All right. Good afternoon to you in Paris. Good afternoon, good morning, and good evening for those who are listening online. Thank you everyone for attending our fiscal year 2024 results presentation. Very excited to have you with us today. The entire management is here to discuss our achievements and of course, talk about our future. Before we start, we'll leave you with a second with a disclaimer.
You, yeah. There you go. It's a long one. Okay, thank you. Okay. Okay, just a second. All right, here we go. So here's the agenda. So we have a lot to cover today. So if you know us, you know that typically we organize a Capital Markets Day every two years. So the last Capital Markets Day was last year, so today is not, properly speaking, a Capital Markets Day. We want to focus on the fiscal year 2024 results. However, given all the important things that happened to us and to the industry over the last 12 months, we felt that it would be a good idea to have a quick checkpoint on some of our key activities in terms of strategy, innovation, our three divisions, operations, of course.
So without further due, it's now my pleasure to welcome Pierre Barnabé, our Chief Executive Officer. Welcome, Pierre.
Thank you. Thank you, Steve, and good afternoon to all of you in, in Paris, and, thanks, thank you for those who are joining us online for our fiscal year 2024 results presentation. Today is a good opportunity for all of us to explain how we are navigating the current environment and how we are strengthening our fundamentals to deliver our sustainable growth story as the market progressively rebounds. I will start this presentation by sharing the key elements from our fiscal year 2024, and my vision for the years to come. As you know, fiscal year 2024 was a challenging year, impacted by a severe inventory correction across the smartphone supply chain. We are going through this challenging short-term environment with resilience and agility.
That means strengthening our model, starting with our customers, pushing the diversification of our product portfolio, optimizing our cost structure, and securing future growth through sustained investment in R&D. Our fundamentals are extremely robust, and we have a clear vision for mid-term ambition to reach around $2 billion with significant EBITDA margin improvement, potentially towards 40%. Let's start with a look at the last fiscal year. Our revenue performance, down 10% year-on-year, essentially reflects the ongoing inventory correction on RF-SOI across the smartphone value chain. At 34%, our EBITDA margin proves our resilience in the context of lower revenue. And finally, our lower operating cash flow reflects higher working capital needs, in line with our delivery profile and our growing supplier base. Let's have a look at our division.
In Mobile communication, the growing penetration of FD-SOI and the acceleration in POI were offset by the impact of the ongoing RF-SOI inventory correction in the smartphone supply chain. In automotive and industrial, our strong growth continued to be supported by two powerful trends: digitalization and electrification, driving the strong momentum and the expansion of our product portfolio. In smart devices, the short-term softness in data center investment across the market and lower smartphone volumes for imager impacted our revenue generation. Across these three markets, the penetration of our product continues to rise, and our market shares remains very strong. What does it means for our outlook? In fiscal year 2025, we expect our revenue to be flat-... with inventory corrections among our direct customers expected to wait on our H1 2025 revenue.
An EBITDA margin around 35%, leveraging the positive contribution, positive contribution margin of new products and strict cost control. Our CapEx at around EUR 250 million, reflecting our agility in deploying capacity to match customer demand. The current environment is challenging. We are using it as an opportunity to strengthen our foundation and to deploy our sustainable and profitable growth model as the ongoing inventory correction ends. More concretely, we are focused on investing in innovation and deploying capacity with agility, accelerating our diversification, strengthening our customer intimacy, growing our client base, and accelerating product adoption. Talking about product portfolio, we continue to develop a comprehensive range of silicon on insulator solutions. While some of them have become an undisputed standard, we continue to invest in R&D to strengthen our leadership in SOI solutions.
On these solid foundations, we have decided to develop specific compound products for diverse applications, such as POI for filter product, showing significant traction, SmartSiC for the powertrain to enable the electrification of the vehicles. We have a clear vision: to go beyond these strong assets. We leverage our expertise to ramp up compound manufacturing and develop new products. We have a strong ambition to expand our leadership and become a standard on new engineered substrate and product materials. The expansion of our product portfolio is a stronger driver behind the diversification of our customer base. Our SOI portfolio is qualified or in development with all foundries and IDMs to address our three end markets with a strong segment share around 70%. On compound semiconductors, our customers are more numerous and diversified. They see us as a strong innovation powerhouse that enables breakthrough innovation.
Every quarter, we are engaging with a growing number of customers. Today, we are serving 50% more customers than in fiscal year 2021. We continue to strengthen our sustainable and profitable growth model. Our success starts in our ability to innovate at the edge of physics and to produce in high volumes with both quality and competitiveness. This strong intimacy between innovation and operation enables our division to deliver value to customers across the industry. Ultimately, this value creation benefits all our stakeholders, employees, shareholders, suppliers and partners, communities, and of course, our planet. In this regard, we continue to deploy our sustainable model. Sustainability is a fundamental element of our strategy that matters a lot to me. On water management, we have recently announced a new industrial installation, allowing to significantly increase the proportion of water that can be reused in our industrial processes.
On climate, we are on track with our CO2 emission reduction targets, and we have passed the inflection point of the curve. Our Scope 1 and 2 emissions in calendar year 2023 are down 15% year-on-year in absolute terms, and already 3% below the SBTi target. Another very important topic is our people. We continue our efforts to make Soitec a workplace that attracts and develops its talent, emphasizing internal promotion and leading the industry on diversity achievements. Finally, on governance, we continue to raise the bar to reach industry leading practices and standards. On that note, our board of directors decided to propose the appointment of Frédéric Lissalde for a three-year term as director at the next annual general meeting.
Frédéric will bring experience at the helm of a global industrial company, as well as a deep knowledge of the challenges around the transformation of the global automotive sector. We believe we have a fantastic ESG roadmap, and we are convinced we are taking the right actions to ensure the value we create is sustainable. As a proof point, I'm proud to share that we have improved our MSCI ESG rating from B to A in three years, acknowledging our steady efforts. The strong fundamental behind our value creation model give us great confidence in our $2 billion revenue midterm ambition. How we get there? Mobile communications will continue to grow significantly, contributing to 50% of our bridge to $2 billion. We capitalize on the ongoing rebound of the smartphone market and the higher share of premium phones.
We also see more innovation, both in terms of data rate and artificial intelligence, and higher content growth for Soitec. Our RF-SOI will benefit from the end of the inventory correction, with our customers returning to significant growth, and FD-SOI from more innovation. In addition, POI design wins for filters continue to increase, fueling our diversification beyond our RF-SOI. The momentum on POI remains very strong in Q4, as we added another new customer in production for a total of eight. More broadly, the advent of AI will radically transform the way we use our phones and trigger the acceleration of smartphone replacement cycles. Moving on to auto, our fastest growing division. We continue to expect significant growth to be fueled by two powerful trend: digitalization and electrification.
FD-SOI will benefit from the exponential growth of AI features embarked on cars, enabling the structural progression in autonomous driving, infotainment, and functional safety. Power-SOI will ramp to 300 mm, supported by a strong demand for battery management systems. Our latest product, SmartSiC™, is a fundamental enabler to the adoption of electric vehicles across the industry. We are proud to announce a third partnership on SmartSiC™ with X-FAB, a leading foundry. Together, we will begin working to offer our SmartSiC™ wafers to their extensive fabless network. Going forward, we will continue to gain new SmartSiC™ design wins to deliver on our ramp-up targets in line with customer satisfaction. Regarding smart devices, we will leverage the rise of artificial intelligence. On the edge, enabling the right balance between computing power and energy consumption for AI devices.
In the cloud, where our Photonics-SOI product is a key enabler to new AI data center architectures. The ongoing advent of AI means exponential growth of computing power capabilities. The industry needs to deliver innovative data centers architectures while keeping the AI energy bill sustainable. The next silicon photonics innovation wave will enable chip-to-chip communication to reduce latency and energy consumption. We are a unique, trusted partner in silicon photonics, and we develop innovative R&D roadmaps with leading fabless company globally. Soitec is becoming a truly diversified company with the right product portfolio to address our customers' current and future needs to reach our midterm revenue ambition at $2 billion.
While mobile communication continues to be the largest contributor for more diversified product, automotive and industrial is expected to outperform, powered by the growth of our current SOI product and the ramp-up of SmartSiC, expected to start in the second half of fiscal year 2025. Smart devices will continue to grow in line with Soitec's trajectory. We are strengthening our customer intimacy and building R&D roadmaps with key fabless companies globally... we will leverage the potential of Photonics-SOI for co-packaged optics to deliver new architecture for AI. Further evidence of the strength of our fundamentals, profitability. The significant growth ahead for us will unlock strong value creation, with an EBITDA margin expected to be around 40% for a revenue at $2 billion. Léa will share more details with you later on. With that in mind, I would like to hand over to my team.
