Kulicke and Soffa Industries - Q4 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Greetings and welcome to Kulicke and Soffa's 2024 Fourth Quarter Results Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are on a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone requires operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Joe Elgindy, Senior Director, Investor Relations. Thank you. You may begin.

Joe Elgindy (Senior Director of Investor Relations)

Thank you. Welcome, everyone, to Kulicke and Soffa's Fiscal Fourth Quarter 2024 Conference Call. Fusen Chen, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Lester Wong, Chief Financial Officer, are also joining on today's call. Non-GAAP financial measures referenced today should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or in isolation from, our GAAP financial information. GAAP to non-GAAP reconciliation tables are included within the latest earnings release and earnings presentation. Both are available on investor.kns.com, along with prepared remarks for today's call. In addition to historical statements, today's remarks will contain statements relating to future events and our future results. These statements are forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 and are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results and financial condition to differ materially from the statements made today.

For complete discussion of the risks associated with Kulicke and Soffa that could affect our future results and financial condition, please refer to our recent and upcoming SEC filings, specifically the latest Form 10-K, as well as the 8-K filed today. With that said, I will now turn the call over to Fusen Chen for the business overview. Please go ahead, Fusen.

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Thank you, Joe. Good afternoon, everyone. Although some of our core market remains in a state of digestion, we continue to anticipate a return to capacity growth in the Core, Ball, Wedge, and the APS segments throughout fiscal 2025, as we continue to expand shares through technology transitions in advanced packaging and dispense. Yesterday, we made several positive announcements regarding a high-potential foundry win, our Copper First hybrid bonding process, which we expect will reach three micron pitch, and also an expansion of shareholders' return initiatives. Our leadership in Fluxless Thermal Compression, FTC, continues to grow. The collective effort by our advanced solution team and the execution across many parallel customer development programs have allowed us to drive market adoption of this innovative process.

This recent win represents a significant milestone, which highlights the market potentials, our system-level competitiveness, and also the broader reach that chiplet and advanced packaging can have on high-volume, more mature portions of semiconductor packaging. First, this milestone highlights that FTC is a very competitive and compelling industry solution, which is capable of directly supporting many different sector applications, including the world's most advanced logic and memory production, but also within our high-volume logic market, which is transitioning from the mature flip chip process. We are very proud of our innovations within TCB technology and also our strong foundational base of leading customers, which illustrates the current market need and the longer-term potential of this competitive technology. Secondly, our current win and innovation highlight our leadership position in the technology transition. K&S is the first and the only provider of Fluxless systems, which are proven in the production environment.

Today, we have a global TCB install base of over 100 systems and are approaching $200 million of cumulative TCB sales. Of this install base, approximately 30 systems are running FTC in either a development or production environment across five major IDM, OSAT, and foundry customers. Maintaining this level of support across different emerging applications and customer locations continues to be accomplished by our dedicated advanced solution team. Cross-customer engagement has been essential in the development of our FTC platform, APTURA, and provides the critical market insight, which enables us to develop very flexible and capable system architectures, which can support a broad range of new packaging formats.

While there are many different marketing acronyms used to explain the growing mix of advanced packaging offerings, such as on wafer, on substrate, on interposer, on IC, we have built a system which supports a wide variety of material handling configurations and is very capable of supporting the most advanced TCB requirements, whether chip-to-chip or chip-to-wafer. As a need for advanced fine-pitch FTC and Copper-First hybrid growth, we expect our competitive position will continue to improve across high-performance applications. Finally, these announcements serve as a reminder that the future of semiconductor assembly will require new and increasingly more complex assembly solutions that can provide greater transistor density at the package level. This growing need extends well beyond the most advanced process nodes. Emerging packaging technologies provide a new level of value, increasingly necessary to offset the limitations of two-dimensional node shrink.

Today, our new product portfolio, including vertical wire, HPI, FTC, and Copper-First, provides capable solutions well positioned to support packaging-level transistor density across end markets. We have been focusing extensively on this transition for years. We are pleased with our recent progress and look forward to additional adoption. Turning to the fourth quarter's results, we delivered revenue of $181.3 million and a non-GAAP EPS of $0.34. From an end market standpoint, key portions of General Semiconductor, Automotive, Industrial, and memory have improved as anticipated, while LED demand remains very soft. We continue to anticipate coordinated recovery of our two most significant end markets, General Semiconductor and Automotive Industrial, through fiscal 2025. For the September quarters, general semiconductor reduced sequentially, primarily due to strong June quarter TCB revenue stemming from shipment schedules and the revenue recognition timeline, which created quarter-to-quarter variability.

