Kulicke and Soffa Industries, Inc. (NASDAQ:KLIC) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Fusen Chen: Well I think memory you know, probably is looking at the 2024, but the later part of the 2023, I think we might have some chance. But memory, I think everybody know at this moment is a little weak. For the display, actually in a consumer market, unless, I think and that’s why we always need to focus on our high throughput. The display actually is also not a very easy market. So for the consumer part, is going to be impact a little bit, but for the long-term, I think that we are formally deliver that mini LED and the micro LED is here to stay. And we also have a lot of qualification activity with customers. And so it’s really not only like a volume related, there’s a lot of new project. So in terms of advanced display, we are looking at the 2021, I think our revenue was $80 million, 2022, actually last quarter, we ended the last quarter at $90 million.

But after this quarter, the full year I think we are slightly over a $100 million for advanced display. For the 2023, we actually have a target to be $80 million to $100 million at this moment. So advanced display I think is a little weakness. But we have a lot of qualification, customer use it is opportunity for developed products. So advanced packaging, I think we actually cannot ship more than enough and a lot of requests actually we are increase our capacity and try to meet our customers demand. Right? So I hope I answered your questions. And for the unit growth related products, actually we have two, one is ball bonder. We feel like actually already significantly the inventory actually, issue, actually again at this moment we are at the quite low level already.

But another one actually is the wedge bonder. Wedge bonder I think in our 2018 only qualified with our first EV customer. The revenue is $100 million. And this quarter actually we are looking very close to $4 million. So this is like in the auto trend, right? So I wish I gave you some color about our customers.

Craig Ellis: Yes, that’s really helpful, Fusen. Thank you for that. Lester, I wanted to understand more about what was happening with operating expense control. I think you talked about slowing hiring and a few other things that happened tactically and then there was some, I think, FX benefit. So can you quantify the FX benefit and what should we expect with operating expense quarter-on-quarter? I’m sure we’re down just given the variable cost model, but are there incremental tactical or structural cost savings that are coming into the model as we look at fiscal 1Q?

Lester Wong: Yes, so thanks Craig. I think for Q4 we did have about $4 million positive ForEx that helped bring OpEx down. I think the other thing is we are implementing cost control, but as we have always done, we focus on our critical projects. We continue to invest in our critical projects. And I think in Q4, we budgeted in hiring certain personnel in critical projects and R&D. The labor market is still a little bit tight, so some of those hires did not happen. We expect that to happen in Q1. So, of course we will continue to look at the noncritical controllable costs. We’ll push it out to the second half if we can or delay it all the way to FY 2024. But for critical projects in Advanced Display and Advanced Packaging, we will continue to invest in Q1 and throughout FY 2023. We believe that that will put us in a very strong position when the recovery comes in 2024 to really ramp and take advantage of that.

Craig Ellis: That’s helpful. Thanks, Lester. And then lastly, the deck talked about some positives that you’re seeing in the compound semi part of the business, and I was hoping you could just elaborate on what you’re seeing and what investors could expect in fiscal 2023?