In order to show the progress we have made in one year, it is my pleasure to introduce you to Steve Babureck, our EVP Strategy. Steve, thank you very much.
Thank you very much, Pierre, and hi, everyone, again. So let's talk about strategy. Let's talk about growth engines and market opportunities. Between 2023 and 2030, we estimate that the size of our addressable market should more than triple, thanks to several factors. Number one, solid growth in the semiconductor of our product portfolio. Reflecting at the semiconductor industry, it's clear that it's been a rollercoaster over the last few years. We've navigated geopolitical tensions, macroeconomic volatility, inflation, supply chain disruption, et cetera. But despite all these challenges, the mega trend, the technology mega trends are pretty much doing their jobs. 5G technology continues to be deployed globally, electric cars are now produced by millions every month, and AI, of course, is already everywhere. So what's next, and what does that mean for all of us?
These technologies, these mega trends, will continue to scale and impact our daily lives, especially in the second part of this decade. Gen AI has just entered smartphones and PCs. You can use ChatGPT now everywhere you go. That's good news. The low case is that Gen AI only boosts creativity and productivity at home and in the workplace. That's good for innovation. But the high case, it could be a revolution, new apps, new use cases, who knows? We could invent the next big thing in consumer devices for the next decade. In cars, same thing, it's a slow revolution on the road. The mix of 5G and AI will accelerate the development of fully autonomous vehicles. Safer car will offer the driver decisions in real time.
Going further, we should expect to see larger fleet of robotaxis in larger cities, especially in the U.S. and in China. And last, data centers. Pierre mentioned that, the computing power is growing exponentially. It is critical, especially for, this infrastructure, which are literally the electronic backbones of our daily lives. It's very important that these data centers continue to run faster and remain cost competitive. However, one of the pain point is electricity demand, which is growing way too fast, and we will need to find more and more energy efficient, solutions for power supply for data centers. So what does that mean for semiconductor chips and especially engineered substrates? Clearly, we will need more and more better semiconductors with better performance. More and more semiconductor chips will require adopting engineered substrate to continue to push the limits.
In mobile, engineered substrates provide better experience for the user, longer battery life, and connectivity everywhere. In power applications, engineered substrates bring better reliability and safety, especially in autonomous driving, lower energy consumption, and more autonomy for electric vehicles. For Edge AI, engineered substrates allow balancing computing power and energy efficiency to embed AI into all of our mobile devices. Last, in the cloud, engineered substrates can bring higher network speed, lower latency, lower cost, and lower energy consumption. Our core business, engineered substrates, we estimate that it reached around 4 million wafers, 200 mm equivalent last year in 2023, and we expect this market to reach around 12 million wafers in 2030. Clearly, mobile communication should continue to grow fast and should remain our largest end market for smartphones.
But not only, it's also opening more and more for infrastructure, smart cities, and satellites. This end market diversification should continue with higher growth rates and opportunities for automotive and industrial and smart devices. Looking at the same picture, but now by product, we split our addressable market between SOI and compound semiconductors. In SOI, where we have significant leadership, we estimate that the CAGR between 2023 and 2030 should be in the range of 15%. 15% is pretty much two times faster than the rate of the semiconductor industry. On the compound side, we expect even faster growth because of the adoption of new products and new substrate. In our product portfolio, we have POI for filters, SmartSiC for electric vehicles, for instance. This growth should be even higher, and we expect 30% between 2023 and 2030 on average.
So for us, in order to capture these business opportunities, first priority is to consolidate our leadership in SOI, where we derive a very large share of our revenues today. Our objective is to maintain a segment share of around 70%, high volume manufacturing capacity, and of course, strategic partnerships with customers and suppliers across our end markets. Beyond SOI, we need to accelerate and continue to develop at the right pace our product portfolio into compound semiconductors with POI, SmartSiC, GaN, and of course, new products. And this development will essentially be fueled by organic innovation and bolt-on acquisition when necessary. And so far, we've been quite satisfied with this first phase of expansion in compound semis, especially with POI and SmartSiC.
Last, our strategy, our innovation, our division teams are putting a great focus also on identifying new technologies, new types of engineered substrate to fuel growth across Asian markets, but also to go beyond Asian markets and potentially new ones, quantum computing, healthcare, leading-edge logic, and much more. To conclude, three key messages. Number one, megatrends are strong. They will continue to sustain a solid growth for the semiconductor industry. This growth obviously will not be linear, but they will drive and fuel content increase in every market that we serve. Second message, leadership in engineered substrate. Engineered substrate are critical materials to improve and enable new applications. We serve the increasing demand of engineered substrate to expand our leadership in SOI and beyond SOI. Three, market expansion.
We anticipate that our addressable market will triple by 2030, and to capture these opportunities, we must expand our product portfolio at the right pace. Now, at the beginning of every growth story at Soitec, it always started with innovation, and it is now my pleasure to introduce Christophe Maleville, our Chief Technology Officer. Please, Christophe.
I'm very happy to be here with you today. One year after our CMD, I'd like to come back to the innovation vision and share with you some of our key achievements. We continue to strengthen our leadership in SOI and compounds. Another 67 patent families filed this year. We have made decisive progress on our SmartSiC, and we are pushing the limits on our SmartGaN. Let's focus on our end-to-end approach to innovation. Innovation that is at the heart of our value creation model. Now, how do we proceed to actually bring products to market? First of all, we work closely with the end user to understand their challenges. Then, we take the best out of each single layer of material and combine their properties into one compelling solution, one engineered substrate, using our toolbox of processes.
Our innovation creates differentiation only if we operate with speed, which means focusing on priorities and efficiency, and of course, leveraging our prior experiences to bring compelling products to the market in a record time. This model has allowed us to expand our Smart Cut process to multiple semiconductor materials, opening up the field of possibilities to device makers. We are strongly investing in innovation, structurally more than 10%, and specifically 14% this year, as a fundamental lever to secure our growth, mid and long term. My responsibility as a CTO is to be very thorough in strengthening our leadership and creative in defining what comes next to fuel our expansion. We allocate 80% of our resources to support our current business plan and deliver next-generation products in SOI and compound semiconductor.
We allocate 20% to address the challenges our industry will face beyond this plan to strengthen Soitec leadership and enable our segment share expansion. This last part is the very creative part of our R&D investment, where we allow ourselves to experience and push the limits of our toolbox to invent potential new solution, such as SOI for new application, and it could even relate to advanced logic, SmartGaN, and many more exotic compounds. This brings me to our anything and anything table, which illustrates what our toolbox enables us to deliver. It shows you our strengths, our ability to combine different materials to create differentiating substrates. All of these wafers are combinations we've demonstrated, combining the best active layer with the range of functional substrate we have used so far.
Behind each of these wafers, there is multiple years of R&D, numerous patents, and secret recipes. With all of these assets in the bank, we can innovate faster, better, and bring unique, added-value, engineered materials to the market. Innovation is what allows us to strengthen our leadership in SOI and support our expansion beyond SOI into POI and compounds. The innovation team of more than 250 researchers and whole Soitec employees have been, again, very active this year, pushing the boundaries of engineered substrate performance and innovating into new materials. A great example to illustrate our innovation strength lies in one number: 377. This is the number of patents we filed this year, including 67 new families that we deploy across region. We ranked number one among mid-sized companies in France patent filers and 25th overall.
We have been ranked among the top 50 patent filers for seven years in a row, and I monitor our efficiency with great scrutiny on how many patents we file per EUR invested. We talked about how crucial speed and efficiency are. SmartSiC is a good example on how we are innovating fast. We brought it from idea to pilot product in a record four years, and we keep moving fast. We inaugurated the fab in September and successfully transferred 150 mm into production on time, with value now endorsed by three customers. We are now working on 200 mm SmartSiC and on developing next generations, focusing on ultra-low defectivity and resistivity for higher power applications. The second update I'd like to share with you is our SmartGaN. We introduced this innovative concept to you in June last year.
