Good day, welcome to IQE Results Conference Call. My name is Priscilla, and I'll be your coordinator for today's event. Please note this call is being recorded. I will now hand you over to your host, Americo, to begin today's conference. Please go ahead, sir. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, everybody. Thank you for some of you who are joining us live, I wanna thank those who will be watching us on video after this session. We have important information this morning to share with you. Mainly two topics on the agenda. One is our 2022 results. As you are all aware, last night we have announced a GBP 20 million placement. We will take you through the details of that operation as well. I wanna thank you very much for being with us today. Before we get into the details, I would like to reflect a little bit on my first year as the CEO of IQE. As you all remember, I joined early 2022. It has been a very, very exciting year, a lot has happened.
Let's take a moment and look at the year in review. I spent the first half of the year understanding the business and going into a lot of detail with our customers and partners. That led us to a refreshed strategy that we have announced in November. It is a very important strategy for us. It is the right strategy. Throughout my conversation with the market players and customers, I have got a great validation that the strategy is sound and very, very good for our future. To be able to capture the growth of the market, we have announced a strategy mainly around two key pillars. One is maintaining our positions into connect and sense and diversify into growth markets.
With the strategy, we have begun the transformation of the business, starting with the commercial engine that is absolutely critical for us to position the company for growth. With the commercial engine comes the customer engagement. As I said, it is important to reshape our relationship and be market-led and customer-centric. That led us to several key announcements in the year with long-term strategic partnership with key customers. Putting all that together, we have said we have seen a great execution of the business performance throughout the year. We have delivered great performance, given the market conditions. For some of you who are following our industry, you have seen the softness in the market that we will talk about as well. We have been driving our cost to the right position, improving our product mix, and being fiscally disciplined to deliver an improved margin.
Talking about the industry softness, for some of you, as I said, who are tracking the sector, it is a industry-wide downturn that we are experiencing. It isn't unique to IQE. We're gonna have to navigate through that softness. I think most industry experts are placing this downturn to be a temporary downturn, focused mainly in the last part of 2022 and 2023. Therefore, we are taking the right measures to be able to manage our business throughout the downturn with a very laser focus on implementing our strategy, which is the right one for the growth of the business. When we look at the short-term challenges of the industry, obviously, there's many factors that combine into this downturn, but it is by far caused by the high level of inventory that we see in the sector.
That level of inventory has been highlighted by many in the industry and can be traced back to the extended lockdown following the pandemic. Allowing us to navigate this challenging operating environment is one of the reasons for embarking in the fundraising that we announced yesterday afternoon. The GBP 30 million will ensure that we can meet our near-term liquidity requirement and deliver a sustainable balance sheet. It also gives us sufficient headroom in case this macro environment would persist into second half. As you know, our current forecast is a recovery into second half, but in case that recovery doesn't materialize, we wanna make sure that we have the balance sheet that allow us to navigate that as well.
Most exciting for me is that this placement will allow us to accelerate our strategy of diversification into GaN business, specifically for power electronics, and seed our position into microLED market, which is the next big market in the compound space. We all know those two markets are high-value, high-growth market and are at the core of our strategy, moving forward. If we take a step back, and we look at the industry as a whole. It is important to keep in mind that despite the downturn that we see, which is not new to the industry, right? This is an industry that has gone through cycles on a regular basis, even though this time is exacerbated by the COVID and its consequences.
We can't lose sight of the fact that this industry has always been a growing industry over the long period of time. It is forecast to double over the next 10 years. When you look at on the slide, we are currently at the red dot, which is a little dip. Contemplating the growth that's ahead of us from today to 2030, we can only be excited about the longer term of this industry. It is also important to keep in mind that the industry has shifted from design to manufacturing of semiconductor becoming more and more critical, as we have seen on the chip shortage that we experienced. I believe for the first time we have seen the cost of not having wafers or chips in the industry.