Excluding TCB, general semiconductor increased by 11% sequentially, driven by capacity digestion and the returning demand from global OSAT as anticipated. Although the December quarter trended to be seasonally softer, averaging 10% sequential reduction over the prior three years, we are confident broader ball bonding demand will improve further through fiscal 2025 due to reasonable unit growth combined with higher fab utilization rate. For automotive and industrial, we are seeing demand improvement after a challenging year. As explained last quarter, the demand improvement in general semiconductor, driven by Ball Bonding, will be completely offset by the challenge within automotive and industrial during fiscal 2024. At this point, we believe both critical markets are past trough and expect coordinated recovery to accelerate in fiscal 2025. Despite this recent period of capacity digestion, we continue to participate in emerging transitions, driven by secular growth in electronics, in electric vehicles, and the sustainability trends.

We have a strong network of global customers who are critically enabling these transitions, which we continue to support. Over the past four years, many countries, in addition to the European Union, have implemented targets or policies to incentivize EV adoptions. Just last month, the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported seven million EVs or so globally in the first half of calendar 2024, representing a 25% year-over-year increase. While our core wedge, SMT, and battery assembly solutions are directly enabling this critical transition within the automotive market, we continue to seek out new solutions which can expand our market access. During the recent September quarters, we recognized revenue for an advanced dispense system positioned to support a solid-state EV battery manufacturer. This represents a new market for our advanced dispense business, but also diversifies our growing base of battery-related opportunities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.

We anticipate follow-up orders in the coming quarters to support these customers' production ramp. LED overall remains soft within ball bonding and continues to be in a state of digestion across the traditional wire-bonded, high-bright lighting market. While this current level of demand will likely persist over the coming quarters, we remain focused on driving adoption of our Luminex laser-based mini-LED placement systems, which is positioned for a direct emissive and advanced backlighting adoption over the coming quarters. During the September quarters, we booked revenue for one Luminex system, which is in late-stage development and production readiness. We look forward to qualifying additional customers who seek ultra-fast LED placements through 2025. Lastly, we see ongoing strengths related to both capacity addition and technology change within the memory market.

In addition to the improving capacity need for traditional stacked NAND applications, we are working with key memory customers to leverage vertical wire application in next-generation low-power DRAM package, as previously explained, but also within NAND application. Initial vertical wire LPDDR solution, leveraging a vertical fan-out configuration, are currently running at the two key memory customers which we anticipate will move into low-volume production environment next year. Like LPDDR, memory customers are also seeking new stacked packaging formats for NAND memory, which also utilizes our unique set of vertical wire solutions. Both approaches offer smaller package footprint and performance benefits related to an improved die layout, low parasitic capacitance, and also low parasitic resistance. These unique vertical wire solutions are compelling examples of how new packaging formats are mitigating node shrink challenges. We expect a similar approach to extend beyond memory into higher-volume general semiconductor applications over the coming years.

We are pleased with our recent progress and the emerging position supporting advanced packaging applications serving the compute market. This leading-edge market is now being enabled by chiplet and heterogeneous packaging techniques and was previously excluded from our serve market despite our dominant ball and wedge bonding shares and has been a key target of our advanced solution strategy. We are proud to demonstrate our strengths, progress, and potential with this long-term advanced solution strategy. Along with additional technology changes, we are providing opportunities in several other areas as well. While the current TCB win for Foundry, IDM, and OSAT customers who are supporting leading-edge applications is expanding our market potentials, we want to remind investors that leading-edge applications are not the only opportunity for advanced packaging. Besides Copper-First hybrid and FTC, our production-ready assembly techniques, including vertical wire, are providing new solutions for memory and high-volume general semiconductors.

Additionally, High Power Interconnect (HPI) is enhancing power semiconductor and battery assembly approaches. These all represent critical technology transitions which are enhancing the value of our respective assembly processes. We are well prepared for this transition and have multiple market-ready solutions to support our extensive customer base. Consortium participation, broader market engagement, key customer adoption, and a comprehensive set of advanced packaging solutions highlight our preparedness to address the next set of industry challenges. After an extended period of capacity digestion, we also expect ongoing improvement and cyclical recovery across key end markets, most notably general semiconductor, automotive, and industrial. Looking into fiscal 2025, we remain optimistic due to the recent technology win, but also due to underlying market conditions. The relatively high global ball bonding utilization rate, combined with reasonable semiconductor unit growth, is expected to trigger additional growth in our core market during fiscal 2025.