Since then, we've created SmartGaN internal incubator, an internal incubator to align the product value proposition with market needs to accelerate technology maturation and structure for future volume production. We are here leveraging the know-how and experience we gain with SmartSiC, targeting lateral GaN HEMT applications, namely power devices up to 1,200 volt, lateral GaN for high-frequency RF devices, and high-power vertical gallium nitride devices that will require further improvement in crystalline quality of gallium nitride device layer. Bringing SmartGaN to the market will enable more aggressive roadmaps for gallium nitride material. We ambition the first pilot product around 2027. To conclude, three messages I would like you to remember today. One, innovation is at the heart of our value creation model and the engine allowing us to strengthen our leadership across three end markets, gain segment shares, and potentially expand into new markets.
Number two, we constantly invest significant resources in R&D, focusing on speed, efficiency, and strategic partnerships. And number three, Soitec is SOI and more than SOI. We continue to push the limits of SOI, bringing new generations of product year in, year out, and we go beyond. New generation of POI, new generation of SmartSiC, and new engineered substrates. And we are now creating incubators to accelerate our innovation and priority topics. We innovate for our customers and our divisions, which is why I have the pleasure to routinely work with our three heads of divisions. Let me introduce you to one of them, Jean-Marc Le Meil, Head of Mobile Communication. Thank you for your attention. Jean-Marc, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Christophe. Hi, everyone. Today, I'd like to discuss the current market environment for mobile communication and the reasons to be optimistic. In particular, I show you how our ongoing diversification put us in the right position for the future, as we are making progress in the current onset inventory correction.... My division leverage three long-term growth driver. Consumer applications, which are rooted to the deployment of 5G, 5G Advanced, and 6G, as well as the future of Wi-Fi roadmaps with Wi-Fi 6 and 7. Smart connectivity, again, thanks to 5G Advanced new IoT protocol, it will address smart transportation, smart cities, and smart industries. Last, new infrastructure will support this growing need for communication capacity. Let's start with the smartphone market overview. The smartphone market didn't go as expected across the industry after COVID-19.
That was a disappointment, clearly, for all of us, but over the same period, the demand for RF-SOI was much higher than the performance of the smartphones market. Customers were building inventory just in case instead of usual, just-in-time pattern. So when we combine these two parameters, it created a significant inventory across the value chain. This inventory situation is now improving. Downstream at the OEM level, at the fabless level, but also and lately, at the foundry level, we see it starting to improve. Consequently, on our side, with six months lag, we'll reach the bottom of this major inventory corrections in this current quarter, Q1 fiscal year 2025. For 2024, 2025, we remain cautious, and we forecast low single-digit growth in the smartphone sales. 5G deployment continue to progress well, in line with expectations for two reasons.
The second wave is coming through 5G Advanced, and the equipment of new regions such as India, APAC, and Africa is accelerating. In this context, Soitec remains a content growth story, driven by increased innovation within the phone, new smartphone applications, as well as expansion beyond mobile. We also believe AI will enable new ways to leverage connectivity and communications. Our strong customer intimacy and our innovation capabilities allow us to strengthen our leadership in the mobile innovation roadmap. With new product introductions like advanced RF-SOI 90, low-band POI, and GaN-on-Silicon. This brings me to our product portfolio. At Soitec, we develop a comprehensive set of solutions to address our customer needs and to tackle the market challenge. RF-SOI is a standard, integrating in 100% of the 5G smartphones and will remain the standard as well for Wi-Fi applications.
The good news is that FD-SOI adoption across mmWave performance is progressing very well, with a growing number of smartphones integrating FD technology, such as the latest Galaxy S25 and the Google Pixels. GaN-on-Silicon is also a good fit for higher frequency. It will address FR3 bands, so-called sub-20 GHz, with some benefit in term of linearity, energy efficiency, and output power. Finally, POI adoption is strongly picking up. As mentioned earlier, in Q4 2024, another customer has moved to production. Total, eight customers have now adopted our POI substrate. We continue to see a strong traction from China, and we are engaged with all leading U.S. fabless. These megatrends and the growing penetration of our products translate into a content opportunity in FY 2026, almost tripling its level of FY 2021.
The RF-SOI ratio is moving from almost 100% to less than 50%, illustrating the diversification of our product portfolio. Going forward, we'll continue to strengthen our unique position in mobile communication by further penetrating switches, LNA, tuners with RF-SOI, by making FD-SOI the mainstream technology for mmWave RFIC, and by ensuring POI adoption across all Tier One fabless customers for mid-band, but also low-band filters. We continue to work on further diversifying our serviceable market into new infrastructure systems like fixed wireless access and non-terrestrial networks. To do so, a strong customer intimacy is a demand. To ensure we develop the right solutions with the right partner, to be the number one and the benchmark in our field, and that is something we reinforce on a daily basis.... To conclude, I have three messages to take away.
First, again, we have a strong position in the smartphone market, which is recovering. We expect to see greater penetration of premium smartphones, again, thanks to new AI use case, to drive overall the semiconductor content growth. Second, we are diversifying our portfolio beyond FD-SOI, and in applications as well beyond mobile. Third, the intimate relationship we have developed and continue to reinforce every day across the entire supply chain are powerful levers to ensure we remain leaders in this market, but also to increase adoption, standardization, and expansion of our solutions well beyond mobile. I will now leave the floor to Emmanuel to address the opportunities in automotive and industrials.
Thank you, Jean-Marc, and hi, everyone. It's a real pleasure to share with you the results and the roadmap of the division, Automotive and Industrial. This year, we overperformed the market in fiscal year 2024 because we have leveraged the three main mega trend. The first, more digitalization in the cars, more electrification in the car, and development of charging infrastructures and renewable energy. For the first one, we see the car more and more digital, more and more autonomous, and safer to prevent accidents and cyberattacks. Second, EV penetration targets remain strong and boost the adoption of power devices and modules. We entering in a second brief of the EV with more mass market and more and more. And this year, 14 million EVs were sold, which is 35% growth.
Finally, the development of charging infrastructure and the most needed transformation of the renewable energies to set accelerated significant and drive higher demand for power device. But let's, let's focus now on the semi content of this growth. We see in automotive, the growth 10% annually, and this is for the next years. This growth is driven by infotainment in vehicle networking, the power management systems, and the applications which are delivered 5% growth over the last decades. It's now completed and accelerated with the ADAS systems, and because there's more EVs, there's more semiconductor inside. As a EV penetration, it's probably slightly slowing down. But keep in mind, we are coming from 35% growth, and we are speaking in about 20% growth for the next years. And in this market, the dynamic of silicon carbide is very strong.
The penetration growth is moving sector per sector, segment per segment, the premium, which will probably be fully silicon carbide, the mid-range, with increasing numbers of silicon carbide inside, and even the entry range are also driving silicon carbide into the cars. Which means 2025, 50% of silicon carbide adoption and a 70% for 2030. How do we address these trends? What is our product portfolio? We have developed the right product in the right time to touch the market we want to have. Whether it is electric or not, Soitec delivers differentiated and value solution for the system. The Power-SOI first. The Power-SOI is more robust and efficient than bulk silicon. In particular, suited with wide-bandgap devices and is gaining traction in battery management systems. FD-SOI is a perfect fit for AI into the cars.
Because they have a lower consumption than the FIT Fed, it's a perfect fit for the car industry. We see today the radar as a first application, and they are behind the radar, some deep learning system already running into the cars today. SmartSiC is a greener, faster, and better technology than the single-crystal silicon carbide, allowing for at least one generation gain in power device, accelerating the 200 mm for the leaders and increasing by at least 25% the numbers of good dies per wafer. Finally, and Christophe said a word about that, we are thinking about SmartGaN, also to complete our portfolio. It's still in R&D, it's still under incubator, but SmartGaN could be a promising way to address the bi-directional charging, home to car, car to home, in the future.
We have a clear vision how to grow this automotive market. We are strengthening our customer intimacy to accelerate the adoptions of our game-changing device and solutions into a once-of-a-century transformation of the car industry. For the green industry revolution for the planet, we also are pushing our solutions. Looking ahead, the robust adoption of our SOI products will significantly contribute to the revenue growth, with a growing appetite for Power-SOI, already demonstrated this year, and FDSOI, which become mainstream for the more AI - AGI into the car. We are delivering on Soitec expansion goal with new wide bandgap semiconductors, with a successful deployment ongoing for SmartSiC toward more than 30% of market share, as a standard, expecting in 2030. Hey, let's talk about SmartSiC a second. We are very pleased and very proud to announce the partnership with X-FAB.
