ACM Research, Inc. Q3 FY2025 Earnings Call

Good day, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the ACM Research Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. As a reminder, we are recording today's call. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Steven Pelayo, Managing Director of the Blueshirt Group. Stephen, please go ahead.

Good day, everyone. Thank you for joining us to discuss third quarter 2025 results, which we released before the U.S. market opened today. The release is available on our website as well as from Newswire services. There is also a supplemental slide deck posted to the Investors section of our website that we will reference during our prepared remarks. On the call with me today are our CEO, Dr. David Wang; our CFO, Mark McKechnie; and Lisa Feng, our CFO of our operating subsidiary, ACM Shanghai. Before we continue, please turn to Slide 2. Let me remind you that the remarks made during this call may include predictions, estimates, or other information that might be considered forward-looking. These forward-looking statements represent ACM's current judgment for the future. However, they are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Those risks are described under Risk Factors and elsewhere in ACM's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Please do not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which reflect ACM's opinions only as of the date of this call. ACM is not obliged to update you on any revisions to these forward-looking statements. Certain financial results that we provide on this call will be on a non-GAAP basis, which excludes stock-based compensation and unrealized gains and losses on short-term investments. For our GAAP results and reconciliation between GAAP and non-GAAP amounts, you should refer to our earnings release, which is posted on the IR section of our website and on Slide 13. Also, unless otherwise noted, the following figures refer to the third quarter of 2025 and comparisons are with the third quarter of 2024. With that, I will now turn the call over to David Wang. David?