In addition, the expectation of a broader automotive and industrial recovery is also supported with our results this quarter. Finally, broader macroeconomic improvements are also expected to stimulate global semiconductor unit growth through fiscal 2025. I will now turn the call over to Lester for the financial update. Lester?

Lester Wong (CFO)

Thank you, Fusen. My remarks today will refer to GAAP results unless noted. As we anticipate a broader cyclical recovery for our ball and wedge businesses, we remain focused on supporting many different customer engagements and new technology requirements to expand market access further into fiscal 2025. We continue to execute our broad growth strategy intended to expand our market competencies and market share in support of emerging technology transitions. This too has been demonstrated in many different markets and applications over the years, including stacked wire bonding, battery assembly, display, and most notably, fluxless thermal compression today.

The success of this strategy relies on our technology strengths, close customer collaboration, and also our ability to hedge customer and project-related risks where possible. Considering the extent of the Project W-related charges booked during the March quarter of our fiscal 2024, we are pleased to announce we reached a customer agreement for reimbursement of a significant portion of our prior impairment charges. We intend to book the benefit within the current December quarter. Looking back at our September quarter results, we generated $181.3 million of revenue and a 48.3% gross margin, largely due to an improving mix of higher-performance ball and wedge systems. Non-GAAP operating expenses came in above our expectations due primarily to foreign exchange and end-of-the-year accrual adjustments.

During the September quarter, we booked a net income tax benefit of $2 million, primarily due to a $6.5 million tax benefit from a U.S. tax court case, which reduced our one-time transition tax. Prior to today's call, we also announced several updates to our capital allocation programs. First, we received approval for our fifth consecutive dividend raise. We continue to appreciate the consistency and continuity of the dividend program, which allows us to provide our long-term holders with a competitive dividend yield and income stream for their support. Secondly, we announced the authorization of a new repurchase program, which we anticipate will seamlessly transition as we complete the existing program. Finally, we want to remind investors we have repurchased 10.3 million shares over the prior three fiscal years and continue to maintain a consistent and fairly aggressive repurchase cadence.

Over the long term, growing our market access through the organic and inorganic activities remains our priority, although we expect to further enhance long-term EPS growth for investors by continuing our proven repurchase strategy. For the December quarter, we expect revenues of approximately $165 million, ±$10 million, with gross margin of 47%. Non-GAAP operating expenses are anticipated to be $70.5 million, ± 2%. Collectively, we expect GAAP EPS of $1.45 per share and non-GAAP EPS of $0.28 per share. This outlook includes customer reimbursement associated with the March 11, 2024, cancellation of Project W. As Fusen mentioned, we remain very focused on many different customer engagements and also very focused to drive market adoption of our growing portfolio of solutions. We look forward to announcing additional product successes as we prepare for the broader core market recovery in fiscal 2025. This concludes our prepared comments.

Operator, please open the call for questions.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The floor is now open for questions. If you would like to ask a question, please press Star 1 on your telephone keypad at this time. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press Star 2 if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up the handset before pressing the Star keys. Again, that's Star 1 to register a question at this time. Today's first question is coming from Krish Sankar of TD Cowen. Please go ahead.

Speaker 7

Hi, yeah, thanks so much for taking my questions. This is Steven calling on behalf of Krish. I guess the first one for Fusen, in terms of your general semiconductor end market, it's nice to see the sequential growth during the September quarter.

But just kind of curious, if we were to dig in a little bit further, in terms of the, I guess, utilization rates at your OSAT customers, I think last quarter you mentioned it would be reaching the high 70% range during September quarter. Did it reach that or exceed that? And I'm just kind of curious, do you still think 80% utilization rates are still the right threshold to think about for when your customers will add capacity? Or is the more historic 90% utilization rate still the right sort of threshold?

Lester Wong (CFO)

So Steven, it's Lester. Let me answer the question on utilization. So I think for the September quarter, the utilization rate differs in different regions, right, as well as in different end markets. So for example, in China, the utilization rate is over 80%, while for the rest of the world, it's probably in the mid-70s.

