Bradford Ferguson: And those subcontractors are where the die maker, the wafer makers shipping out the whole wafer to Asia or whatever to get burned in and then it goes on from .
Gayn Erickson: Yeah. I didn’t mean to confuse that. We are working with companies that will use their own subcons and they will buy the tool and put it there and it’s dedicated for them, okay? What I was referring to is, we’ve actually identified a generic subcon who would make themselves available for just services to anybody and their brother kind of thing. And so we’ve kind of kept that to ourselves candidly, deliberately. So I know that we mostly have investors on the call. Any customers or potential clients that are interested in potentially using the subcon, they can contact us and we’ll be happy to make an arrangement in a proprietary way to enable that — the ability to test your wafers at a secure subcon.
Bradford Ferguson: Okay. Thank you.
Gayn Erickson: No problem. Thank you.
Operator: The next question comes from Tom Diffely with D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.
Thomas Diffely: Yeah. Good afternoon, Gayn and Ken. I guess a couple of follow-ups here. So Gayn, when you talk about — and I can appreciate that you have capacity to do even a couple more clients by the end of the year. But when you look at the 15, 20, maybe more silicon carbide players that are ramping right now, do you have capacity to serve a majority of them?
Gayn Erickson: I think so, yes because I don’t think not all of them will be — most of them will not be anywhere near as big as the first one. So it’s — we do actually look at the total capacity need. And to some extent, we only need to have enough for everybody and then the inefficiencies, right? Because guess what, people will over buy at some point because they’re all thinking they’ll have more market share. But you sure don’t need to be 10 times the total market. So we are focusing on all of it, if you will, and who wins that were kind of — doesn’t really matter to us.
Thomas Diffely: Yeah. Okay. Great. And I know, obviously, this is a very early stages of this market growth. But just curious if there’s been any kind of a slowdown from any of the customers just based on China’s EV market and some of the broader concerns in the marketplace?
Gayn Erickson: We haven’t seen it at all. And I obviously pay attention to it all the time. I think — remember that’s — okay, there’s — I’m going to simplify the categories of silicon carbide players. They’re the multinational or multi-segment large players, big automotive guys, et cetera. I mean obviously, the folks like the STs and Infineon’s and ON Semiconductors of the world and TIs or whoever, I’m trying to just make it generic, please don’t quote me, they have a big product portfolio. And what they’ve seen, I mean, across the board, they’re just slowing down. There’s cancellations out there. There’s just stuff where the — this is the 17 cycle in semiconductors if people aren’t paying attention, okay and there will be in 18, okay?
As they contract, what they’ll do is they’ll figure out where the hot markets are and they redirect their energy, okay? I’ve always referred to as waves. It came back to my HP days, okay? We’re in a hot way right now. Customers are pouring their energy towards silicon carbide right now, even though, obviously, there’s other business units that aren’t doing very well. And so for those companies that have multiple products and all they focus that are in silicon carbide, the pure players are pure and they’re all in, right? I think some of the discussion that’s been going on at Tesla stock or what’s happening, Tesla is going to lose market share. Of course, they are. Guys, they have a dominant market share. There’s no way they’re going to ship that many to the rest of the world.
That doesn’t matter. There’s way more opportunity in lower-cost EVs than they’re in the high-end ones, but they all have traction inverters, they all have engines, they all need silicon carbide, if they want to go for efficiency mileage and charging times. And so we think there’s going to be tons of players out there. And the more the merrier, the more — the faster they’re going to get market penetration of all the BBs. So we have not seen it. It has picked up right now. Vernon is so excited about having, we have these three new senior guys. I’ve had a chance to meet and be in front of customers with them, they’re fantastic. And that’s going to be a big deal to help us to get to more people.
Thomas Diffely: All right. That sounds good. And final question, I was quite frankly shocked when you said earlier today that the silicon photonics customer could be bigger than your current silicon carbide customer. I was always under the assumption that after the initial set of orders, they’re doing 100% burn-in and then it goes down to like a 5% sampling over time such that, that market itself would be a lot smaller.