Many governments around the world or companies are increasing focus and investment into the manufacturing of semiconductor product and compound is a very, very good, is very well-positioned to capture that level of focus and investment across the world. We see that in Asia. We see it in the U.S. with CHIPS Act, we see it in Europe, and we look forward to the U.K. announcing also its semiconductor strategy in supporting the industry. We really hope that semiconductor manufacturing will be at the core of such a strategy. IQE is aligning itself with these trends, and our global footprint would allow us to capitalize on that growth while we are accelerating the growth into power electronics and future microLED markets. The $1 trillion is overall semiconductor market.
If I zoom into the compound space, it is a sector that is forecasted to grow even faster than the overall industry. When I look at the specific epitaxy wafers, which is where IQE plays, the growth is even higher. 22% projected growth for epi wafers. Based on our strategy that we outlined end of last year, we are positioning the company to really capture and address the total market of $4.6 billion. That means we are positioning ourselves not only to address the outsource market, but also to serve very large customers that today are maybe doing their own epitaxy, and we would like to be the strategic partner of choice of the global market moving forward. We have a strategy to do that, the strategy is really in two ways.
One, we maintain our strong positions into wireless and sensing, for which IQE is known to be the leader. We leverage our technology leadership, our customer relationship, our global footprint to scale into new growth market, which are power electronics and microLED display. We have at IQE three key advantages to be able to implement such a strategy. First, we have the most advanced technology portfolio when it comes to epitaxy with five material platforms in volume production. Secondly, we have a global footprint which put us unique. As I said, we are the only global pure play manufacturer. In today's geopolitical world, having a global footprint is one of the key strategic advantage of any semiconductor manufacturer. We can deliver a secure and resilient supply chain in the ecosystem by manufacturing products seamlessly in the U.S., in Europe, and in Taiwan.
Third, we have the ability to scale to serve the global market and large customers without the need to create a new fab. We can deliver 3x the wafer output within our four walls, which is a very key advantage in term of time to market and customer supply security that would allow us to deliver our strategy. Those three key strategic advantage position IQE to capture not only the current outsource market, as I said, but in our conversation with customers, it is the key value proposition for them to be able to serve their global customer base. To our focus, as I said, is implementing our strategy while we navigate our temporary downturn. The successful equity raise allow us to do exactly that. Let me quickly run through the details. We were very pleased to see how strong the take-up was.
It really reflects the commitment of our shareholders to the business and the recognition of the growth opportunity ahead for IQE. Two main reasons why this placement is so important, as I said earlier. Firstly, in term of liquidity and deleveraging, we need additional liquidity in the second half of this year because of the temporary downturn that the overall industry has experienced, not just IQE. we have agreed with our bank partner on revolving credit facility for us moving forward. That give us sufficient headroom that we need if the economic downturn were to persist in the second half of 2023. In addition to a better balance sheet, it allow us to accelerate our diversification strategy. We have forecast CapEx investment of approximately GBP 15 million this year. In this year and next.
It is important for that investment to be disciplined while we position the company for growth. That's why we focus on investing on the most attractive growth area, and that growth area is focused on GaN to serve the growing power electronics market. We also need to see the microLED market where we see a lot of interest from key customers. We have a diverse and rich customer pipeline for both of these markets. Obviously, we would also work with customers to fund the capacity when it comes to volume ramp to be able to deliver our commitment during the Capital Market Week of 3x revenue in the next 5 years. First, let's look at the financial performance of 2022. I will hand it over to Tim and then come back to you with some closing thoughts.
Thank you, Americo, and thank you all for joining the call today. I'm gonna take you through the preliminary financial results for FY 2022. Really resilient performance from IQE in a softening market for FY 2022. As we previously updated in our trading update, we were expecting 8% revenue growth on a reported basis. We came in just above that. As you can see, with 9% reported growth, which is approximately flat year-over-year on a constant currency basis. A solid performance in a softening environment. In terms of our profitability, we delivered savings in line with our efficiency objectives, which meant that we have a reported adjusted EBITDA margin of 14%, which is slightly above the prior year, 12%.
