Veeco Instruments Inc. (NASDAQ:VECO) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

William Miller: Yeah. Tom, I think that’s a, a good question there. So our expectations for where we expect it to be in the second half of the year is holding out, just on scheduled delivery dates. We had more scheduled deliveries in Q4 for these customers than Q3. So I don’t really think it’s really a change in the demand. There just so happened on how the systems were scheduled to be shipped. So yeah, we expect in the high 30% range of revenue in the fourth quarter coming from customers in China.

Thomas O’Malley: Got it. And just as a follow up to that one, is that all coming from the trailing edge? Could you just describe maybe the disparity? Is it a little more leading edge than it was before? Has there been any change in ordering patterns there? Just trying to figure out where that demand’s coming from.

William Miller: Yeah. So no change in the pattern there, Tom. What we’ve seen this year is as revenue increase to about 30% of revenue coming from China and over the past couple years is about 20% of the company’s revenue. It’s principally been in our laser annealing product line, is where the growth has been coming from. And that’s where we see that continuing into the fourth quarter and into the beginning of next year.

Thomas O’Malley: Gotcha. And just one more quick one, if I could sneak it in. So you guys said Q1, your expectations, I think the exact words you used were similar revenue rates to Q3 and Q4. There’s obviously a big disparity be between the September and December. Are you kind of saying split the difference for March? And if you could just give any color on — if you guys have any outlook that backs up that better than expected or at least that flattish guide into March, that’d be helpful. Thank you.

William Miller: Yeah. I think looking at the average, Tom, we did get over the high end of our guidance, revenue range in Q3. We shipped one or two more systems. So — but for the whole second half of the year, we’re at a number where we expected. We were expecting growth in revenue in the second half of the year. So yeah, I think that’s the right way to look at it. Look at the average of Q3 and Q4 and our commentary would be mean, like sort of in the middle there. That’s what our expectation would be at this point somewhere of a similar range in Q1 of 2024.

Thomas O’Malley: Thank you very much guys.

William Miller: You’re welcome, Tom.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Gus Richard with Northland Capital. Please proceed with your question.

Gus Richard: Yes. Thanks for taking the questions. Bill, I think on your commentary, you talked about semis being up 10% year-on-year. And if I just plug in the number for Q4, you kind of got to do $111 million, $112 million to hit 10%. Am I doing the math right there?

John Kiernan: Yeah. So Gus, this is John. Yeah. We expect full year semiconductor revenue at the midpoint of our guide to be somewhere around $405 million for the year. That’s up roughly 10%. So Q4 revenue numbers should be around $105 million in that range at the midpoint of our guide. So I think you’re in the right zip code there.

Gus Richard: Okay. Got it. And then, just shifting back to the EUV mask, I’m sorry, EUV blank — mask blank opportunity and pellicles, just a couple of questions. First of all, is the pellicle customer the fabs, or is it the blank manufacturers? And then as you go to high-end a high NA EUV, you go to like a six by — six-inch by nine-inch substrate. Is that going to require just a different set of tools when we go, you have to do some modification, the existing tools to accommodate that larger substrate?

William Miller: I would — to answer the first part of your question, I would say, this tool we sold for pellicles is not to our traditional mask blank customers. And then I would say, moving to high NA with the larger format size, we are engaging with the industry to be prepared for that on the EUV mask blank deposition equipment. So we are working on that as well.

Gus Richard: Okay. And — okay. I’ll take my question — the rest of them offline. Thank you.

William Miller: Thank you, Gus.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rick Schafer with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.

Unidentified Analyst: Hi, this is Way Malcolm [ph] on the line for Rick. Thanks for taking the questions and congrats on the results and shipping the first NSA tool. My first question is on customer order patterns. Did you see any customer expedite orders for 3Q? Was there anything that was pulled from 4Q into 3Q?

William Miller: My first inclination is no. We did over ship a little bit, but I don’t think it was anything related to me, any related pull in at the system level. Maybe some upgrades are part in the like, but I don’t know, John, any more color there?

John Kiernan: No. I think if you looked at the high-end of our guide range that we gave that it had a couple of more systems in the high-end of the guide range, and essentially that’s what we shipped out. During the quarter was the biggest things that drove the revenue for the quarter, but not a new order activity. It was something that was already in that backlog and scheduled towards either the end of Q3 or the beginning of Q4.

Unidentified Analyst: Got It.

William Miller: Just excuse me, I’ll add that. I think our on time delivery for systems was, if not 100%, extremely close to 100%. So our factories were getting closer to on time.

Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thank you. Appreciate that. My second question is on the NSA system, it looks like things are moving rapidly in the space. So was wondering if you can help us better understand this opportunity as it relates to LSA. Has there been more of a customer shift of interest from LSA to NSA and — or do you see NSA as a separate green field opportunity? Or do you see NSA taking some share from LSA?

William Miller: I would say NSA is a really complimentary, incremental served available market opportunity for us in both logic and memory. I would say, if I were to look like today, our LSA served available market is totals about $500 million, $400 million in logic and about $100 million in memory. I would say if I were to click forward to 2027, I would say probably two-thirds of our business will be in LSA, our traditional LSA. We’re actually planning to put evals out in the field for customers’ next node roadmap. So it’s clearly an active product and about one-third from nanosecond annealing. And so we’re right now sizing the 27 market at $600 million in laser annealing and about $300 million in this incremental NSA business, both kind of equally split between logic and memory.