X-FAB is a pioneer and leader in the foundry models into the fast-growing silicon carbide market. SiC fabs will provide access to SmartSiC technology to the fabless customers. There are a lot of them in the U.S., but also internationally. The adoption of SmartSiC is progressing as planned. With Soitec, we have and we know the recipe to make standard into the market. Jean-Marc showed it, and we did it in RF-SOI in the past. The fact that we are able to demonstrate that in each of the market segment, our technology as a value and a value proposition, is absolutely the right path and the right way to make this technology as a standard into the market, and this is what is behind this X-FAB announcements.
Obviously, this is only the beginning with the SmartSiC, and we are in our ramp towards the 500,000 wafers we are targeting in our new fab in Bernin. Growing adoptions and of our products and customers, we address different markets. Here, we measure them in square millimeters. Powertrain and power systems for car and grid industry, infotainment in vehicle and networking for the car and inside the cars, and ADAS and functional safety for more intelligence into the cars. In a nutshell, my takeaway is, one, a powerful megatrend. We leverage growing digitalization and electrifications to deliver steady growth in our markets. Second, customer intimacy. We continuously reinforced our customers' intimacy to ensure adoptions and optimize the go-to-market for our solutions with the foundries, the IDM, and the OEMs. And three, the right product portfolio.
We have developed comprehensive and differentiated product portfolio within the right time in SOI and in wide bandgap, and enables more autonomous and safer car, while powering the transition for greener systems. Thank you very much, and I hand over to René, head of the division of smart devices.
Thank you, Emmanuel. Hi, everyone. I'm René Jonker, and I'm heading the Smart Devices division. As this is my first time in front of you since I took over the division recently, let me also share a few elements of my background. So I joined Soitec about a year ago as head of the FD-SOI for smart devices. I have more than 20 years' experience in the semiconductor industry, with an extensive background in semiconductor manufacturing and a strong drive for quality and process improvement. I've worked in Asia, in Europe, and in the U.S., collaborating with international teams. More specifically, I've spent more than a decade working for NXP, with different positions from innovation and design to various leadership roles in the business unit.
I also held different leadership positions in Nexperia, which is a spin-off of NXP, and I've been leading operations for the internal backend equipment manufacturing organization. And I spent four years working for AMS OSRAM as operations manager for automotive. So I'm bringing with me a strong application background, which with chip design experience, which helps reinforcing our intimacy with the decision makers in our value chain. I'm trying to leverage my end-to-end experience in the semiconductor industry to pilot Soitec's Smart Devices Division. So I'm very excited about the growth prospects for my division, and today is a great opportunity to tell you more about the why. The advancements of AI boosts the application of sensors and drives the growth in edge AI and cloud AI. Sensors proliferate with more and more energy-consuming functions and miniaturization specifications.
The growth in AI is happening at the edge as well as in the data centers. The ongoing acceleration of AI pushes existing technologies to their limits and implies the need for new technologies. Two megatrends are driving the growth for the division. The first megatrend is the proliferation of edge AI devices. So AI is going to the edge with more compute power and sophisticated functions. Specifications are challenging, targeting low latency, improved power efficiency, enhancing user experience, and securing a better privacy. Compute at the edge demands low power consumption devices. The second megatrend is the use of silicon photonics in data centers. The low latency and the low power consumption requirements imply high bandwidth connections using silicon photonics. Connectivity will move from pluggable optics to so-called co-packaged optics, CPOs. The exponential data center growth pushes the need for high bandwidth connections.
To push the limits of existing technologies and accelerate AI capabilities, we are leveraging smart cuts across our product portfolio. FD-SOI is driving energy efficiency for sustainable-aware electronics. The growth of smart FD-SOI is now and continues to highlight industry-leading merits. Performance on demands can be boosted by up to 25% with power management features, such as body biasing. Imager-SOI addresses the secure 3D facial recognition by offering reduced readout noise, improved sensitivity, and increased image resolution. Photonics-SOI is now a standard technology platform for high speeds and high bandwidth optical interconnections in the data center. It is adopted in pluggable optics transceivers, and it is the platform used for the development of co-package optics.
In order to answer the AI and machine learning demand for bandwidth and speed in data centers, the electrical connections are replaced by optical connections at different levels in the data center. Photonics-SOI is a standard for the fabrication of pluggable optics, and Soitec is a leader in both 200 and 300 mm. In the future, co-packaged optics will connect the optical fiber even closer to the IC. Key benefits are a lower cost, estimated to be 40% lower, and power savings, estimated to be 30% less. Leading fabless have already started to commercialize CPO on an SOI platform. Exciting prospects for the division, where we have a leading position as supplier for FD-SOI, Photonics-SOI, and Imager-SOI. We expect the division revenue will roughly double in the mid-term. We can consider three waves for the FD-SOI product adoption.
We are currently on the first wave, with strong 22 and 28 nm adoption for microcontrollers dedicated to machine learning and edge AI inference. For example, in smartphones, smart city, wearables, hearables. Second wave is the 18 nm node, which will bring better performance to power ratio, larger on-chip memories, and increased digital peripheral density. Advanced node FD-SOI has already been endorsed by key foundries and IDMs, evidenced by recent announcements around capacity deployment and product adoption. Beyond 18 nanometer, we are already working on next generation of FD-SOI to bring further scaling and improved performance. Photonics-SOI is a key enabler to AI in the data centers, enabling higher data rates and sustainable energy consumption levels. Photonics-SOI is already adopted in 400 Gbps pluggable optical transceivers. It will be more largely deployed with optical transceivers up to 1.6 Tbps and beyond.
The demand will increase, thanks to data center proliferation and the need for high-speed transceivers. The wafer size will shift to 300 mm, where Soitec is a leading supplier. The next Silicon Photonics innovation wave on Photonics-SOI will enable highly integrated Silicon Photonics and CPO solutions, further reducing latency and energy consumption. Imager-SOI Gen 1 is adopted for secured facial recognition in smartphones, and Gen 2, for event-based imaging, is under development and will extend our market coverage beyond mobile devices into applications like Industry 4.0, AR/VR devices, and automotive. I think we all agree on one thing: AI has started to transform our daily lives, and we have just seen the beginning. AI, whether it happens on the edge or in the cloud, is a strong megatrend powering the smart devices division activities.
Thanks to the strong collaboration and technology co-development with foundries, IDMs, fabless, and OEMs, we have enabled our long-term revenue generation. This will end my remarks. Thank you for your attention. We are switching gears to operations. Cyril?
Yes.
Ah, there you are.
Thank you, René. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all of you. In the past five years, the two most dynamic growth drivers were SOI 200 mm and SOI 300 mm. Going forward, our growth will rely on three major pillars to serve our three divisions: SOI 300 mm, which remain a significant driver with our fab in Singapore, 150 mm POI in our fab of Bernin 3, and 150-200 mm SmartSiC in Bernin 4. In the next years, we will install additional capacity for a total of EUR 750 million to support the business acceleration. Our industrial footprint became global with the addition of our Singapore facility.
With the extension of Bernin 4 for SmartSiC and Singapore for SOI 300 mm, we are leveraging our expertise and know-how to achieve scalability, robustness, and agility. I'll come back on this. We will increase our capacity in both POI and SmartSiC, respectively, up to 700,000 and 500,000 wafers per year in Bernin. As a reminder, both POI and SmartSiC in Bernin 3 and 4 are highly flexible on 150 mm and 200 mm. Talking about SmartSiC, we announced yesterday a new partnership for PolySiC with Tokai to strengthen our SmartSiC roadmap. We have built a robust ecosystem with a focus on maintaining our competitive edge. At the same time, we adjust our extension in Singapore, Phase 1A, to customer demand. We continue to foresee EUR 1.5 billion for our current investment cycle.
We have already invested EUR 750 million. We will deploy another EUR 750 million to address the following topics: the strengthening of our 300 mm SOI capacity, the expansion into semiconductors—compound semiconductors with both POI and SmartSiC™, the next wave of expansion of our product portfolio with SmartGaN™ and other innovation projects, and our ongoing effort in ESG, IT, and automation project. 15% of our upcoming investment support the expansion of our 300 mm building in Singapore. As for the equipment, we will deploy CapEx in line with customer demand. The amount of our investment in fiscal year 2025 will be around EUR 250 million. Addressing such growth challenges require ambition, and at the same time, we must keep our fundamental based on a rational approach and agility.