Thanks, Steven. Hello, everyone, and welcome to ACM's third quarter earnings conference call. I'm very pleased to report another strong quarter for ACM. Revenue grew 32% year-over-year to a new quarterly record, reflecting broader demand across our innovation product portfolio. Across the industry, AI and data center investment are accelerating semiconductor and wafer fab equipment spending. AI is also demanding new innovations, many of which have yet to be developed. We believe these trends are driving the market toward us. ACM's strategy remains focused on building a multiproduct portfolio of world-class tools that expand our service market and play a critical role in enabling the next generation of chip making. Our differentiated technology continues to raise the performance bar across both front-end and advanced packaging applications. For example, in advanced packaging, we are seeing strong global customer engagement in our proprietary horizontal plating technology for panel-level packaging, and we plan to ship our first system in the fourth quarter. In cleaning, our high-temperature SPM platform is reaching industry-leading performance as our proprietary nodule design achieves performance at 19 nanoparticle sites down to single-digit particle counts. We believe this will lead to higher product yield for our customers. Further, with no need to clean out the chamber, the tool requires significantly lower maintenance. This is truly a world-class tool, and our team has a roadmap to even lower particle size down to 70 nano, 50 nano, and 30 nano to support the next few generation technology nodes. In Track, we shipped our first KrF high-throughput Track platform this quarter, further broadening our reach into lithography-adjacent applications, which demonstrate ACM's ability to grow into new product categories. Together with innovations such as nitrogen bubbling, cleaning and etchers, and high-temperature furnace discussed last quarter, this advancement reflects ACM's commitment to continuous innovation and the tangible performance improvements we have delivered to customers. In September, our ACM Shanghai subsidiary completed its second capital raising on STAR Market, raising net proceeds of approximately $623 million. ACM has the technology, the customers, the capacity, and global reach and now additional capital to pursue our mission to become a key supplier to major global semiconductor producers. These funds strengthen our balance sheet and will be used for additional investments in our Lingang mini-line and to expand our global production capacity. We also plan to accelerate our R&D investment. This will advance our existing cleaning and electroplating tools for next-generation processes. It will also speed up the development of our new product categories, including furnace, PECVD, Track, and panel-level packaging tools. And we're also investing in new products that we have not yet announced. ACM is committed to world-class products for both China and global customers. Our tools enable next-generation device architecture and help solve our customers' complex process challenges across front and back-end applications. We have world-class technology and a strong IP position. Customers around the world come to us for our technology, rather than for low price. We believe this is the right combination to grow our business and maintain our gross margin targets. We feel that ACM is now at an inflection point in which innovation will win the game and drive a significant shift in market share. Now on to our business results. Please turn to Slide 3. For the third quarter of 2025, we delivered revenue of $269 million, up 32% year-over-year. Shipments were $263 million, up 1% year-over-year. Gross margin was 42.1%. This was at the low end of our target due in part to product mix, inventory provisions, and other adjustments. There's no change to our target model range of 42% to 48%. We ended the quarter with net cash of $811 million versus $206 million last quarter and $259 million at the year-end of 2024. Now I will provide detail on product. Please turn to Slide 4. Revenue from single-wafer cleaning, Tahoe, and semi-critical cleaning tools grew 13% and represented 68% of total revenue. We believe our top-bottom cleaning portfolio is world-class and put us in a strong position to gain additional share both in China and expand to global markets. The 13% year-over-year growth was mainly from our traditional cleaning product. The contribution from our newer cleaning line, including single-wafer SPM, Tahoe, and semi-critical CO2, is still fairly small. We expect this new platform, especially SPM to contribute more revenue in 2026 and beyond. We estimate an incremental opportunity of more than $1 billion for those new cleaning products from the Mainland China market alone. We remain confident in our target for 60% market share in the China market, and we expect higher growth rates for cleaning next year and beyond. Revenue from ECP, furnace, and other technologies grew 73% and represented 22% of total revenue. We had a record revenue quarter for ECP front-end tools, which represent about 60% of the mix for this group. This group, including our MAP, MAP+, ECP 3D, and ECP G3 products, all of which grew from last year; ECP back-end tools were about 40% of the mix for the quarter. Revenue from furnace was small for the quarter and year-to-date. That said, we are making good technical progress across a range of customers and multiple product offerings, including our ultra-high temperature new furnace, which operates at more than 1,250 degrees Celsius, our LPCVD oxidation, and ALD for both thermal and plasma. We continue to focus on qualification at key customers, and we anticipate incremental revenue contribution from furnace in 2026. And as I noted earlier, we are seeing very strong interest in our panel-level plating tool for advanced packaging from both China and global customers. We will ship our first panel-level packaging tool in Q4. Revenue for advanced packaging, which excludes ECP but including service and sales, was up 231% and represents 10% of revenue. About two-thirds of this group for this quarter includes small tools for advanced packaging. This includes coder, developer, etcher, steeper, and wafer-level packaging tools that run around $50,000 to $1 million each. We had a good contribution this quarter from a handful of different customers. Although we include plating products for advanced packaging in the ECP group and the combination is very powerful, it provides ACM with valuable insight into the challenges of next-generation packaging as AI drives the industry toward 2.5D and 3D integration, stacking die with through silicon via TSV and integrated memory and logic in a single package. We also shipped advanced packaging tools in Q3 to two new customers in the U.S., and we expect the installation and then true acceptance in the next couple of quarters. We are making good progress with our new Track and PECVD platforms. I already mentioned the shipment of our first KrF Track tool. We believe our high throughput design positions this platform to compete effectively with incremental suppliers. Our proprietary PECVD platform with three trucks per chamber gives the flexibility to support a wide range of processes with the same hardware. We feel good about our positioning as the team continues to work through the technical details with a few tools in our Lingang mini-lab running wafer tests and the EVA tools planned to ship in the near term. To close on product, ACM's culture of innovation continues to deliver industry-leading performance across the broader portfolio. Customer engagement is deepening as the chip makers look for partners that can enable their next-generation processes. Please turn to Slide 6. Global WFE demand continues to be fueled by investment in AI and data center infrastructure, particularly in advanced logic and memory, while the China market, in our view, remains stable. Last quarter, we increased our long-term revenue target to $4 billion, supported by an estimated $2.5 billion contribution from China and $1.5 billion from global markets. Next, let me provide an update on our production facility. First is Lingang. Please turn to Slide 8. Our new Lingang production and R&D center is now fully up and running. The site's first building is already in volume production, while the secondary building provides additional room for future expansion. Together, the two buildings can support up to $3 billion in annual output, positioning ACM to meet growing customer demand and support our long-term growth plans. We plan to allocate part of the proceeds from ACM Shanghai's second capital raising to expand our mini-line at Lingang to strengthen our process development capability and enable on-site customer evaluation under fab-like conditions. This will accelerate product validation, shorten development cycles, and enhance collaboration with key customers as we're expanding our portfolio of next-generation tools. Turning to our Oregon site. Please turn to Slide 9. This facility will allow customers to test wafers locally on ACM tools and will serve as our initial base for production and technology development in the United States. Our global customers are encouraged by our commitment, which we believe will help them to choose ACM as a key supplier to scale production. Now I will provide our outlook for the full year 2025. Please turn to Slide 10. We have narrowed our 2025 revenue outlook to a range of $875 million to $925 million versus the prior range of $850 million to $950 million. This implies 15% year-over-year growth at the midpoint. We made greater progress with several major product lines this year, including single-wafer SPM, Tahoe panel-level plating, furnace, Track, and PECVD. We believe these new products provide a solid foundation for multiple major new product cycles for continued growth in the coming years. Now let me turn the call over to our CFO, Mark, who will review details of our third quarter results. Mark, please?