But it is, every last couple of quarters, it's been going up. So I think for general semi, utilization rate is also going up. And I think 80% is sort of the threshold we've always set where people start doing more capacity-wise.

Speaker 7

Okay, great. Thank you for that, Lester. And then just for my follow-up, in regards to the foundry customer win for the TCB APTURA tool, congratulations on that announcement. I'm just kind of curious, is that at a major timeline foundry? And also, can you give us a sense for the longer term or the opportunity for the APTURA sales next year and longer term for the time horizon for that?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Okay. The recent win, actually, was a multiple system PO. This is for the near-term production. Why we believe we actually have upside for the next year and onward?

Actually, we have not received a long-term forecast, but we do believe it can be significant for the future. So we probably will give you more updates probably early next year. But I think this concludes. Our effort actually was successful to qualify our products. And we believe a long-term will be good. So short term, I think we probably will update you in the next couple of quarters.

Speaker 7

And Fusen, just a quick follow-up to that. For that FTC win, are you guys the sole supplier for that solution, or are you sharing that business with another industry peer by chance?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Well, I think at the present moment, we are the ones to receive it.

We don't comment on future any possibility, but we are quite confident in our capability and also confident in the opportunity we have for the next couple of years or long term.

Speaker 7

Great. Thank you so much.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Tom Diffely of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Yes, good morning. Thanks for the question. Curious, just on the general semi business, how much did that recover during your fiscal 2024? And then what are your projections for fiscal 2025? Maybe you can put it in the context of where that market is kind of on a normal basis.

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

General semiconductor. So are you talking about? I'd like to know general semiconductor in FY 2025?

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Yeah, just kind of where we are in the cycle. I mean, obviously, two years ago, it troughed, and then it came up a bit last year.

And then your call for growth looks like again this year.

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Okay. So maybe I can just overview to tell you how market forecasts from industry forecasters and also our view. So the Q1, actually, we got 165. I think industry digestion looks like it'll take a little bit longer. But we do see our Q2 actually will be better than Q1. And industry forecasters actually believe next year unit growth will be about 7%-8% and approximately about 14% in revenue. This is from Gartner. And the growth in the semiconductor revenue driven by number one is AI. Number two is automotive. And a lot of people believe automotive may be already past the trough. The third one, maybe I answer your question, is general semi.

General semi, I think in 2025, the growth will be in IoT and also AI-edge devices, which is communication devices with AI, like AI-capable PC and the smartphone. So these few items added, people believe it's going to be 14% for the semiconductor revenue. So from our point of view, we got 165, and we do believe Q2 will be better. And as your question to Lester, the current iteration, I think average we look at about 77%, really not far away from 80%, which is triggered capacity addition. So talking about our products, talk about ball bonder first. Our ball bonder peaked at about $1 billion in FY 2021. But as you mentioned, I think recovery, we do see recovery in 2024 compared to 2023, but way up, way up by actually the auto weakness, right?

But our ball bonding in 2021, 2023, and 2024 actually is only average $300 million, give and take. So we believe our ball bonding has a lot of room to go. So we do expect second half 2025. Normally, it's our strong second half. We expect pre-COVID, our ball bonding running about 500-600. We do believe from our second half of 2025, we should run into what is a number. So to make a story short, we believe our ball bonding will be up more significantly in second half, mainly driven by China mature node capacity addition. These are 28 nanometers and above. China has a lot of capacity coming up. And also Southeast Asia, particularly in Malaysia, a lot of some demand will come to Malaysia. It is for China plus one strategy. So ball bonding, we believe, will be up.

And Wedge Bonder we discussed probably past the trough, we actually are quite optimistic to receive order in recent quarters. And we believe our TCB and TCPS will also go up, right? So that's a give and take of our view and the industrial forecaster view about FY 2025.

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Yeah, no, I appreciate the color. That's very helpful. And then as a follow-up, Lester, if you could just talk a little bit about the recovery from Project W you're getting in the first fiscal quarter here and how that compares to what the total charge-off was, that would be helpful.

Lester Wong (CFO)

Sure, sure. As you recall, in Q2, Project W was canceled by the customer, and we took an impairment in Q2.

So as we indicated in our remarks, we are very pleased that we've reached an agreement with the customer for the customer to reimburse a significant part of our impairment charges as reimbursement for our costs. And this reimbursement will be recognized in Q1, and it's already in our current GAAP and non-GAAP guidance. So we provide in our earnings release, Tom, at the back, there's a table that shows our anticipated non-GAAP items included in the outlook. And there's a 75 million item related to discontinued business claims and proceeds in that table, which is overwhelmingly related to Project W.

