presentation and then take your questions. This call is being recorded by Extron and is considered copyright material. As such, it cannot be recorded or rebroadcast without permission. Your participation in this call implies your consent to this recording. All documents referred to in the call can be accessed via our website in the investor relations section. Please take note of the disclaimer that you find on slide one of the presentation document as it applies throughout the conference call. This call is not being immediately presented via webcast or any other medium. However, we intend to place a transcript on our website at some point after the call. I would now like to hand you over to our CEO for his opening remarks. Felix, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Christian. Let me also welcome you all to our full year 2024 results 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 new guidance. Let me start by giving you an overview of the highlights and key business developments of the year on slide two. The most important messages of the day from my point of view are, in 2024, we have outperformed the market by achieving revenue growth of 1% to 633 million. That translates into a CAGR of 24% since 2020. We thus delivered on our adjusted 2024 revenue guidance, meeting the lower end of our financial but also our initial guidance given in February 24. As indicated before, we finished the year with an outstanding Q4 24 performance, even better than last year's extraordinary Q4. This marks a great achievement of our operations team as it indicates the ability of Axtron to ship way over 200 million euros of revenue in a single quarter. Mainly due to negative product mix effects and cost under absorption in operations, our gross margin was down 6% to 262 million euros. EBIT was down slightly more at 131 million as a result of this. Overall, Extron delivered a good operating performance in a weak market environment. Our outlook for the year 2025 is based on expected continued weaker market environment. We expect revenues to come in at a range of 530 to 600 million euros, with a gross margin between 41 and 42%, and an EBIT margin between 18% and 22%. As you know, our market position in silicon carbide has been strengthened throughout the last quarter. In particular, we have made further technical progress with a G10 SIG. We have achieved layer thickness and uniformity values, which puts us in a leading position in the industry, not only in productivity and cost, but also in terms of uniformity and run-to-run stability. We have also made significant investments last year to prepare the company for the next growth waves in our end markets. Specifically, for gallium nitride, we see the next technology step on the horizon, the move to 300mm wafer technology. We have started work on 300mm GAN early and shipped first tools to sales customers already. And we've built a dedicated clean room, our innovation center, for the 300mm technology. This was all done on time and in budget. In our 300-millimeter single-wafer reactor, we leveraged the multi-year experience and core elements of our 200-millimeter GAN technology, combining it with 25-plus years of show-ahead technology know-how. This puts us in a unique competitive position to keep our strong market share in the GAN market. This concludes the short highlight section, and I will now hand over to our CFO, Christian Dunninger. He will take you through the full year 24 financial question.