Intevac, Inc. (NASDAQ:IVAC) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Nigel Hunton: I think if you think about material science, I think one of the x things we’ve done with the last I suppose 10 years, within the HDD business is leveraging our material science and making sure we keep absolutely aligned, with our customers’ roadmaps. In a similar way, we want to make sure we stay aligned with our customers’ road maps and consumer devices and order. So I think — I’m not sure what will happen, but I know that the technology will keep shifting import, thin glass in automobiles will keep expanding. And therefore, for me over time, I think this — there will be more and more opportunities coming through and it will be driven by material science and anything else.

Peter Wright: Wonderful. Congratulations, again on a great quarter.

Nigel Hunton: Thank you.

Kevin Soulsby: Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] The next question, we have a follow-up from Hendi Susanto of Gabelli Funds. Please go ahead.

Hendi Susanto : Hey, Nigel I look at slide 11 that has estimate of how many TRIO tools across different markets, my thoughts are I think it depends on the area, the yield and then the part the initial market penetration, maybe you can give us some insight into how you calculate the number of TRIO tools there? And then my second question is in the melt [ph] wearable section. It is said that it can be replacement of sapphire. Is it more of let’s say for glass display coated with the TRIO system it can be stronger than Sapphire? I would like to clarify my understanding there. Thank you.

Nigel Hunton: Okay. If I run through at a high-level model for the smartphones. So literally, if you look at the smartphone market opportunity, if you look at the total market size, you can actually break that down into high end model, premium sector, you can break down into two medium and then the lower end. And so therefore, by taking a percentage of the market opportunity and really focusing that’s on the higher end percentage gave a sort of reduced market size opportunities which are the TAM down to a lower TAM. And then I’ve taken an average throughput per year of the tool and converted that into number of tools. So it is going to put up quite a bit of analysis as you work your way through the total smartphone market to the high-end markets through an average size of phone that can go into machine.

Average number of those phones that we can catch up a year and that gives you a total number for fair tools. And that’s why we’ve said initially that we believe that number will be for this of higher priced model market opportunity. Similarly in the wearables we’ve said, some of those wearables that our sapphire glass today we’ve issued will not move to a new technology in the short-term but as our technology and the capability and the sort of the market acceptance of having a hard scratch resistant anti-reflective coating, phone into the wearable market becomes more accepted then you’ll see that being considered for complete replacement, I think have suffered less in the future. In a similar way, as we’ve gone to tablets have taken, the tablets have said, there’s a premium level of high-end tablets, which I think will get and looked at first for this coatings.

we’ve taken them by again assumed a certain number of tablets per panel to go through the machine that gives us a smaller number of smartphones a year, but gives a number of tools a year and then goes into the number of tools we require. And the similar way, for laptops uptaking the touch screen laptops, not all laptops around the world market size of laptops have taken only the touch screen elements of it. So we’ve tried to make this day very clear serviceable, addressable market rather than go for the much bigger TAM to give you some initial views on the size of this market opportunity. So hopefully that helps give you some of the detail and the granularity behind our thinking regarding some of the tools.