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Okay, great. Can you just remind us what the total impairment charge was in the second quarter?

Lester Wong (CFO)

$105 million.

Tom Diffely (Director Of Institutional Research)

Great. Okay. Very helpful. Thank you very much.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Dave Duley of Steelhead Securities. Please go ahead.

Dave Duley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Thanks for taking my questions and congratulations on the nice TCB win. I was curious, you mentioned several applications, I think, in the press release. But as far as your initial read on the situation, do you think you're going to be is this win at the foundry going to be more for chip on wafer or the wafer on the substrate? I think the chip on the wafer is kind of the higher value-added step. So I was just kind of curious if you've gotten one or two of these steps.

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Yeah, actually, to answer your question short, the application is for a fluxless qualification, but it's at the chip to wafer level. And this is a most advanced, probably chip to wafer application and use all fluxless. And all fluxless actually can qualify processes where both chip to substrate and chip to wafer.

But for this case, I think start with chip to wafer to qualify fluxless. But I think there will be numerous opportunities and numerous projects.

Dave Duley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Okay. And as far as will these be for mobile applications, or do you think these are going to be for high-performance compute AI applications?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

So I actually mentioned, I think this is probably the most advanced TCB process for the very high-end products.

Dave Duley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Okay. And then I was curious, you've made several comments during your prepared remarks and in the press release about a coordinated recovery in the general semiconductor market. So obviously, your utilization rates have improved. Have you started? Are the customers coming in and asking for slots or asking about availability for larger orders? What other signs are you seeing in the general semi business that gives you confidence that there's a recovery underway?

Lester Wong (CFO)

Well, Dave, I mean, you've mentioned one, right? Utilization rates across the board are in the high 70s in most end markets. And then on a regional basis, it's over 80 already in China. And it's, again, growing in the rest of the world. China has been strong, actually, over the last couple of quarters. And we believe that now the rest of the world is starting to catch up. I think they're starting to, for all the reasons that Fusen said, right, in terms of in China, there's a lot of fabs coming online, which means wafers, which obviously need to be packaged. And again, wire bonding is still the cheapest way of interconnection. I think in addition, we also are seeing macro recovery a little bit in the economy. Obviously, there's still a little bit of volatility out there.

But all in all, I think we are seeing a lot more customer interest both inside and outside of China.

Dave Duley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Okay, great. One more question for me is, you had a very robust gross margin in the quarter. I think it was just over 48%. And I was kind of curious. I've asked this question on previous conference calls. You've introduced a bunch of new products in the core wedge and wire bonder business that have higher margin profiles. I'm wondering, as we move into next year, what can we expect for the gross margin profile for the wire and wedge bonder business? Thank you.

Lester Wong (CFO)

Yeah. So for the overall corporate margin, I mean, we are still aiming towards 50%, right? And then you're right. We have started introducing higher gross margin products in both our ball and wedge bonder businesses. And now they are getting qualified.

And I think they're becoming a higher and higher percentage of our overall ball and wedge sales. So I think as we move further into fiscal year 2025, I think the margin will start expanding. And also, as we've mentioned many times before, Fusen is very focused on cost reduction efforts, which is still ongoing.

Dave Duley (Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. The next question is coming from Mayur Popuri of B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.

Speaker 8

Hi. Yeah, I'm actually calling on behalf of Craig Ellis. And I wanted to ask about something that you said to Tom earlier, which is that you kind of expect a stronger Q2 than Q1. That's sort of kind of been a theme across the board with this earnings season. Are there any dynamics that you see that lead you to believe that Q1 might be somewhat depressed unusually?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Q1, normally, most of the weakest quarter probably is Q1. Normally, I think seasonality happened in Q1, and the past three years is about 10% down. So this looks like a nice with that Q2, actually, we do have a few customers, actually, because of our schedule reason, I think already have a slot over there. So we do believe Q2 will be better than Q1. That's the number we are seeing right now.

