Aehr Test Systems (NASDAQ:AEHR) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Jed Dorsheimer: Well, that’s better than I expected. So nice. I guess second question is just on this long courtship with this potential large customer. Any more details on sort of, I know it’s the longest in your history Gayn in three years sounds like a long time for that process. Is there any more details you can provide on sort of what is, is the next step a large order. Is that what we should expect? And I ask that kind of also in the context of your capacity, as you’re adding these customers, I know you talked about low lead times, but if you saw a large 20, 30, 40, whatever that number system type order, I would assume that, that changes things in a good way.

Gayn Erickson: Yes. I mean, generally speaking, even if customers talk about ordering lots upfront, my experience has been, it’s normally met with one or a small number of systems, say, for production to begin with and then a little bit of absorption. That might change here because they’re running out of time. And they’ve done way more evaluations than I’ve seen in the past. So I think that has a chance to collapse itself. There’s also engineering systems involved, et cetera. So I’m not sure I want to perfectly carve it because I might end up being wrong, but engineering systems, first production systems, quantities, perhaps we make it quantities with longer lead times because it’s getting pretty serious with companies now. They’re putting real capital in place, putting fabs in place, making commitments to these very significant ramps that are happening in the automotive guys in ’25, ’26.

And I don’t think they want to be cut short. So my message, I guess, to my customer is listening, I mean we are able to ship more than anybody else. We literally can ship up to, call it, 50, 80, 100 testers, call it, wafers or blades of capacity a month, we are shipping more per month than the combined number of installed base of every other competing alternative has ever shipped. But there’s still a scenario where please get your orders in so that we can continue to make sure that we can address everybody’s needs. But I’d just reiterate, obviously, we’re expecting significant amounts of orders in the fiscal year to be able to turn to make $100 million and then without zero backlog, and we’re sticking to our guns there.

Jed Dorsheimer: Got it. Last question for me. Chris, on the 300 basis point decline in gross margin. You answered this question that Christian asked in terms of mix shift or gain you did. But operating margins dropped by 500 basis points. Is there something else that drove the incremental $200 million? Or is that just the aligners that in mix shift that contributed the extra of contraction there?

Chris Siu: Yes, it’s really primarily on the airlines that decreased the margin here.

Jed Dorsheimer: Okay. I’ll say…

Gayn Erickson: I’m going to give a little bit more color. We haven’t talked about this. In our agreement with respect to the CM that was building these things for us, we actually had some NRE charges in there. They’re not necessarily directly tied to cost of sales, but they were timed with the timing of it. So the first units actually have a higher incremental cost to us than I think the ones going forward now, I think the first four or five units had that. So anyhow, it was worse than would be expected if that helps.

Jed Dorsheimer: It does. Sorry, one last one. What percentage was your largest customer in the quarter?

Gayn Erickson: Number one customer is 88%… It’s very high.

Jed Dorsheimer: 88%. Great

Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question is from Dylan Patel with SemiAnalysis. Please go ahead.