We have built a scalable and agile model. Here is why. First, we rely on fab extensions to leverage our existing footprint and accelerate qualification, avoiding longer time anticipation. Our second pillar relies on margin protection, by leveraging our assets at the earlier stage. For example, we combine new business introduction with the immediate benefit from a large 300 mm refresh activity, lowering break-even point of new activity, such as in Bernin 4 these days. Third, we have the ability to create synergies by sharing resources in the same organization, such as compound semi operation in this slide. This help to create agility between organization to adapt to the different business dynamics. Finally, we continue to scale up by improving our fab performance with state-of-the-art fab automation, scheduling, and AI to improve our productivity, yield, and ultimately, quality.
As Pierre pointed out earlier today, we are very careful about our environmental impact and constantly increase efforts to reduce water consumption and carbon emission. We have set ambitious objectives, such as growing significantly while reducing our carbon emission, according to Science Based Targets initiative. As a result, our revenue has grown by almost 70% since 2020, while our scope 1 and 2 carbon footprint is similar in absolute value. We are strongly engaged in dividing our water intake by two in fiscal 30. Recycling more water will be fundamental. Here, we have reached our long-term target and decided to raise the bar to 50% recycled water by 2030. We are using 100% low-carbon energy commitment. Finally, we are aiming at reducing transportation needs through supply chain optimization.
Sea freight is now our first transportation choice, and that allow us to divide our internal freight emission by four. We are for the finance section, let me wrap up my part on operation. One, Soitec operating model is scalable, designed to preserve its agility, and relies on a larger ecosystem. The ability to execute on time, such as the delivery of our SmartSiC fab as per schedule, will enable us to scale up and deliver more than four million wafer, reaching our midterm ambition. Second, I reiterate, we'll always be wise when investing in manufacturing. We care very much about efficiency and flexibility to adjust to customer demand, including CapEx management and supplier contract management. And finally, we care about our people. We are at the core of our daily attention to deliver sustainable growth with ambitious objective on water management and carbon emission reduction.
Thank you very much. I will leave the floor to Léa, our Chief Financial Officer.
Thank you, Cyril, and good afternoon to all of you. Fiscal year 2024 has been a challenging year in terms of visibility and performance management. Before commenting on our FY 2024 results, let me share three key messages with you. First, we expect FY 2025 to be a transition year, and we are preparing for re-acceleration in H2 and beyond. After two difficult years in the smartphone market, we continue to feel the impact of the inventory correction at our customers' level, and we are confident that our diversification strategy is paying off, both for markets and for products. Second, to support this strong, sustainable, and profitable growth, we need to continue to invest at the right pace. And third, we expect our EBITDA in value will more than double in the midterm as we accelerate value creation. Now, let's move to the FY 2024 results.
The main highlights are: we delivered a revenue of EUR 978 million, down 10% year-on-year. In this context, we reach a resilient 35% EBITDA margin, enabled by efficient cost management, allowing us to sustain a high level of investment in R&D. Our free cash flow was at -EUR 43 million, due to capacity investments to prepare upcoming growth and an increase in working capital. Pierre already commented on the revenue performance, so let's move directly to our gross margin performance. We delivered a solid gross margin of 35%, thanks to strong industrial performance with improved yields and agility in resources allocation between our fabs. A highly effective cost control, including the renegotiation of some of our raw material long-term agreements to minimize the effect of the inflation and to manage volumes.
We also had a favorable effect of subsidies. Our resilient model allowed us to absorb several headwinds in FY 2024. Higher depreciations, as expected, slight underutilization of our SOI fabs, inflation, and a lower revenue, as explained before. Let's move now to the current operating income, which reached EUR 208 million, a 21.3% margin, three points lower than last year. We continued to significantly invest in R&D to support our strategic priorities, and our growth R&D expenses before capitalization were up EUR 15 million, representing 14% of our revenue. We remain focused on reinforcing our technological leadership in each of our three end markets and across all product lines. Taking a longer-term view, we are also increasing our efforts in upstream R&D, hiring talents, and continuing to build collaborations with innovation platforms.
At the net R&D level, we benefited from an increase in subsidies, thanks to the signing of a new European agreement. SG&A expenses are down EUR 8 million, a 12% decrease year-on-year. This is a result of strong cost containment actions. Labor costs were contained, thanks to cost management, the decrease of compensation items, as well as non-recurring tailwinds. We continued to invest in automation to secure our future competitive edge. Finally, our 35% EBITDA margin was pretty much in line with our gross margin, non-EBITDA items being offset by SG&A and R&D expenses. Net profit. Net income reached EUR 178 million, representing around 18% of our revenue. Our financial results improved, thanks to the higher income from cash investments, which more than offset the increase in financial expenses. Finally, our income tax continued to benefit from tax loss carryforward.
Regarding cash flow, we generated EUR 165 million operating cash flow, compared to EUR 262 million last year. This decrease was due to a lower EBITDA, as already explained, and a higher working capital at EUR 142 million. Let's spend some time to look at the key moving parts. First, EUR 19 million from inventory, mainly due to a lot of changes in customers' demand over FY 2024, leading to additional raw material inventory at the end of the year, driven by lead time for supply. Second, EUR 94 million in trade receivables due to revenue seasonality with a large last quarter, including a very high March month, combined with an unfavorable customer mix. As in the previous years, receivable...
A EUR 45 million decrease in trade payables due to non-recurring down payments to supplier, exceptional down payments to supplier. We continue to strongly manage our working capital in order to come back to a normalized level that I will comment on later on. Let's continue with cash from investing activities at EUR 208 million, which are split between EUR 276 million cash out from CapEx, slightly below our guidance of around EUR 290 million, as we adjusted investments based on customer demand. This was, this was partially offset by EUR 50 million of leasing contracts and EUR 17 million of cash in from investments. So where did we invest our CapEx? In Singapore, for 300 mm SOI production....
in France, in tools and facilities for SmartSiC and POI, as well as for the internalization of 300 mm SOI refresh capacity. And we also had ongoing investments in innovation, sustainability, and automation. As a consequence of our sustained investment, free cash flow was at -EUR 43 million, compared to a positive free cash flow at EUR 34 million last year. Net debt now. We ended the year with a strong EUR 708 million cash position, and a moderate net debt at EUR 39 million. Beyond our, beyond our cash consumption, this reflects EUR 59 million related to the leaseback contract for our new SmartSiC fab, and EUR 50 million of leasing contracts for tool. Finally, our balance sheet remains very healthy, with improved equity and low net debt. This concludes my comments on FY 2024.
Let's focus now to the future on our FY 25 guidance. FY 25 remains a transition year. Let me give you more details on our confirmed guidance. First, revenue. We anticipate FY 25 revenue to be stable year-on-year at constant exchange rates, with different trends among our divisions. In mobile, while maintaining our market shares, we continue to expect a strong inventory correction during the first two quarters, impacting mostly our RF-SOI business. First, positive signals from OEMs and fabless fuel our confidence in the H2 rebound, but inventory level for some customers, especially the foundries, remains high. Weak RF-SOI revenue will offset the strong acceleration of POI sales. Our declining mobile revenue will be compensated by growing semiconductor content in cars, with increased electrification and digitalization supporting growth of our Automotive division.
The dynamic around artificial intelligence, both in the cloud and at the edge, for our smart devices divisions, mainly. We anticipate at total revenue to decline at constant exchange rates by around 15% year-on-year, with a bottom point during our first quarter, close to around -25% year-on-year, followed by a strong acceleration in the second half of the year. We'll continue to closely follow the visibility, especially on this RF-SOI business, to further adjust our cost and our supply chain if needed. Let's move to the second part of our guidance: profitability.
We expect to get our gross margin to stay overall at, in the same range as in FY 2024, thanks to a more favorable product mix, a solid operating performance, and on the R&D side, we will face the effect of the capacity increase for POI and SmartSiC FY 2025. On the other hand, we'll continue to manage SG&A expenses to protect FY 2025 performance with a strong cost control process. Finally, our investment cash out from CapEx is expected around EUR 250 million, mainly reflecting capacity investments in Singapore for 300 mm SOI, in Bernin for SmartSiC and POI tools and facilities, and also ongoing investments in innovation, sustainability, and automation projects. As usual, this investment plan will be deployed step by step, based on the visibility on the demand. Let's move now to our midterm ambition.
We disclose at the end of March that we will stop providing FY 2026 financial targets. Nevertheless, we are confident in our engine of growth for the midterm. The growth between FY 2025 and our midterm ambition at $2 billion will be supported by: one, the increase in sales of SOI products, especially with the recovery of the smartphone market and the growth of photonics, Power-SOI, and FD-SOI products, driven by the semiconductor market growth. Second, the growing adoption of compound products, POI and SmartSiC. Our growth will continue to be more and more profitable, and we are driving our business to reach around 40% EBITDA margin for this revenue of $2 billion. We'll capitalize on the three main profitability drivers. First one, the operating leverage coming from higher activity.