In terms of the bottom line profitability, this is affected by a goodwill impairment, a non-cash write down of the wireless business unit goodwill. This is really formulaic related to the current operating environment of the group, being based on a cash flow NPV, obviously with a soft period in the first years of that NPV, which gives us this formulaic write down, which is of course non-cash. On an adjusted basis, the EBIT of the group is GBP 3.6 million. Operating cash flow was solid but affected slightly by adverse working capital movements in the year, with a performance of GBP 8.9 delivered during the year. Let's break the performance down in terms of our segments. Starting with our wireless business unit, which started to experience the softening in Q4 last year.
If we break that down into the two key material systems, we have gallium arsenide, which is the power amplifier material in mobile handsets, and we have gallium nitride, which is the high-performance, high-efficiency material used in 5G communications. If we take gallium arsenide, first of all, this is most affected by the industry downturn, being related to smartphone handsets, which of course we've seen large inventory buildups in predominantly in the Android space. Here we're down 25% year-on-year on a reported basis, 32% on a constant currency basis. That was partly offset by the gallium nitride infrastructure materials business. Here we saw strength in the aerospace and security segments, up 59% on a reported basis and 43% on a constant currency basis.
Overall, we've got wireless business unit down 18% year-over-year on a constant currency basis. This was offset substantially by the Photonics business unit. Really here, the IQE portfolio working well to provide resilience in this environment. Photonics up 18% on a constant currency basis. When we break that down, we can see that VCSELs were very strong. These are our vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers used in the 3D sensing components of smartphone handsets. That part of the business up 29% on a reported basis, which is 17% on a constant currency basis. Here we diversified our customer base and are now delivering to two out of three of the key chip vendors within the key premium smartphone handset chain.
We also had strength in infrared, which is our advanced sensing materials business delivering into the aerospace and security sector. That was also up 17% on a constant currency basis. We also saw resurgence in indium phosphide, which is the material used in the fiber optic networks of datacomms, here up 21% on a constant currency basis. Just rounding off our segments. Our smaller segments is CMOS++. This is our silicon epitaxy business, which is important to the future integration of compound semiconductors on silicon. Here at roughly around GBP 3 million is the size of the business again in 2022. Let's move to CapEx and investments. Here we saw really disciplined control being exercised in FY 2022 in the context of the market softening.
Down just over a third on a year-on-year basis at GBP 9.4 million for property plant and equipment CapEx. We continue to invest in our R&D development. Remaining at the forefront of innovation is an important thing for us, GBP 3.8 million invested in intangibles for development. We also invested in our systems and processes to scale the business as we target our 3x growth over 5 years and our improvement in margins to over 30% EBITDA as set out in our Capital Markets Day investment in consistent, scalable, repeatable systems across our global footprint is really important to us. GBP 4.7 million invested in the year. In terms of cash flow, that results in GBP 15.7 million of adjusted net operating cash flow.
At the end of the year, we had GBP 11.6 million of cash in equivalents in the bank. The net debt figure at the end of last year was GBP 15.2 million. Just like to go into a bit more detail on the EBITDA bridge to set out the movement in profitability. This takes us from our adjusted EBITDA in constant currency, and takes us down to the reported after-tax loss. The key movements here really are the depreciation and amortization of the group of over GBP 25 million. The impairment of goodwill previously referenced. This is a non-cash write-down in the wireless business segment of GBP 62.7 million. We've also got the impairment of development costs related to distributed feedback lasers.
This is actually something we announced in last year's annual results, the actual accounting impact of this happened in FY 2022, so we're repeating here. We've got some restructuring costs flowing through here that relate to the group's global site optimization program. This is the closure of the Singapore site that was subscale. That was completed on time in the middle of 2022. We're on track as well with the closure of our Pennsylvania site by 2024 and the consolidation of that part of the business into our North Carolina site. With a few other movements, that gets us down to the reported after-tax loss of GBP 74.5 million. Let's move on to our current trading and outlook.
