are anticipated to drive the majority of our revenue growth and account for well over 40% of the segment sales in the fourth quarter of 2026. At the same time, we remain disciplined on the SFS side of the business, where mature node demand has yet to meaningfully recover, and we are managing costs and working capital accordingly. The outlook provided today during our call and in our earnings release is based on an assumed exchange rate between the United States dollar and foreign currencies. Changes in the value of foreign currencies in relation to the U.S. dollar could cause the actual results to differ from expectations. And I will now turn the call over to the operator for questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. If you are using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. At this time, we will pause momentarily to assemble our roster. Your first question comes from Craig Irwin with Roth Capital Partners.

Hey, guys. Andrew on for Craig. Congrats on the progress. First one for me, he had a nice jump in a TPS backlog. Can you kind of just help us understand how long you kind of expect a backlog to convert to revenue and the timing there?

Primarily over our fiscal, we're going into, this is our fiscal fourth quarter. We're expecting it to carry into primarily first quarter and some into the second quarter of our fiscal year 27.

Perfect. Understood. And then second from me, just within your existing silicon carbide customers, can you remind us kind of what the mix is currently of EV versus defense, medical? any other industrial customers and maybe any pockets you do see potential areas for growth?

Yeah. And I kind of alluded to this. We've seen a marked decline in silicon carbide demand. And I'd say it's really de minimis at this point. And I don't really envision a meaningful recovery in demand for our silicon carbide products. We've really de-emphasized that going forward and, you know, restructured the business accordingly and really have the majority of our effort continues to focus on driving growth in our AI infrastructure equipment, for AI infrastructure equipment. And then, again, developing our specialty chemicals business and our parts in service in the mature world. That's where we see the big opportunities. So I really don't, you know, really we don't focus a lot of time on what's happening in silicon carbide anymore.

I understand. Well, thanks for taking my questions, and I'll hop back into Q. All right. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Scott Buck with Titan Partners.

Hi. Good afternoon, guys. Just kind of a follow-up on the backlog. I'm curious how much of that uptick maybe a few large hyperscaler or OSAT orders versus a more kind of broad step up? Just trying to understand what, you know, how bumpy that is.

So we, yeah, no, we're, you know, our equipment is agnostic in terms of what, where it ends up in terms of the, We're shipping to the OSATs and we're shipping to major OEMs, and it really doesn't matter which hyperscaler it goes into. And frankly, our equipment would also be used across the spectrum, whether you're talking, you know, all the various GPU, TPU applications would all use the same equipment. So we aren't really tied. We're tied really to overall demand in these infrastructure buildouts, not necessarily specific to any one player or customer.

Okay, that's helpful, Bob. And then I wanted to ask about the Q4 margin guide. It looks like you're guiding revenue flat to up, but margin came in at 15%. EBITDA margin came in at 15% in the third quarter, but the language suggests kind of low to mid-teens. That seems to imply maybe a margin step down, or maybe that's just some conservatism. How can you be thinking about that?

You know, again, it always depends a lot on mix. But, again, when we say low teens, 13 is the first number in the – right? right? It's not 11 or 12. Those aren't teens. So we think of 15 kind of being in that low to mid teens range. That's how we think about it. Okay.

I'm nitpicking here, I guess. And then last, I was hoping to maybe get a little bit more color on capital deployment, given the balance sheet strength. What does the M&A environment look like? Would something make sense? Or how do you think about, you know, kind of prioritizing things organically?

Yeah. So, yeah. So our, you know, we've, we've got these, I think, very strong tailwinds, obviously associated with, with AI infrastructure build outs. We would, our, our, our vision for the future, our strategy for the future is really to try to expand what we, our participation. So So that's one area where we would look to potentially deploy capital. And, again, whenever anybody asks me about M&A, I say maybe because there's a lot of things that have to be in place for it to make sense. When we say synergistic acquisitions, one of the key criteria for us is making sure that anything we bring into the fold does create good return on invested capital. So you might imagine some things we would explore are, you know, capabilities we can build on to expand our capability and AI. You could potentially envision things where, you know, we did a lot to really change our financials through business, changing our business models. So to the extent there were opportunities to bring things in where we could create value by, you know, implementing a similar business model, that could be interesting. So I would characterize it as, you know, I'd say, you know, it's an addition to what we see as strong organic growth, but, you know, it will depend on what's available at what kind of valuations in terms of how we execute on that in the next coming quarters.

That makes a lot of sense. Well, I appreciate the added color, guys. Thank you for the time.

Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from George Marema with Parado Ventures.

Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Bob, I was wondering if you could give a little more color on this. You said you got a first order on a cooling application. Can you kind of expand on that a little bit?

Yeah, it's basically direct. The application is really geared towards removing heat directly from the semiconductors. You know, it's an efficient way. It's a relatively new trend, we believe, in the industry. And one of our customers for equipment is basically building their process around our equipment to do so. So it's an interesting application. It's similar to what we were doing back when there was a lot of build-out of EV. You know, EV was a booming business. We were selling equipment that was used to do heat exchangers for EV batteries, and this is very similar technology that's being applied to cooling semiconductors and data centers.

Would you characterize the opportunity as like a small little niche thing or more than that?

It's too early to tell, George. I think it's an interesting, you know, we've talked about this before. I mentioned that, you know, one of our goals is really to expand what we do in the infrastructure space. I think this was a success story we thought was important in terms of our efforts starting to pay off in this pivot. But I can't really characterize how big this is going to be. It's going to depend a lot on how successful our customer is here. And then you mentioned you have a show in September to introduce some products. um about approximately how soon after the show will you start taking orders on these products yeah usually um we're going to get exposure uh i mean we'll be we'll be ready to start taking orders uh we'll have a better sense for that probably uh at the next quarterly call after we've introduced to see you know how quickly customers are ready to to move on things um But until we actually introduce it, it's not something we know up front, George. But I think we can provide more color in terms of what we see as the roadmap.

Go ahead, George.

How long would it take to be able to produce the actual machine in production, the ship? yes yeah so right right now this is similar to the platforms we're producing uh with with typical lead times of six to eight weeks i suspect will be on the high end maybe a little bit north of that but i don't i don't think it'll be i think with a little bit of uh a little bit of time it should fall within our our normal lead times uh but it may take it may take uh you know six nine months before the cycle times get to that point okay and then um how's the progress going on the chemical business i mean we've had some wins uh uh yeah i mean yeah we've talked about some of those we have a pipeline but it's uh you know we're still it it takes it takes time right so we've built the pipeline. We've got a lot of energy right now going towards replicating some of those successes with other customers. So we're expecting to see some incremental improvement in the coming quarters from those efforts. But it's, you know, it's, again, we've focused really on getting some momentum behind that pipeline right now.

Okay. Thanks, Bob.

All right. Thanks, George. This concludes today's question and answer session. I would now like to turn the conference back over to management for any closing remarks.

Well, thank you, Operator. In closing, I want to thank everybody for joining our earnings call today. We look forward to seeing some of you later this month at the Canaccord Genuity Conference in Boston. And thanks again for your continued support of Amtech Systems. Have a good evening.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.