Our current POI and SOI fabs will be fully loaded for this level of revenue, and we'll continue to improve our industrial performance with a target to offset inflation effects. Second profitability driver, positive mix coming from higher value-added products. And third, higher ASP in a more favorable economic context. At the same time, we plan to continue to sustain a high level of investment in R&D to maintain our competitive edge. This financial model is based on the EUR 1.10 . Remember that a change of $0.5 has a one-point effect on our EBITDA margin. Overall, we expect our EBITDA in value will more than double between FY 2025-- '2024, sorry, and this midterm ambition. To support this growth, we will need to continue to invest in capacity expansion.
As Cyril just presented, the amount of remaining CapEx in this investment cycle is expected around EUR 750 million. FY 2024 was a peak investment year, as we are preparing for growth acceleration in FY 2026 and beyond. Of course, we'll continue to adjust investment based on the visibility on customers' demand. We already adjusted the timing for our fab extension in Singapore, as well as for some 300 mm SOI tools versus our previous plan. A key KPI for us to monitor the performance of our business model is a return on capital employed. After FY 2025, that will still be low. We then anticipate a ROCE between 22% and 25%, improving both versus FY 2024 and FY 2023, thanks to the operating leverage and the working capital improvement. We'll finance our, our investments with the cash generated by our business.
Beyond the strong level of EBITDA we anticipate, we will continue to strongly manage our working capital, and we are driving our business to be at a rate of working capital around 35% at midterm. In terms of capital allocation, our priorities are clear: to finance our CapEx plan, to invest in our innovation, and we'll manage our convertible bond, OCEANE 2025, with a maturity in October 2025, based on market conditions. Overall, our financial structure is robust, and we have liquidity tools available if necessary, including unused credit lines. To conclude, you can see that we maintain a strong level of profitability despite the decrease in revenue, and we continued to invest for the future. We are taking actions on all the items we can control, such as operating expenses and CapEx, and we are well prepared for the market rebound in H2.
I will now hand over to Steve to open the Q&A session. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you. Thank you very much, Léa. So yeah, now let's get into the Q&A session. So we'll take questions, of course, here from the audience. We have some questions on the webcast, and we'll take some question also online. So maybe first question, the audience, Emmanuel?
Hello.
Sorry, no, Emmanuel Matot. Oh, sorry, sorry. Please, please, please have a seat. Sorry, sir. Too many Emmanuels. Okay, Emmanuel Matot.
Hello. Thank you for this presentation. Emmanuel Matot from ODDO BHF. So three questions for me, please. Why have you decided not to give any more a clear deadline, Pierre, for achieving your $2 billion sales model? This may come as a surprise because you are saying that destocking should come to an end for RF, and that product diversification is going well. So that imply for me a better visibility and no more deadline. So that's my first question. Second, regarding RF, excluding customer destocking, would you say that growth drivers have not changed?
... what should be the normative sales growth for that product with flat volumes of smartphones and I would say a continuous penetration of 5G? And last question, if I may, Emmanuel, are you concerned by the downturn seen by some semiconductor companies in automotive and industrial? Do we have,
Okay, thank you, Emmanuel. Then you have distributed the questions, and for you, you saved part of my job. Thank you. Then for the question number one, you know, we are changing our model because exactly what you said, we are more and more diversified. Then we used to have, in the past years, a model that was one product, very limited list of current geographies. You remember what I said several times? Few customers were making 90% of our revenue in 20-- confirming that our engine for growth are very strong, and that we have the ability to look at each of these product and each of these customers and business to make it happen.
Then that's really this diversification that makes us strongest, stronger, but with a view that is midterm. Then today, the model is to give you a yearly guidance that is clear and detailed, and a model, midterm, giving you the magnitude of our development and also reflecting the good diversification and the good development of the company across the different markets. Jean-Marc?
The second question to Jean-Marc.
Yes, so thank you for the, for the question on the RF growth model. So okay, so you can say that smartphone sales will become flat, but there is still, I mean, some growth which are forecasted, like, between 3%-4%, year-on-year. Obviously, I mean, what you see, it's that the market is moving to flagship models, to more premium models. So again, it means for us, more content. And in the smartphones, I mean, in the coming quarters, let's say, there is not only RF-SOI, there is now POI, I mean, being integrated.
Also, the good news is that, as I mentioned during the talk, the FD-SOI for mmWave applications, and we can still question, I mean, why is this guy implemented, I mean, FD-SOI for mmWave, and why mmWave? But I mean, it's a fact today, and it will continue, and it will continue probably because AI will also need more, I mean, capacity, more bandwidth, more data aid, and there is a need for to add more frequency to to to be able to deliver this capabilities, this capacity. So overall, in my model, in the coming years, I still see a CAGR for RF-SOI of roughly 10%. POI, I will not tell you, but because, I mean, starting from scratch, so it's huge.
But I mean, FD-SOI will continue to penetrate. So today, I mean, it's already integrated in the iPhones for envelope tracker. As we mentioned, I mean, on the booth here, I mean, mmWave has also using FD-SOI for the Galaxy models and Pixel models. So of course, I mean, we bet that it will come soon through iPhone. So, I mean, this is the future, and it will continue to assist the growth of mobile communication.
From Emmanuel to Emmanuel, from the last part of your question. Yeah, as I said, we see a slight slowdown in the EV, and the beginning of the year is not fantastic. We are not totally immune of the market conditions, especially for Power-SOI and FD-SOI. But I don't see the stock correction that we have seen in the smartphone. So the automotive had to rebuild their safety stocks after the COVID, where they destocked much too much, and it took them three years to reconsolidate their own safety stocks, stock of safety or security. And now they manage, they adjust, but I don't see any big stock corrections as you have seen in the smartphones.
Okay. Next question, Sébastien?
Yeah, hello, thanks for taking my question. One—another for you, Emmanuel. On SmartSiC, how do you see the volume ramp at your first customers, STMicroelectronics, in the coming months? Are you still on track? Are you comfortable with the progress made there? And secondly, attached to that, do you see any kind of adoption—acceleration in the adoption of SmartSiC among the other silicon carbide device players in the market? That would be the first question. The second one, for Léa. Your forecast for top line is flattish for this year. How do you see the three divisions trending in fiscal year 2025? What kind of growth, sales growth or sales decline do you expect in the three main division? Thank you.
Sebastian, regarding the roadmap, I think Christophe was clear, and we are perfectly online on our roadmap on SmartSiC.
Yes. Yes, yes, we will. We, I said in the slide, we, we've been working on, on the plan, and we are on time with our SmartSiC development. So, so now, moving it to-
Technology as the standard... because the name of the game is to be a standard into the market, and that's what is behind your questions. To make a standard, we have to have a good technology. It is. And we also need to be clear about, is this technology fit all the different segments of the market where it started late, or they prefer to wait, or they want to see the first wave of SmartSiC or SiC going on, and they want to take the second wave or the third wave. And they really want to enter into the market with a very competitive edge, competition coming from innovation. This is the one who are adopting SmartSiC because they are really convinced that they will gain market shares quick and fast, thanks SmartSiC.
Here, we couldn't name it, can't hear clearly. The third one, this is the one we just had the press release yesterday, is the foundries. For the market at the beginning, because it was a new market created by Tesla five years ago, the first reaction of the manufacturer was to be vertically integrated, to try to control at minimum the supply chain of the silicon carbide. But now, as we see that in most of the big markets, a big growing, a fast-growing market in semiconductor industry, the foundries are starting to be involved, and they are manufacturing some designs that was done by the fabless. This is extremely important for us to see also the value of SmartSiC also for this segment.
So a year ago, for instance, for P-POI, we announced a fabless, because in our recipe of installing our technology as a standard, we have to tick this box, and we are extremely pleased that this box has been ticked today for the SmartSiC, because as telling us that we are accelerating really in SmartSiC. So the fab is on time. We did it perfectly on the right time because we are now qualifying, and we have to qualify it only with a fab, which is itself qualified. So the reason why the jobs done by Cyril and Christophe were outstanding to do that from R&D to the fab in a record time, and now we are in this digestion by the market, full adoptions, and meanwhile, we are ramping, and the ramp is really on track, and as per plan.