As Americo has set out, we are at the moment going through a period of industry downturn that is temporary and is not unique to IQE, is really part of the broad industry outlook at the moment. Here we can see that, you know, we do expect our revenues to be lower in the first half. We're expecting between GBP 50 million and GBP 56 million on a reported basis due to the industry downturn for the first half of 2023. And we're still expecting that that will return to year-on-year growth during the second half of 2023. In this context, we have strengthened our balance sheet as set out, and that allows us to diversify into the high-growth markets of power and display through expanding our GaN capacity, which is the relevant technology to both.
Our strategy has been to improve our balance sheet to do that. Really, there are three aspects of how we've done that. The first is to take all appropriate measures as a management team to recognize the environment that we're operating in. We've reduced our labor costs by about 10% for the full year for 2023, while maintaining all of the critical skills and capabilities that we have in IQE to help us grow out of the downturn. In total, we've reduced our overheads by about 7% on a forecast basis for the year, and that's despite inflationary pressures in several cost categories such as utilities and the bulk gases we use in production. We've taken measures to reduce travel and all discretionary spend. We've reduced our core CapEx spend on maintenance, health, and safety items and committed expenditure.
We've rephased some of our IT transformation that I've talked about today to preserve cash while we continue to deliver, albeit slightly slower, to make sure that we recognize the environment that we're in. We've also got some commercial options that we've exercised, which include the tool sales and renegotiation of certain commercial agreements. We've taken adequate necessary steps for ourselves as a management team in the environment. We've also worked with our relationship bank, HSBC, to agree new terms and extend our credit facility with them. This is a $35 million revolving credit facility with a tenor to May 2026. We have covenants agreed with the bank, but also some alleviations to those which enable us to navigate with safety through this environment.
We also have then completed our successful launch of this equity raise that we announced yesterday. That means that we're raising a further GBP 30 million via the placing, which includes director participation of GBP 2.5 million, and there's an additional GBP 3 million REX retail offering to existing shareholders in addition to the GBP 30 million. These three steps really strengthen the balance sheets of the group and give us the best possible position to navigate through the current environment, maintain our liquidity as a group. Enable us to continue investing in our diversification strategy and leave us very much on track to execute the strategy that we set out last year at the Capital Markets Day. I'll now hand you back to Americo, who's going to finish with closing remarks before we move to Q&A.
Thank you, Tim. Thank you very much for the details. As we said, despite this, short-term weakness in the market, we are positioning the company to be resilient to not only navigate such a downturn but also implement our strategy for growth. We have a very, very strong platform to do that. We are now building long-term agreements that recognize the pivotal role of manufacturing that we play in the semiconductor industry. The market, as I said, is set for a period of very high growth rate, particularly in the area where we diversify into, with power electronics and later microLED. Being the only pure play manufacturer for global footprint, we are really well-positioned to be able to play a vital role in this industry and becoming the champion of compound epitaxy manufacturing.
We are very dedicated, we are very focused, and we are improving our organizations, our business models, and our balance sheet to be able to do that. Now let's open it up for Q&A. We welcome questions and your answers.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question or make a contribution on today's call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause just for a moment to allow everyone an opportunity to signal for questions. We'll take our first question from Damindu Jayaweera from Peel Hunt. Please go ahead, sir. Your line is open.
Thank you very much. Firstly, congratulations for being on the front foot. Americo, I wanted to ask you a question on the GaN opportunity. When you kind of look at I was looking at Infineon's acquisition of GaN Systems, and you're going through that deck. Obviously, they align with the view you guys have about the GaN power opportunity specifically. It was interesting to see they talk about their internal capacity for epitaxy. Does that mean that in GaN right here, right now, a lot of the epitaxy is still insourced and there is very little outsourcing? Is that the opportunity you see on a go-forward basis?
