Axcelis Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ:ACLS) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

So I don’t — I’m not worried about this book-to-bill because I think a couple of quarters ago, we were under 1 and then we popped back up under one and again with such a strong backlog, that systems backlog if you consider we have $250 million CS&I business sitting on top of that. I mean there’s more enough revenue that gets you quite a bit down the road out over booking and other tool. So again, I think we’ll see it bounce around a little bit until there is this broader base industry recovery. Power segment is very strong still. I think we now believe that 60% of the year’s bookings have come from power. I think on the last call, we might have said it was 55%. So we’re seeing additional strength coming through power right now.

Doug Lawson: Nick, let me just — this is Doug, let me just add one more comment. The other indicator we watch is the quote activity. And our quote activity remains very high and it’s exceptionally good in the silicon carbide side. And these guys are planning factories out over the next couple of years. So it’s — that’s another good indicator in terms of continued strength.

Nicolas Doyle: And for my follow-up and you kind of — you touched on these points in the call, but more directly, what is the company’s expectation for the — for a memory recovery in 2024? It sounds like you’re thinking second half driven by PCs. Maybe you can touch on what you’re seeing in terms of the PC strength coming back where you’re seeing that? And can the company hit the $1.3 billion model without the recovery in the memory market?

Russell Low: Hey, Nick, it’s Russell. Thanks for the question. So regarding what we see with memory, so naturally we stay very close to our memory customers. We’ve historically been very strong in the memory market. And once the market starts to recover, we’re expecting to see a lot of benefit from that. A lot of people looking for green shoots. I think at the moment, we’re talking to our customers, I’m thinking the second half of ’24, giving a pretty strong year in 2025 as far as memory goes. That’s kind of what we’re seeing. This question regarding path to $1.3 billion, so I think we’ve previously said that we’d be looking for a consumer spending recovery in order to propel us to the $1.3 billion and that would be obviously a recovery in memory and some of the other mature processes like image sensors.

I think we are seeing strength in our power business beyond what we expected. But I think with that strength in the power plus a recovery in the consumer spending, we see us getting to $1.3 billion like we say in the next 1 or 2 years.

Doug Lawson: Yeah, I think the bottom line on it, Nick, is that there’s multiple paths to that $1.3 billion model. So that’s why in the call we said depending on market conditions. And so it really depends a lot of thing on a bunch of different combinations.

Operator: Our next question comes from David Duley from Steelhead Securities.

David Duley: A couple, I was just wondering, have you seen recent adoption of silicon carbide in other markets besides the electric vehicle market? And which markets would you expect to be early adopters outside of EV?

Doug Lawson: It’s Doug, thanks for the question. The — so yes, I mean, if you look at our customers’ websites, their press releases and so forth, they are talking quite a bit about applications in energy, industrial applications, the thing with silicon carbide is — it’s a tremendous benefit to automotive because of the savings that it can provide in a module weight and heat generation and so forth, as well as the performance of the devices. It’s a little more costly. But as volumes increase, that cost comes down and that opens it up to other markets, especially the energy and industrial markets where the weight and the heat iron is important, but the performance would be nice to get. And so we expect that, that will be another piece.

In the presentation, we show that there’s a good growth area above EVs that’s associated with silicon carbide. So, yes, we definitely are hearing that from our customers. For us, we don’t see it necessarily directly because our customers would build the same devices using our Purion H, Purion XE and Purion M silicon carbide tools, whether it’s going into an EV or into an energy or industrial application.

David Duley: And then as far as lead times go, could you just help us understand where lead times are currently? And I guess, you mentioned you’re taking orders for 2025. How much manufacturing capacity do you have for 2024? Or maybe another way to ask it is, what is the current quarterly capacity availability?