Thank you, David, and good day, everyone. Please turn to Slide 11. Unless I note otherwise, I will refer to non-GAAP financial measures, which exclude stock-based compensation and unrealized gains/losses on short-term investments. A reconciliation of these non-GAAP measures to comparable GAAP measures is included in our earnings release. Unless otherwise noted, the following figures refer to the third quarter of 2025 and comparisons are with the third quarter of 2024. I'll now provide financial highlights. Revenue was $269.2 million, up 32%. Total shipments were $263.1 million, up 28% sequentially and up 0.7% year-over-year. Gross margin was 42.1% versus 51.6%. This is the low end of our target model. Adding color to David's earlier remarks, we attribute this to two key factors. First, product mix. Our Q3 sales included a high number of smaller front-end tools, which had tighter margins, and that contributed about 200 basis points of headwind to the gross margin. Second, we had a higher level of inventory provisions and other adjustments, which hit our COGS for the quarter and contributed about a 300 basis point negative impact. I want to reiterate that there is no change to our target model of 42% to 48%. ACM is fully committed to developing world-class tools that enable our customers to scale production of leading-edge semiconductor devices. We believe this creates a healthy pricing environment for our tools, which combined with an efficient cost structure results in good profitability. Operating expenses were $76.9 million, up 56.3%. R&D was 14% of sales, sales and marketing was 7.7% of sales, and G&A was 6.9% of sales. For 2025, we continue to plan for R&D in the 14% to 16% range, sales and marketing in the 8% range, and G&A in the 6% range. Operating income was $36.5 million, down 34.9%. Operating margin was 13.6% versus 27.5%. Income tax expense was $2.9 million versus $4 million. For 2025, we now expect our effective tax range to be in the 7% to 8% range. Net income attributable to ACM Research was $24.8 million versus $42.4 million. Net income per diluted share was $0.36 versus $0.63. Our non-GAAP net income excluded $7.6 million in stock-based compensation expense for the third quarter and $18.7 million in unrealized gains on short-term investments. I remind the analysts that as a result of the second capital raise of $632 million net by our subsidiary, ACM's ownership in ACM Shanghai is now 74.6% versus 81.1% at the end of last quarter. I will now review selected balance sheet and cash flow items. Cash and cash equivalents, restricted cash, and time deposits were $1.1 billion at the end of the third quarter versus $483.9 million at the end of the second quarter. Net cash, which excludes the short-term and long-term debt, was $811 million or about $12 per share versus $205.8 million at the end of the second quarter. Total inventory net was $676.4 million versus $648.3 million at the end of the second quarter. Raw materials were $326.2 million, up $40.6 million quarter-over-quarter. We made additional strategic purchases to support production plans and mitigate any potential supply chain risk. Work in progress was $59.5 million, down $1.2 million quarter-on-quarter. Finished goods inventory was $290.7 million, down $11.3 million quarter-over-quarter. Finished goods inventory primarily consists of first tools under evaluation at our customer sites, along with finished goods located at ACM's facilities. Cash flow used by operations was $4.6 million for the third quarter and $44.4 million year-to-date. Capital expenditures were $43.2 million. For the full year, we expect to spend about $60 million to $70 million in capital expenditures. That concludes our prepared remarks. Let's open the call for any questions that you may have. Operator, please open up the call for questions.