Speaker 8

Okay. Thank you. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and then so another thing, obviously, auto and industrial has been picking up for, I guess, three consecutive quarters now. Do you kind of expect that linearity to continue into the next year? And do you think that we've sort of seen the trough of the cycle and now we're entering into a more sustainable expansion?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

I think it impacts us the most in auto. There are two products. One is ball bonder, one is wedge bonder. So all we can tell you is that we have actually believe the wedge bonder is recovering. And so is ball bonder. So in terms of linearity, sometimes wedge bonder, actually, we actually have a big customer both in the U.S. and also in China, two customers. The POs can actually be big. And so to achieve a linearity probably is not easy. But we do believe wedge bonder and auto industry will be doing well for 2025.

Speaker 8

Okay. Great. Thank you. And then just one last question. Congrats on the TCB Fluxless wins. The way that I'm kind of thinking about it is that it might relate to these leading-edge advanced packaging uses. Am I thinking about this the right way?

And what sort of end markets are carrying this order pickup?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Well, the end market, I mentioned I don't want to speak about customers' critical information. But we believe this is so critical. It's a most precision and reliability is very important. And would be at least moment is actually can be for many multiple industries, right? It can be for autonomous in the futures, can be for the high-end, high-power computing. So we believe this is really a typical application. And once qualified, this will run many, many years.

Speaker 8

Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's all I have. Thank you so much.

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Thank you.

Lester Wong (CFO)

Thanks.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, if you do have a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad at this time. The next question is coming from Charles Shi of Needham. Please go ahead.

Charles Shi (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Good evening, Fusen and Lester.

Congrats on the TCB announcement. I do have a few follow-ups on that. First, sounds like you are characterizing the order as a production order. Can you kind of confirm that? And the second, I do want to ask from the technical perspective, can you kind of speak to why the customer is transitioning to TCB? Because everybody heard about the story about the shrinking bump pitch, smaller bumps. But I do think maybe there's something there regarding the large die assembly that may require TCB. Can you kind of speak to that? And especially on the large die angle, is that part of the reasons why your tools are getting adopted? Thanks.

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Okay. I think the qualification I mentioned is for the fluxless. So fluxless, as you know, there are two technologies. We actually believe we have a very strong direction.

Actually, you know this. This is a solder process. This is a without solder process. But anyway, you really got to make a good contact without any oxide, right? So we believe our process, fluxless, is using actually localized delivery of formic acid vapor to clean the surface at the bonding stage. We believe this is the right approach. There's no wait time issue to clean. And we do believe the surface, the bonding between copper to copper is very, very good. And the other one actually is a use of plasma. And of course, large die is always in our roadmap, right? And we believe we can handle very, very large die. Because right now, as you know, the die is getting much bigger. And the whole wafer may be only a couple of dies, right? So it's a critical one.

So, I just want to let you know we have a capability for a large die. And we are very confident on our technology providing good reliability and good years. That's the reason. I think, yes, to answer your question, yes, this is for production.

Charles Shi (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Got it. So the current order, is it mostly the you said there's two technologies, right? That one's using plasma. The other one sounds like it's a different technology. Which one is shipping today?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Oh, okay. Of course, we are the one shipping. And we use Chemical Clean. It's a forming essence.

Charles Shi (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

Got it. Thank you very much. Maybe the other question regarding high bandwidth memory, any progress you can update us on the TCB for that particular market?

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Sure. So actually, we are quite excited. For the memory, this is going to be our focus. So we have two paths focused in memory.

One is vertical wire. And as we mentioned, this is for the first one is going to be for the low power DDR. And customer indication, preliminary, low volume production will happen probably end of this year. I'm sorry, end of 2025. And with vertical wire, same process, you actually can shrink about 35% over the form factor. So we are quite excited on that. Yeah. Next one actually is HBM. So we actually put quite a lot of effort engaging memory customers and to demonstrate our capability. So this is going to be our priority in FY 2025. I think probably in another quarter or two, we probably can give you an update. But to tell you, I think we are quite confident in our technical superiority. And we are going to put a good effort.

And we have a lot of work to study already and probably give you more update on next one or two quarters.

Charles Shi (Managing Director and Senior Analyst)

All right. Thanks, Fusen.

Fusen Chen (President and CEO)

Yeah. Thank you very much, Charles.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor back over to Mr. Elgindy for closing comments.

Joe Elgindy (Senior Director of Investor Relations)

Thank you, Donna. And thank you all for joining today's call. Over the coming quarter, we'll be presenting at several conferences and road shows. As always, please feel free to follow up directly with any additional questions. This concludes today's call. Have a great day, everyone.