Yeah, thank you for the question. I think the that acquisition highlighted how critical GaN power electronics is for the market. We have to understand that some of the energy crisis or climate issues can only be addressed at the technology revolution level. GaN is one of those, as well as silicon carbide in different segment of the market. We believe that the GaN ecosystem is really prone to a pure play outsourcing model like we see in the silicon world, because you have an ecosystem of fabless that needs manufacturing capabilities. Companies who are manufacturing their own epitaxy today would have the opportunity to come work with IQE, right? We are positioning ourself to deliver a resilient supply chain and capacity that would allow them to scale even faster than otherwise.
When I look at the geopolitics and some of the supply chain requirements, will allow IQE to deliver product very close to customers for the global market. We have a very large pipeline of customer that we are engaged with to be able to do exactly that, right? We wanna be able to give optionalities to customers who are doing their own epitaxy today so that it is, at the end of the day, more valuable to come scale with IQE than continue to insource, such growth of GaN system. There is a fantastic growth in that sector that is not yet addressed as we speak, right? On top of that, the fabless ecosystem that we believe will proliferate would also give us opportunity to strengthen our position in that market. We are looking at a dual strategy, right?
Up to market that is insourced today from IDMs and also serve the global fabless ecosystem.
Thanks, Americo. The second question I wanted to ask is, obviously in people's minds who are probably not looking at the other peers in the value chain, they will question how do you kind of get back or, you know, what evidence you have for getting back to growth in the second half. Could you perhaps remind us what others in the ecosystem are talking about? Because I am aware what, for example, what you see in the WIN Semiconductors numbers or what you would see in the commentary from Qorvo or even the adjacencies like TSMC. It would be helpful to get some color of what you hear from the industry and what gives this confidence for return to growth in the second half.
Sure. Thank you very much for the question. Yes, we have obviously a close relationship with several players in the ecosystem being our fabless customers, our foundry customers, or to some extent also our substrate partners, right? We scan the entire industry from U.S. to Taiwan to China, and we're aligning with our customers on the inventory levels. We already saw some news coming from the industry. You mentioned a few names here who have hinted that they already see recovery in this first half or early second half. What we monitor is the inventory level. What I hope is we're gonna be aligning with our customers to make sure that we manage inventory level at the right way in the sense where we resume orders in the second half as we forecast.
We do not wait too long, because if we do wait too long, we may go back to a situation where there's again shortage, right? If customers wait for too long until we deplete completely the inventory, we may be in the situation where we came from. We did not have enough wafer. At the moment, consensus is that the inventory burnout rate is pretty good. We would see, we already see in some cases demand coming back, as highlighted by a few customers publicly or a few players in the industry. We look at the inventory level by talking to our customers and all the ecosystem players.
Thanks, Americo. Maybe the last question I wanted to ask was for Tim. If I look at consensus forecasts out there for EBITDA, excluding the outliers, it seems people are forecasting just under GBP 7 million adjusted EBITDA for FY 2023. Just on rough math, on that GBP 7 million overhead cost saving, it looks like that EBITDA number is moving to kind of GBP 12 million-ish level. I just wanted to clarify if that math is correct, there is obviously the implication of the 150 million new shares and what it'll do to the earnings outlook. Thanks.
Hi, Dominde. Yes. Thank you. Your math is good as always. We've taken a number of steps, as set out in the presentation, to tackle the cost base in advance of, you know, discussions with the bank and coming to shareholders. It's a fair assumption there of the full year EBITDA that you make.
Thanks. That's all for me.
Thank you. Once again, if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. We will move on to Balajee Tirupati from Citi. Please go ahead. Your line is open.
Hi. Thanks for taking my questions. Two from my side, if I may. Could you share color on different drivers within your first half outlook? At this stage, while you expect a recovery in second half based on historically lower visibility, what will be the confidence level that you have based on conversations with customers and also messaging from some of the larger players which is suggesting a potential push out of recovery in some of the end consumer markets? Then I have a follow-up question.
Okay. Thanks, Balajee. I'll tackle the first part of that question, then Americo will give a bit more flavor on the customer and industry conversations that he's having. You know, the first half performance, we said back in March that we'd be GBP 30 million lower than the prior year. Last year was GBP 86 million, that puts us at GBP 56 million. We're currently saying GBP 50 million-GBP 56 million, that's based on a few remaining purchase orders that we need to close for the first half and some potential capacity constraints in our infrared part of the business, where actually order flow is very strong, related to a part of the industry that's obviously on a different cycle to things like the handset, and so on.
