Wolfspeed, Inc. (NYSE:WOLF) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Neill Reynolds: Yes. Sure, Jed. So I think first of all, this is a presentation change only. This doesn’t change our business plan or our long-term outlook for driving greater than 50% gross margin. It’s a presentation change in terms of how we want to talk about the financials on a quarterly basis. So, a couple of things drove that in terms from a timing perspective. I think as I said in the prepared remarks, we updated our presentation of our results really just to adhere to updated guidance from the SEC. Also, if you think about Mohawk Valley, that’s now transitioning from a pre-production facility to a full production facility, utilization of the fab will start to play a much bigger role in our margin trajectory going forward. So, putting those pieces together along with the fact that we’re moving into a new fiscal year, just made this kind of the right time to make that transition.

Jed Dorsheimer: So just to be clear, though, was this your decision to change the presentation? Or I guess I’m going to be getting asked these questions. What drove this? Was it SEC that you couldn’t do the underutilization? That’s what I’m getting at.

Neill Reynolds: Yes. So, we — there’s updated guidance from the SEC. We’ve had correspondence with them. And then upon completion of that, we’ve decided to make the update to the presentations.

Jed Dorsheimer: Got it. Thank you. And then I guess just a follow-up. And there are a bunch of different numbers, so give me — if you can help stitch this together for me. I heard, and if it’s true, congratulations that 75% of the growers in Building 10 are operational. Is that correct? And the reason I’m asking that is, could you help me better understand the sequential guide down in revenues while you’re producing more materials to load Mohawk Valley? How should I think about that and then the six months pushout in the 20% utilization?

Neill Reynolds: So from a 20% utilization perspective, I think we’re in line with what we thought we would get to 20% by the end of the fiscal year. So, I think that’s all in line. As we bring out…

Jed Dorsheimer: Sorry, I thought you said calendar year on the call. So, it is fiscal year ’24 for the 20%?

Neill Reynolds: Fiscal, yes. So no change to the outlook in terms of the timing of bringing the fab up online up to 20%. So, we anticipate getting to 20% utilization by the end of this fiscal year. We continue to see good positive momentum in crystal growth during the Durham campus out of Building 10. We’re turning on additional crystal growers. We’re seeing positive signs from the yield and the output that we’re seeing from that. So that’s in pretty good shape. So, now it’s a matter of bringing the capacity from a substrate perspective up to the fab and beginning the process of bringing up the yields to entitlement, as Gregg mentioned, treating the tools and tuning things in. And that’s really what we’re working on right now is bringing that back to capacity.

What that means from revenue perspective is we’ll see a bit of a tick up [indiscernible] revenue. We’ll see, again, some pickup in Q2. But as we drive those wafers through the fab, we also see a more dramatic pickup in the revenue to get to the back half of the year — fiscal year.

Jed Dorsheimer: So Neill, if that’s picking up, though, what’s dropping off?

Neill Reynolds: So Jed, there’s two pieces here. So, from a Q1 perspective, we saw better performance out of the Durham campus, both I think in power devices out of Durham and materials as well. So, it was just better performance in the quarter. So what we’ll do is we’ll forecast that back to the mean, so to speak. So Durham will have some good quarters and good performance. There will be plus or minus. We saw a positive performance last quarter, that would be a bit of a headwind as we move into Q1. So that will come back to kind of a mean. But that’s what we’ve always kind of forecast and how we looked at Durham. It was an older campus, an older facility, there’s going to be some variation there, it requires maintenance from time to time.

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