Our first question comes from the line of Suji Desilva from ROTH Capital.

David and Mark, congrats on the progress here. Can you talk about the shipments and the growth there? Are there any factors, puts and takes in terms of what we should expect in terms of your visibility in the next four quarters?

Yes. For shipments, we see that there are some customers asking for delays for maybe the first quarter of next year. And also certain parts are short, right? We cannot fully complete the orders as a manufacturer final testing. But those products will probably still get into the first quarter shipments, and we're still expecting shipments to continue to grow next year.

These part shortages, David, how long do you expect that to persist? Is that a multi-quarter effect? Or is that short term?

It's not really. There are certain parts we're using right now, and we've replaced some parts. We're looking for a new supplier. Those things have been qualified in their customer process. Once those parts are qualified, then we can use more of the, I want to say, domestically made parts in China. So that's probably a portion of the fact there.

Yes, one other thing I'd add to the shipments for the quarter and even for the year, we talked about this before, but some of the newer products that we would be shipping that David talked about in his prepared remarks, some of those probably fell into next year versus this year.

Okay. Helps Mark. And then my final question is on the panel tools. Can you talk about the opportunity as you ramp maybe into the HBM memory or AI memory opportunity, how much that can grow as a percent of revenues and how quickly that can ramp?

Well, okay. Panel packaging, right? Suji? Well, the panel has been really hard this year, especially a major customer in Taiwan is really promoting the panel business. We believe panel is a way to solve the large area AI chip, right, packaging with HBM together. So all the wafer level has a lot of, I call it, area. So with the efficiency of the using the area. So panel packaging, one key is plating technology, right? I should say a lot of people in the copper plating for panel is a vertical style. And we are probably the first to propose horizontal cover plating for the panel, which also we got the 3D Insight award, Innovation Technology award from the USA. We believe we really have a good solution and they can plate their panel uniformly and there will be a fill requirement of all this either 310x310 or 515x510. By the way, we're going to ship one of the panel plating tools in the fourth quarter. And also, we're engaging with multiple customers for the panel packaging business in Taiwan and U.S. and also in Mainland China.

And our next question comes from the line of Charles Shi from Needham & Company.

A couple of questions here. The first one, a follow-up to Suji's question on shipment. So it sounds like it's more of a customer push out and partly due to parts shortage. And it sounds like the implied message seems like it's not a reflection of the end market demand. But I wonder, can you kind of quantify a little bit what's the expectation for Q4 shipment? And maybe on a full-year basis as well, it looks like the shipment is probably going to be down this year. This is probably the first time in many years that your shipment is down on a full-year basis.

David, do you want to take that? Or you want me to start on that?

Go ahead, Mark.

Yes, Charles, so I think your read is good. We're not really making a call on the end markets here. It's hard to say company-specific versus end market. But yes, in terms of our shipments, Q4 will probably be down from Q3. So you could have a full year that would be down year-on-year. And that is different than what we had expected. I think I would point out that shipments were pretty heavy last year, as we know. Some of the reasons we talked about for the deferment of shipments, we should start seeing those pick back up in the first half of next year. I think David in his prepared remarks talked about an inflection point where we're still shipping a lot of our current products, and a lot of newer products we expect to really start kicking in and contributing more next year, the SPM, the furnace, and this panel-level packaging product line.