It could be that some of that revenue shifts from the first half into the second half. If it does, we're not changing our full year view. You know, we were just giving the range of where that could that could outturn it between GBP 50 million and GBP 56 million. As Americo I think has just set out really around, you know, the second half, there are a number of players that are, you know, giving signals that green shoots are starting to appear at the end of the first half and into the second half. Americo, anything further you'd say on that?
No. As I said earlier, we are monitoring the inventory level with our customers and foundry partners, Balajee. We are, you know, hoping and hearing that the growth would resume in the second half. If it happens to push out, I think we have created, you know, the way the balance sheet that would allow us to navigate the downturn if it happens to expand into next year. I have yet to hear from industry that this is an issue beyond 2023. I think the debate is more into, you know, at what phase of 2023 we see the growth, you know, coming back. I haven't heard yet it being 2024. We continue to monitor very carefully the situation in the inventory with customers.
Thank you for the reply. The follow-up question is on Photonics and VCSEL side. With supplying the two VCSEL chip customers, what is your view on share within key premium smartphone customer? At this point, do you have any visibility that you can share with us in terms of design for the upcoming model, whether the content, pixel content will be seen going up staying stable any color that you may have, may share with us?
Thanks, Balajee. Yeah, you can see, I think from our FY 2022 results that we've got real strength in our pixel performance for last year, which is really driven by that diversification of the customer base. I think that shows just how vital IQE is to that supply chain that we're supplying two out of the three supply chains. It's always challenging to work out exactly what share there is between the various aspects. It will vary between new products and legacy products, depending on different levels of qualification. We know that we've got very strong levels of qualification now across those two chip vendors. Our best guess is that we have either, you know, held or improved share in FY 2022, and we see nothing that will change that for FY 2023.
In terms of the look forward, we're not expecting any, you know, big changes in components that would affect revenue, you know, perhaps as in the past they have with chip size or so on. We don't see any of that this year. As you know, this supply chain is highly confidential, and therefore, we can't really say anything more than that.
If I may, ask one more question and, are you in position to comment on what have caused delays in publication of group financials and what this means on investment in accounting and internal control function going forward?
Really a couple of factors. I think that the audit regulation environment is causing audits to take longer. I don't think IQE is unique in that respect, so we've experienced some of that as well. The level of reviews that need to be conducted by audit firms these days and the, you know, the requirement for documentation to be fully complete before reporting and not completed afterwards. That's been a factor. Obviously this year, you know, we've taken steps both to renegotiate facilities with HSBC and also to undertake an equity raise. That, of course, takes time to put in place.
It's important, for shareholders' best interest that all of these things came together at the same time, so that we can provide the full picture, to shareholders with the balance sheet fully secured in, you know, both our base case and, you know, downside, scenario forecast as well. That's also a factor.
Understood. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. It appears there is no further questions on the conference call. I'd like to turn the conference over to webcast for any additional questions. Thank you.
Thank you. We do have a couple of additional questions on the webcast. The first comes from John Corridus at Numis. His first question is around updating on your efforts to win government grants in both the U.S. and U.K.
We, you know, as a, as a global player, as I said earlier, we are obviously working with different governments in term of semiconductor strategy, how to deploy capacity, technology onshore for the need. We are part of the CHIPS Act in the U.S. We have been also engaged with the U.K. government since I joined. We have spent a lot of time, you know, working on what could be a strategy, and we are looking forward to what that result would look like.
I think the U.K. has a very unique advantage in the global player space with the compound semiconductors, because when you look at how critical this technology and the semiconductor manufacturing has become, with IQE in the U.K., we have a unique opportunity to expand you know, the strategy based on compound and other technologies, right, to be able to serve the global market and be at the table of semiconductor at the global level. We are excited with what is going on in the U.S., in other jurisdiction, in E.U., and also we look forward to hear from the U.K. government.