Okay, and regarding FY 25 revenue, so we are not disclosing guidance by divisions. However, what I can say, in Mobile division, we are seeing a decline for FY 25 due to this inventory digestion during the first two quarters. We will see significant growth for POI, but it will not be enough to fully compensate. And for the two other divisions, smart devices and automotive, we see a significant growth, double-digit growth.
Okay. Thank you. Maybe just two follow-up questions from the line. One regarding mobile from Alexi. It would be really helpful to understand at a product level where FY 2024 finished. How big would you say was RF-SOI and POI and FD-SOI? So kind of the weights of revenue contribution for the Mobile division.
For FY 25, you see we-
For 2024, the year that just ended.
For FY 2024, we show it. I mean, it was 62% overall for, of course, for mobile communication. Then the breakdown, I mean, of... So again, I cannot tell the breakdown. RF-SOI is still the large majority, and you've seen, I mean, we did a very strong Q4. POI has been more than doubling compared to FY 2023. And FD-SOI about at the same pace, so we see, I think, more benefits this year for FD-SOI than last year.
Okay. Thank you, Jean-Marc. Another question regarding automotive. So for you, Emmanuel, from Emiliana. Regarding the EV slowdown, what sort of visibility do you have in automotive in general with your customers?
Directionally, they give us a pretty okay visibility. Even in the EV market, which is a fast-growing market, today there's two things in this slight slowdown in the automotive, especially in the EV. So first, the cost of the car are too high. So somewhere, it's the name of the game, into their own market. On their own market, they are transforming well, but there are more than 100 cars manufacturers in China. Only 40% of them could export really, and, and now this balance between internal market China, which is really, in term of price, a kind of bloody market. The price are really terrible over there because there's internal competition, which is hard. And the ability to export, that create a little bit questioning into the market.
That's the reason why there are this kind of momentum in the second brief of the EV. And of course, there's the charging station, but it's going to be well resolved, especially with a different balance with the battery EVs against the hybrid EVs. So we see the market rebalancing. So directionally, we know how the things are moving, and everything's coming a little bit in the same time at this beginning of 2024. But yes, the end of the year and the remaining portion of the next year looks strong. And once again, we are coming from 35% growth in EV. We are talking here about 20% growth. This is numbers which are very solid and very strong.
Okay. Thank you, Emmanuel. Just a question on finance regarding the EUR 250 million CapEx plan. How will you finance this spending, and would you need a new convertible bond? Question from Julie.
Okay, so there are two parts in this question. First part regarding the CapEx. So we will continue to finance our CapEx as usual in France with leasing contracts for tools. And we do not plan to do additional new financing except this leasing tools. Second part of the question is maybe as a management of our current convertible bond, Océane 2025, with a maturity in October 2025. So we will decide on the reimbursement or conversion, if it's possible due to market condition, based on the market condition at the time of the maturity.
It's too early to say how we'll manage this convertible bond.
Okay, thank you, Léa. Any question? Yeah, Jérôme.
Thank you. Thank you. Jérôme Ramel, BNP Paribas Exane. Maybe a question for Emmanuel. Last time we met, I think you said on SmartSiC, you were engaged with, like, 23 or 24 clients and two in qualifications. You announced one client. Could you update us on where you are in terms of engagement and phase of qualification on SmartSiC? And the question I have behind is, your target of 30% market share by 2030, how many client do you need to reach that market share?
So the update, yeah, we are more than 25 today, but I don't expect now any more other customers because in all the segments, we cover most of the big names, big players in our markets. And the second figure I was giving you is how many wafers into the field for test, qualification, prototyping, and so on. So we are above 2,000 today, and of course, a lot of 200 mm on top of the 150. In terms of the number of clients, customers, it's difficult to say, but by segment, we should expect in the top 5, two of them. In the challenger, it's a kind of bucket between 3-5, not more.
On the foundries, I think with two or three foundries, we'll cover what we want to have. After that, it will depend how quick the market will turn from vertically integrated systems to a pure foundry system. It will never be a pure foundry, it will never be a full vertically integrated, it will be a balance in between these both systems. But roughly with these numbers of customers, I think we will well cover our 30% market shares for this SmartSiC into the SiC market. And we address two markets, the automotive one, which is big and will be big in 2030, but probably even bigger, but later on, will be the green industry. We included the chargers, and we include inside the renewable energies.
So we know that we have the perfect right solution to fit these two markets.
Maybe just a follow-up question. On the guidance for this year of flattish revenues, what is the ASP assumption?
For FY 2025, we are not planning a significant increase in ASP as compared to FY 2024.
Okay. Thank you, Jérôme. Yep.
Hi, Ben Harwood, New Street Research. Just a question on your SmartGaN. So are you targeting purely higher power, or you're also venturing more into, say, the lower power applications? And just as a follow-on to that, in these higher power applications, how do you see competitive dynamics evolving between, say, gallium nitride, silicon carbide, and silicon as well, of course? Thank you.
Okay. So yeah, we are... Well, we are targeting, you know, we have Power-SOI solutions, we have silicon carbide solutions. So having SmartGaN, we already are growing GaN on silicon, but then having a smarter, I would say, a solution for GaN will allow us to cover the whole spectrum, and that's what we are looking at. So obviously, we know there's application for a simple charger today in the GaN, but as Emmanuel pointed out in the slides, the on-board charger from the car, SmartGaN may be is gonna be a great player.
Then, regarding the competition between the solutions, well, you know, for us, at the end of the day, we know that some people today, some people looking at silicon carbide, some people want to look at vertical GaN as well for 1,200 volt.
... Well, we will have solutions for both, and I think it's gonna be a comfortable situation for us, and the better will win.
Okay, any question here? If not. So I'll take just a question from online from Rob Sanders. So a couple of questions. So first, maybe for Cyril. In the June quarter, what is the average factory loading?
Uh, so-
On average.
So obviously, this type of information we won't discuss, but for sure, I mean, H1 is our low point, Q1 is our low point. We have to adjust. We insist on our ability to be agile, so for sure, the loading of the factory will be it during that period, in order to minimize the impact on inventory and cash flow.
Okay. Maybe then question for Pierre regarding governance: When will we hear about the nomination of the next chairman?
Well, first of all, just to recall to everyone the fact that Eric Meurice has decided not to ask for renewal for next mandate. Then it has been decided to appoint Christophe Gégout, who knows very well the company for a long period of time. He knows all of us, he knows many of our customers' business and so on, and he's a very good interim chairman. That means that it's very important for the board to take the necessary time to find the best chair to run the board of directors of this company. Then there is no specific schedule. What is very important is we have a very good interim chairman.
It gives times and occasions for the Board of Directors to really cherry-pick the best we can get for the company, to accompany also the growth of Soitec.
Okay. Thank you, Pierre. I think there was a last question from Rob, which I believe will be in the next URD. What is the top five sales concentration in the business today?
Five top concentration of sales?
Yes.
Well, what we can say is that, and we said it already, 90% of our sales rely on is linked to seven to 13 customers today. Then we prefer to talk about this type of metrics. And as I said, in two years from now, it will be 25. Then clearly, it's we are quasi doubling the number of customers compared to 2-3 years ago. Then it's really a proof point of our diversification from a client-based point of view.
Thank you, Pierre. I think there was a question.
I've got it here. I wanted to ask a rerun of one of the questions earlier. So in the mobile division, you've obviously been on a bit of a rollercoaster with the stocking, de-stocking. Jean-Marc, you gave the figure of the sort of compound annual growth rate that you expect from content going forward. But it would be really good to know, kind of looking back over, say, the past four years, what you think the same figure, so compound annual growth rate in terms of content uplift, has been, you know, looking backward. Does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. So I was there, I mean, when we invented, let's say, a Trap-Rich SOI, so-called RF-SOI, to deliver, I mean, 4G figure of merit performance. So it was, I mean, the beginning of the RF-SOI success story. And so from moving from 4G to 5G, I mean, the content on RF-SOI already double, so which is quite significant. And this is also why we double our capacity. What we see also, it started with switches, a few tuners. Now we see that, for example, I mean, the number of tuners, for example, in the iPhones are increasing by about 25-30%, so it's quite significant.
And of course, thanks to the 5G, 4 by 4 MIMO, I mean, fabless also integrating the LNA. So it is again a game changer compared to the 4G system. And again, so... And we see also, I mean, so for Wi-Fi, for example, the content increase, again, with solutions, sometimes which are fully integrated, like integrating together switch, LNA, PA. So there is some, already some, some RFIC for the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi solutions. Obviously, I mean, to increase the overall capacity, operators are adding new, new bands, new frequencies.