Yes, actually, including we're probably shipping a few PECVD tools, and we see that will definitely contribute revenue next year. So I think it's kind of we're at an inflection point, right, and the new products come out. And also, we're expecting some new cleaning tools to come out, too, contributing to our shipment and revenue, especially as I mentioned, this proprietary design and SPM special nozzle which is yielding very excellent results. We think we'll continue to gain a lot of market share for the SPM process.

Got it. I do have a question a little bit later around the innovation, some of the comments you made, David, around also proprietary design, etc. Before that, maybe a question on the 300 basis point impact from inventory write-down. Mark, it wasn't clear to me what's the reason for writing down, if my math is right, around $8 million-ish of the COGS of the inventory. And may I ask if the write-down is related to inventory you have at your own facility or this is about some of the write-down of the evaluation tools at your customer sites? And if the latter, what's the reason for that?

Yes. No, thanks for the question, Charles, on that. So inventory, you always have a pretty thorough process internally to kind of value the inventory on your books. A big piece of it is related to the aging of some of our raw materials. It's interesting; we think that it’s just kind of a formula you apply to the age profile of your raw materials. On the other side, there were some finished goods that we took a write-down on. And these were mostly at our own internal facilities. We're not really disclosing internal versus end customers.

Great. So for my last question, we've touched on this before, but you've talked a lot about innovation and developing better products to surpass your global competitors and gain market share. However, it seems that domestic customers are primarily looking to simply match the global standards with the tools they currently have, influenced by various factors such as restrictions and the need for self-sufficiency. At this point, focusing heavily on product innovation, do you think you might be overlooking some short-term opportunities? I understand your perspective on long-term success, but do you believe that because your tool, despite its better performance, may not align with the global standards that your customers are accustomed to, it could potentially lead to a loss of business in the near term?

Yes. Actually, we are winning in the short term. In other words, I give this example, this high-temperature SPM process, right? And with our special proprietary design, we can really control all the high-temperature SPM splash out of the chamber and also the vapor into that environment. Therefore, we control the environment very well. That's why I said our product can reduce particles down to a single-digit number, between less than five. So we are better than even top-tier players today in the SPM process. Also, because of the controlled environment, we think that even down to 70 nano, 50 nano, even 30 nano, we can control better. So to answer your question, yes, there are certain domestic players going there or other first-tier tool vendors still setting up in China, but we're achieving the best performance. We think that customers in China or outside China still desire the best performance, right? As we move to small geometries, particle counts matter. So that's why we think this gives us a solid edge to gain market share, both in China and outside China. We strongly believe our innovative products are heavily patented in China as well as in global semiconductor regions. We are confident that nobody will copy our proprietary technology or patented technology. That's why we have the confidence to maintain and continue to increase our market share and gross margin. I still think AI is driving a lot of innovation, and customers desire new technology. Those customers may prefer more advanced technology over low price, right? So that's a strong point. Also, a lot of our existing products cannot meet customers' future requirements, which is another reason we are confident in our tool.

This does conclude the question-and-answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Steven Pelayo for any further remarks.

Great. Thank you. Before we conclude, I just want to give everyone a quick reminder on our upcoming investor conferences. On November 19, we'll present at the 14th Annual ROTH Technology Conference in New York City. On December 3, we will present at the UBS Global Technology and AI Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. On December 16, we will present at the 14th Annual New York City Summit in New York City. And then on January 15, we will join the 28th Annual Needham Growth Conference virtually for our presentation and one-on-one meetings. Attendance at the conferences are by invitation only. For interested investors, please contact your respective sales representative to register and schedule one-on-one meetings with management. This concludes the call. You may now disconnect. Take care.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.