Onto Innovation Inc. (NYSE:ONTO) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

David Duley: Great. As far as the AI inspection revenue, could you help us understand whatever the growth rate you had last year was, how much do you think this is driven by units and/or how much do you think it’s driven by much greater levels of intensity? And then as a follow-up to that, as far as Onto goes, does your business have a — which is a greater piece of this inspection business? Is it high bandwidth memory or the GPU inspection? Thank you.

Michael Plisinski: Thanks, Dave. So, I mean, a year ago, AI wasn’t really on the radar. So, I would say, and the volumes or the pure number of wafers tied to AI is not that high. So, this is really about capital intensity. This is really about the complexity of these advanced architectures and how much precise metrology and inspection is required to yield these devices. I think that’s always been something we’ve talked about for years that in these really advanced applications, our Dragonfly tends to shine. It’s a Swiss Army Knife containing both inspection, metrology, unique capabilities, and clear find that our customers have driven us to ever greater levels of performance. As far as the mix goes, I think the capital intensity is higher for logic, but there are three HBM players. So, at least right now, what we’ve said is our backlog was roughly half and half, HBM and logic.

David Duley: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Miller with Benchmark Company.

Mark Miller: Thank you for the question. You mentioned gate-all-around. You’re getting some traction there. I’m just wondering when does that fully ramp, is it later this year, 2025? And also about the new fab, the funding by U.S. and Europe and Japan for new fabs, internal chip production. When does that start to really become full bloom?

Michael Plisinski: So as far as when gate-all-around really ramps, that’s the million dollar question we all like to know. I don’t have any great clarity there. Right now, we bet on in early 2025. There are some signs I read recently, N2 is certainly they’re seeing stronger demand, so maybe that pulls in, but we’re not seeing anything yet definitive one way or another where that ends up ramping. We just know our job right now is to make sure we have as stronger position in gate-all-around as possible so when it does ramp, we can benefit the most we possibly can. As far as the fabs around the world that are being incented, whether it’s Europe, Japan, U.S., we’ve already taken some orders for at least, I don’t know on memory about the European, but for sure in Japan and in the U.S., we’ve already taken orders. But these are very small, and those fabs aren’t, obviously, as ramping just yet.

Mark Miller: Thank you.

Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from the line of Vedvati Shrotre with Jefferies.

Vedvati Shrotre: Hi. Thanks for taking my question again. So, you provided some color on the power, the specialty markets, which are growing 40% this year. Could you talk about what you’re seeing into 2024? Does this continue to be strong or are you starting to see weakness there?

Michael Plisinski: No, we continue to see very strong specialty device and packaging going into 2024. So, well over —

Vedvati Shrotre: I just meant the power piece of it. Does the power piece of it grow as well?

Michael Plisinski: Power. Sorry. No, we think it could grow. We’re more comfortable with kind of flat at this record level. And there’s opportunities for it to grow. We’re working with customers in certain timing of their expansions. One of the things that we benefit from being process control is our value proposition isn’t just tied to expansions with these customers, it’s tied to output and the quality of the output. So, some of these fabs still have a lot of opportunity to improve yields and therefore improve output without huge capital expense. So, a lot of customers we’re talking to are still, we’re still focusing on that value proposition and seeing some traction there.

Vedvati Shrotre: I see, and if I may double click on that. So, as far as I understood, most of your China revenues really come from the power revenues. So, is that — could you talk about the non-China versus China spent and how that’s looking. Is it different from each other? Are the trends different from each other in the two markets?

Michael Plisinski: No, I don’t believe they’re different. We have activity in Japan, Europe, the U.S., as well as China including in discussions into 2024. So, I wouldn’t say there’s any difference from that perspective.

Vedvati Shrotre: Okay. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question — your next question comes from the line of David Duley with Steelhead Securities.

David Duley: Yes, a couple of questions for me. Mike, could you talk a little bit more about the lithography tool deliveries during the quarter? I think I missed some of the detail. I think you said there was three systems to two customers. I didn’t catch which applications. I was wondering if you could also elaborate, are these new customers or are they current customers that are bringing more tools online?

Michael Plisinski: Good question. You pretty much got it. There are two applications, mobile and high-performance compute. So, those are the primary applications and there are two existing customers. So, buying repeat business so it’s repeat orders from existing customers.

David Duley: And would you expect to see this customer base continue to expand or as far as the growth in that segment in ’24? If it does grow, is it going to come from the current customers or adding new customers or how should we think about that?