I mean, when we say, I mean, 5G sub-6 GHz is in production, but all the bands were not released at the same time. For example, I mean, Verizon were focused most recently on the C-band, which has the frequency between 3.3-3.5 GHz.
... So again, as you see the why, I mean, the content in terms of, I mean, as I said, switches, tuners, LNA are, are-- is increasing, year after year. And, I and I'm not talking about, diversification, so just for RF-SOI. Yeah. And we continue, because after, again, between, 5, 5 GHz, now, I mean, operators are installing 6 GHz. And we'll see later, I mean, FR3, so, which is a frequency between, 6 and 20 GHz. So I mean, again, it continues, towards 6G.
Should we think of that number, that average, you know, content per unit, the growth of it over the last few years as being above 10%, lower than 10%?
Well, I would say around 10%, yeah.
Around 10%.
Yeah.
Okay. Pretty consistent with what you're expecting. Yeah, yeah.
Of course, if you look at some flagship phones, it could be more and more, but-
Okay, cool. Thank you.
Okay, thank you. So, okay, before we take more questions here, just we have a question online from Adi. Can we connect with Adi from HSBC?
Yes, as a reminder to attendees who joined the conference via their telephone lines, please press star one on your telephone keypad to join the queue for questions, and please ensure your lines are unmuted locally as you'll be prompted.
Thank you for taking my questions. I had three. Firstly, just on the guide for fiscal year 2025, when you talk about flat revenue growth, I just wondered if you could quantify the impact of the RF-SOI inventory correction on revenue growth. I.e., if you were to just look at underlying content growth and exclude the impact of the inventory correction, what growth would Soitec have delivered, or what growth would you expect to deliver in fiscal year 2025? That's the first question. Secondly, looking at profitability, it looks like your fiscal year 2024 EBITDA margins were helped by cost control measures, but also non-recurring effects. So I just wondered if you could quantify the impact of these non-recurring effects on margins in fiscal year 2024.
And if you could also give us some idea of how we should think about gross margins and OpEx in fiscal year 2025, that would be helpful, to help us understand why margins will expand, on the EBITDA side. And finally, just on SmartSiC, competition for monocrystalline silicon carbide substrates is rising and pricing is coming down. So when your customers compare your solution to monocrystalline wafers, are they still happy to pay what you had in mind for ASPs two or three years ago when you introduced the product? Or do you think prices will be lower? And if they will be lower, how does this affect your target to hit around $200 million in SiC revenue, potentially in the fiscal year 2026 timeframe? Thank you.
Hello, Adi. Hello, can you hear me?
Yes.
Okay. We should have FD-SOI inside. It should work, yeah. Then the first question, I will take it, then Léa you take the second, and Emmanuel, the third one. Then for the first one, it's theoretically speaking, because of course, you have always inventory depletion or replenishment, and it's... But if you look at the SOI growth market, of which RF is a part of it, that has been presented by Steve, we are on a range of 15% CAGR. Then this is give you an indication of if you take position zero, what's expected CAGR in the SOI business out of which RF is, of course, a part of it.
So regarding profitability, yes, in FY 2024, we had exceptional tailwinds. It remains quite limited, less than half a point of EBITDA. Really, the performance on FY 2024 EBITDA is related to cost management and operational performance. If we now look at FY 2025, as I said in the presentation just before, we expect our gross margin to stay overall in the same range as in FY 2024. We'll benefit from a more favorable product mix and still ongoing improvement in production performance.
In terms of SmartSiC, the price decrease was anticipated in our program. We see an acceleration today coming from China and 6-inch in 150 mm The question is, we know for China, we see this price decrease. Now, is it exportable or not? That's still a question. In any case, our product, due to the fact that the poly-SiC, eight times more conductive, is completely different in terms of performance that the single crystal cannot touched, so we still see enough differentiations here.
The second thing, the fact we multiply by 10 the reuse of one single crystal wafer, especially for 200 mm, which is not today a stabilized technology, industrially speaking, is making us still very, very unique into the market and allow us to keep our program in the direction and in the speed of what we want.
... Understood, very clear. Just a quick clarification, if I may. On the SmartSiC revenues, are you still expecting $200 million in fiscal year 2026, if everything's unchanged?
Then, as we say, beyond fiscal year 25, we stick to the guidance fiscal year 25, and beyond we gave you a model of ambition for $2 billion, in which of course, you have SmartSiC.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you, Adi. I think there was a question in the room.
Yes, Sebastian again. Maybe one question on AGI. How do you see the adoption of FD-SOI for AGI? We have seen STMicro pushing somewhat the technology, notably with the co-development with Samsung. Do you see any other player in the market pushing for FD-SOI?
Good question. René, for you.
Yeah, thank you for that question. So indeed, I think ST publicly announced their 18 FD solution, which is indeed targeting, let's say, the edge AI application. Others are doing this as well. It's actually not new, but it's branded in that way. So I do see... I mean, if you look at an edge AI device, let's look at it. It's a microcontroller, it's memory, it's radio. So it's kind of what we do already for a while. What you see now is that the algorithms used in edge AI are now finding their way and are marketed that way. So for me, it's just an extension of something that is already happening.
I'm not really sure I answered completely your question, but others are absolutely following in that direction. I think what is even more interesting, if you look a little bit beyond that, so what I see as the next step in edge AI is in-memory compute. And this is where I think we will see even more the power of FD-SOI, because the importance of memory becomes more important even. And I think one of the key advantages we have in FD-SOI is the ultra-low leakage in memory. So I do see that as, let's say, the logical next step. There are some studies and first demos available, but this is definitely going to drive this whole market moving forward.
Okay. Thank you. Any more question? No. Nothing on the line, I believe. Okay, so thank you very much. That will conclude the Q&A session. And before we leave, I think Pierre will have a few words to wrap up.
Yes, a few words. I'm standing up. It's more convenient and more polite also. Then, I would like to thank you in the range of the years. We'll have other touch points, but this one is very important. At the end of the day, I was thinking on what matters, the level of relationship and the maturity of our relationship with our customers is today excellent. I mean, the level of trust and confidence, the diversity of product we are selling to our customers, taking into account we have more and more customers, customers we didn't know two or three years ago, is very good.
Personally, I have contact with all the CEO of these customers and future customers and, as well as the exec, and many of the exec member have also direct touch with all of them. Really, the level of trust and confidence, I'm sure you are testing it sometimes, is very good. So, second point is the product portfolio. Are we matching the needs of today and tomorrow? And I believe that the answer also is yes. Not only because we are really fitting with the needs, we are talking about, okay, our FD-SOI is no more to be proven now. But if you look at FD-SOI, that is becoming a standard. If you look at POI, that is becoming a standard.
If you look at SmartSiC, I'm totally convinced, it will take time, but I'm, I'm totally convinced that SmartSiC will be the standard in automotive industry. I'm not talking about the other product, but photonics also for AI, the AI revolution's gonna be, gonna be the standard. Then we have the right portfolio fitting with the today's and expanding needs of the market for tomorrow. So, so, so last, the third point, so is, do we have the means for that? Do we have the means for accompanying our growth, accompanying our ambition, accompanying our willingness to expand? The answer also is yes. We know what we have to do in the CapEx. We have incredible and efficient fab manufacturing units across the world, where we are increasing the yield on a daily basis.
We have innovation powerhouse that is also quite impressive, where we are spending more and more. Look at the number of patents we put on the market. Patents is signals for the future. They are signals for the future. And the last point is, do we have the right people? Do we have the right team? I believe that here you have, you have seen that we have the right team. You have seen the ExCom members, a large part of the ExCo m members, and the rest of the team is there around us. We have some of the best guys in their domains today in the market, and it's extremely tough to keep that in mind. This team is committed. But behind this team, you have also incredible talents I see there.
I know you talk with a lot of them already, and you have occasion to do it later. But we have in this company, increasing talents. We have promoted, we have hired, coming from external world, who are totally committed for this $2 billion ambition and committed to go beyond, with really the ambition to make Soitec a standard in terms of product, but also a reference in terms of ESG matters. I would like to thank you for your attention, and it was very important for me to underline these key pillars that is helping us to cross difficult time and to prepare big growth in the near future. I would like to thank you again. Thank you.
Thank you, Pierre. This will conclude Soitec fiscal year 2024 result. Thank you for your attendance. Thank you.