Veeco Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ:VECO) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Tom O’Malley: Thank you very much, guys..

John Kiernan: Thanks, Tom.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Dave Duley with Steelhead Securities. Please state your question.

David Duley: Yeah. Thanks for taking my question. I guess the first one is a little bit of a follow-up on the high-bandwidth memory opportunity, or just memory in general. Could you just discuss how big you think the LSA TAM is in the foundry and logic business and perhaps compare that to the memory business? And it’s my recollection, at least in the foundry and logic business, that you kind of won one advanced node, then you picked up other nodes or other applications. How do you expect the high bandwidth memory business to unfold over the next year or 2?

William Miller: Dave, I would say in memory, in general, Veeco has very little exposure to memory. That being said, we just had our first foray in the high bandwidth memory, winning an HVM application for laser annealing. So we’ve been sizing the logic portion of laser annealing at about $400 million a year. And then with this one success that we have, we’ve kind of sized it currently with this one success at about $100 million. But I think if you look three to five years out, as we can hopefully win more customers and kind of land and expand in memory, we could see that opportunity growing to be comparable size to logic, so going from $400 million in logic to another $400 million in memory.

David Duley: Okay. And as far as the epi tool for silicon carbide, I was just wondering if you could just talk about — you seem like you made a pretty big bet here on that marketplace. How big do you think the epi tool market is? And what do you think your advantages are with this tool? I know you have tons of years of experience in epi in other markets, but I’m just curious what you think about what the advantages are for the silicon carbide market.

William Miller: Yeah. We’re really excited about the acquisition. From talking with customers, they’re very excited about the technology that we acquired. The challenge was they were a smaller company and really not bankable. And so I think their technology, plus Veeco’s manufacturing, service and sales support, logistics worldwide, really opens up a lot of doors. And we’re seeing very strong engagement from customers. Regarding the first half of your question regarding the market size, we’re estimating that market to be in the $200 million to $300 million a year at this time and then maybe by 2027 kind of growing to about $0.5 billion in the future.

David Duley: Okay. Thank you.

William Miller: Thank you, Dave.

Operator: Our next question comes from Mark Miller with Benchmark. Please state your question. Thank you.

Mark Miller: Just wondering, I think you mentioned some microLED developments later this year. Can you give a little more color on that?

William Miller: What we’ve seen, as we’ve pretty broadly discussed, is microLED pushing out about a year. And so we’re actually, I think, very well positioned. We’ve developed a new arsenide phosphide product to intercept the microLED market when it happens. We’re also selling tools for GaN-on-Silicon for disruptive microLED applications. So Mark, I would say microLED has the potential to be a large opportunity, but it’s probably not going to be in a significant volume until 2025 time frame.

Mark Miller: Thank you.

William Miller: Thank you, Mark.

Operator: There appears to be no additional questions at this time. I’ll hand the floor back to Bill Miller, CEO, for closing remarks.

William Miller: I want to thank our customers and shareholders along with the Veeco United team for their continued support as we execute our growth strategy. Have a great evening, everyone.

Operator: Thank you. And with that, we conclude today’s call. All parties may disconnect.

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