Gus Richard: Well, according to Heisenberg, quantum is always uncertain.
William Miller: Yes, exactly.
Operator: Our next question comes from Thomas O’Malley with Barclays. Please proceed.
William Levy: Hi, guys. This is Will Levy on for Tom. My first question is about the sequentials by segment into March. What’s driving the quarter-over-quarter decline? And is this the bottom for compound semi?
John Kiernan: So I’ll take that. So, Yes, we guided at the midpoint of our guide $170 million for Q1. we just finished a quarter with $174 million, so down about, 2%. If you go to the midpoint of our guide, the high end of our guide was at $180 million. If I look at that segmentation, by market, we’re expecting, semiconductor to be down slightly in the quarter. I would remind that, Q4 was $115 million, and that was a record for us during the quarter. So still, at a high level there, maybe, around $105 million number. we are looking for a bit of a rebound in compound semi, $25 million, plus or minus there for shipping a couple of more systems. And, we see some strength in photonics applications there. data storage, it’s about a one system difference, but about a $25 million number coming off a $19 million number, but it’s only, one system, difference there.
And then we see quite a sizable fall off in the scientific number in Q1, coming in at about, $15 million or so. And I would say that, as Bill just mentioned, we had a very large, research tool that went out for this quantum, computing. So we had a quite a sizable, revenue number in Q4. And, that’s the biggest, driver and a difference not having one of those big tools in the Q1 number.
William Levy: Awesome. Thanks so much. My next question is about your data storage business. With the commercial introduction of Hammer this quarter and the ramp of such, how has this impacted your outlook and your view of this business?
William Miller: We think the adoption of Hammer has been, A, a long time coming, and B, a healthy transition for the data storage industry. We think this long term will give us opportunities in that the heads themselves will become more complex and there will be more deposition and edge steps which would benefit Veeco. We, the data storage business is a great business for us. We’ve been in it for decades and we have a very strong position in long-term partnerships with our customers. What we see, though, is really the exciting long-term growth is really driven by the ability to port this kind of core Ion Beam technology from data storage into SEMI. And so that’s really where a lot of the R&D and a lot of the focus of the EVAL programs that we just spoke about are really coming out of the Ion Beam technology originally started with data storage.
Operator: It looks like there are no further questions at this time, so I would now like to turn the floor back over to Bill Miller.
William Miller: Thank you. I do want to thank our customers and shareholders along with our Veeco team for their continued support as we execute our growth strategy. Have a great evening.
Operator: This concludes today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