Thank you. The second question from John Corridus at Numis is, he's giving you updates on the progress you've made in building IQE's commercial machine since the Capital Markets Day in November.
Sure. We have upgrade our talent. We have brought new executives, new one joining us, joined us last week. A very senior industry expert who can help us navigate the global market. We have also improved our commercial processes and strategies, our customer pipeline, our organizations to be market-focused with 3 business units as opposed to 1. We need to bring focus on the commercial engine to be able to not only engage with the big players, but, and really understand how we create value and how we capture value. Because we have a profitability target of 30% over the period of time, and that comes with value creation and value capture. That all has been, you know, going really well.
We see that translate into the, you know, long-term agreement we announced and a very large and diverse customer pipeline that we are working with.
Thank you, Americo. The next question is from Robert Sanders at Deutsche Bank. There are two questions, so I'll start with the first. In microLED, are you proposing to develop red, blue and green epi wafers for GaN? If you win business in microLED, will it involve customers prepaying the required capital spend?
Yeah, microLED is a fantastic market. It is an ecosystem information, right. We are involved at the core of the technologies. As we know, there are two technology pipeline. There's a pick and placement model where each color is on one wafer, right. RGB and then pick and placement on the color wafers or three in one. We have engaged with both technologies. Working with not only technology partners like we announced, but also end customer, right. Epitaxy is really, really important, if not critical on microLED. I'm sure Rob knows that. Therefore, we are positioning IQE to create and capture value, as I said earlier. We are able to develop on GaN and GaAs for the three colors. We will let the market know as we make progress in a short period of time.
We are making actually very good progress already, engage with customers. The capacity that is required to deliver to the full market for microLED doesn't exist today, right. I don't think it has been created anywhere. There's a business model that we are looking at with customers on how they can help us put that capacity in place so we can get the products on time in the marketplace. As I said in the Capital Markets Day, when it comes to capital investment for high volume production, that would lead us to 3x in 5 years, we will not fund that. We will work with customers to put that capacity in place to make sure that we have a secure demand from them, and also a great business model to share value.
Thanks, Americo. The second part to Robert's question was, please can you provide us an update with your deal with the Welsh Council regarding Newport and the terms of the lease in place?
Sure.
Yes. The Cardiff Capital Region is our leaseholder essentially for the Newport site. They've worked with us over the years very supportively to help IQE establish that really world-beating facility that we have there, which has huge expansion potential. Having redesigned potential layouts and previously said we could fit up to 100 tools in there, we now work out that we can fit up to 160 tools in there, which is a huge advantage and differentiator for what Americo's just talked about. How we build capacity that the industry needs for these hugely growing markets of power electronics and microLED, for example.
Just to give an idea on time to market advantage, we have at least two years time to market advantage with Newport versus anyone trying to do this on a greenfield, and that's if they know how to build such a facility in the first place. Hugely strategic facility. We're working with the Cardiff Capital Region, currently on the terms of that lease, as part of broader discussions with them on how they can support us and we can work with them to really foster semiconductors within South Wales, and extending that into the UK government conversations that we've talked about as well. Not in a position to talk about specifics today. We'll release those at the appropriate point.
We're getting a lot of support from the Cardiff Capital Region, which we do appreciate. Okay. I think that that is it for the questions that we have. Many thanks for your time today. If there are any other questions that come in, we'll follow up with those individually. Americo, would you like to say some final words?
Yes. Thank you so much for taking the time this morning or for some of you who would watch offline. As I said, we are in an industry that is not only important to the world economy, but which is frankly vital to every one of us. Therefore, it is important that we keep that in mind. The market is growing really fast. It is bumpy market sometimes, but that's true for everybody. It's not new. We need to structure the business to be able to cope with those bumps, but laser focus on implementing our strategy for growth. We have fantastic customer pipeline. We have great product portfolio. We have great engineers and business people in the company. I'm excited and I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Thank you so much, everybody.