SkyWater Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:SKYT) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Operator: We will take our next question from Harsh Kumar with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Harsh Kumar: Hi guys. Let me add my congratulations as well on this increased momentum here recently. Guys, I had a quick question. You guys talked about increased momentum with customers. We’re seeing some of that in the numbers. Could you talk about nongovernment activity here? How your sort of commercial customers are responding to what’s going on at the fab? And are they also increasing the activity along with the government? And then I had a follow-up.

Thomas Sonderman: Yes, great question and good to hear your voice, Harsh. The way I would put it is the government is just APs. We have multiple development programs. Again, we’ve talked about over 50 active ATS engagements. And a large percentage of them actually are nongovernment. We have the biohealth space we’ve talked about, the connectivity space, also the high-performance computing space. There’s a lot of energy around and having been in the industry as long as I have, you see these ups and downs. And one of the things that always happens is when you go into these contractions, companies that want to get new products to market hit the accelerator. And that way, they’re positioned for the next upswing. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing.

The other is – and Steve has talked about this before, is each of these ATS programs tend to start out at a relatively small spend rate and then they ramp as you get into the kind of two years and beyond time frame. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing is multiple programs ramping in parallel. That’s why we continue to hire more engineers that allows us to accelerate those programs. And then as I’ve also talked about, we’ve I’ve been working very hard as a company to integrate our ATS and wafer services business so that they run seamlessly inside the fab. And the level of activities that we can generate for ATS doesn’t really affect our overall wafer output, but it significantly drives our revenue and profitability. And that’s really what we’ve been focused on is making those programs move faster.

Harsh Kumar: That was a great update. As a follow-up, the world is changing. There’s CHIPS Act money coming, this increased geopolitical tension as a result. I guess, foundries in the U.S. are seeing a lot of attention and affection from the government. So this, along with what’s going on in the commercial activity, if I was to just ask you how comfortable are you with the 25% growth for 2023 as well? Do you feel that with all that’s going on, you’re in a relatively stable position from here on as you kind of sound like you’re kind of footing here?

Thomas Sonderman: Yes. So we’re cautiously optimistic with the business as we’re running right now, but we’re also cognizant of the fact that we’re in an inflationary environment. There’s a lot of unpredictability. You just outlined geopolitically with the economy. And so we’re going to continue to execute the business at the pace we’ve been executing. We believe we have a lot of committed customers that want to continue to grow with us. That’s both our historical customer Infineon and some of our new volume customers as well as all of our ATS partners. And obviously, we’re not going to provide specific targets at this point, but I will say that we’re optimistic about where we sit as a company and most importantly, our ability to really fine-tune this model that we’re creating with this blended R&D, volume manufacturing capability.