Aehr Test Systems (NASDAQ:AEHR) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Gayn Erickson: So we actually — we — if you were to look at Vernon, Vernon, by the way is our VP of Sales and his team, if you were to look at their funnel, it’s pretty impressive. There are a very large number of companies that are expressing interest and leaning forward with us for our wafer level test and burn-in products across several markets. It’s going to be a very busy year for us. The forecast does include a good number. I’m not sure we want to start putting numbers on it of new customers both for bookings as well as turns, but customers that are expect to book and ship within the year. We still have a wide range of forecasts from people. It’s interesting even with current customers candidly their ability to forecast is all over the map.

And so I think we’ve taken a conservative stance here. But it provides us with confidence to be able to hit that number. And we don’t need any miracles to happen, if you will. I don’t want to get into talking about how much upside there is to it. I will say that we have considerable upside in terms of capacity and the ability to serve the market. The old adage, what if you invite everybody and they all show up? And so we’re looking at it that way. We want to make sure that if the customer select us that we will be able to ship them in shortly times and high volumes with the level of confidence that they would want. And so hopefully that gives you a little bit more color. Again, it’s not all about one, one or even two companies. As we go forward, we’re going to see a lot of breadth.

Many of those will just be starting. The classic they take their first system and there’s a little digestion, which I think will bode well for us as we head into the following fiscal year as well.

Jed Dorsheimer: Gotcha. That’s helpful. I guess just as a follow up on sort of number two through number four of the — or number five, I guess, of the incremental customers. In terms of the discussions, so as you ship out these two systems or as you’ve shipped the two systems, you recognize the revenues. Are the conversations that such that if this tool hits this specification, we expect to come back with five tools or ten tools or 20 or three or what level of visibility. I know as you mentioned, there’s a bit of movement amongst your customers, but what level of visibility are they providing you so that you’re making your decision?

Gayn Erickson: Yeah, Jed, I mean, I don’t mean to be vague or illusive, but it really depends on the customer. But I would say even within one thing in common with all of them is, there’s still some pretty broad ranges. It just they’re trying to figure out the timing of their customer wins or their customer capacity needs. There’s certainly an element of test times and what quality requirements will be needed for different customer levels. The higher the quality requirements, the larger the test times, which have a direct linear impact on us. We’ve heard customers talk about, well, you know, different markets can get away with lower quality than others. That’s very odd or interesting to me, but those are clearly things we keep to ourselves about who’s saying those type of things.

But you know it — we hope to make it get easier. I mean one of the challenges that we face is, we’re very — there’s customers can be very lumpy and there’s these variabilities. The nice thing is, we do expect to wake up here in the not too far distant future with a lot more customers. And so while it may seem like we’re better at planning, we’re probably just averaging a bunch of random uncertainties if you will. Random is way overstated. We have pretty darn good visibility to what people are doing. The one of the things we look at the most candidly is what their actual plans are. You go look at their buildings, you watch them being built. You look at their public statements about the capacity they’re putting in place. We have a pretty good idea of what the average test times are amongst the OEMs around the world.