Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to AIXTRON's conference call regarding the full year 2023 results. At this time, all participants have been placed on a listen-only mode. The floor will be open for your questions following the presentation. Let me now turn the floor over to Carsten Werle.
Yeah, thank you very much, Beatrice. Good afternoon from Aachen. Welcome to AIXTRON's full year 2023 results call. I'd like to particularly welcome our CEO, Dr. Felix Grawert, and our CFO, Dr. Christian Danninger, who will guide you through today's presentation and then take your questions. This call, as a housekeeping remark, is being recorded by AIXTRON and is considered copyright material. As such, it cannot be recorded or rebroadcast without permission. Your participation in this call implies your consent to this recording. Please take note of the disclaimer that you find on page 2 of the presentation document as it applies throughout the conference call. This call is not being immediately presented by webcast or any other medium. However, we intend to place a transcript on our website at some point shortly after the call.
With these introductory remarks, I would like to hand over now to our CEO for his opening remarks. Felix, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Carsten. Let me also welcome you all to our full year 2023 results presentation. I will start with an overview of the highlights of the year and then hand over to Christian for more details on our financial figures. Finally, I will give you an update on the development of our business and our guidance. Let me start by giving you an overview of the highlights and key business developments of the year on slide 2. The most important messages of the day, from my viewpoint, are: In 2023, we have successfully continued our growth trajectory. We have delivered on our 2023 guidance and achieved a very strong fourth quarter result. We have successfully launched the G10 series for all material systems that we are addressing. We expect further growth for 2024 and strong further growth for 2025.
The 2023 revenues have grown 36% year-over-year versus the already strong fiscal year 2022 and have reached EUR 630 million. This results in a strong gross margin of 44% and, at the bottom line, an EBIT margin at 25%. As indicated with our Q3 call in October, we have generated an outstanding Q4 2023 result. AIXTRON played a decisive role in driving the dynamics in the market with the launch of the G10 product family. In just one year, we have renewed AIXTRON's entire product portfolio, starting with the introduction of our G10-SiC, continued with the G10- AsP in April 2023, and concluded with the G10- GaN in September 2023. All members of the G10 family take the strong performance of the already very successful predecessor product to the next level.
With its dual wafer size capability, the G10-SiC supports the transition of SiC power electronics to 200-millimeter wafers. The G10-SiC market entry was met with great response from our customers, such that this product makes already about 30% of the full year revenue of 2023. This has also demonstrated the capability of the AIXTRON organization to scale new products into highest volume very fast. Over the course of 2023, we were able to further improve the already strong performance and productivity of this system, such that the G10-SiC now sets standards in terms of performance, stability, productivity, and unit cost. The G10- GaN, on the other hand, has triggered a new era of high-volume production in the field of GaN power semiconductors.
Not only does this system offer further improvements in performance, but above all, it addresses the need of modern mass production: increased productivity, reduced space consumption, longer maintenance intervals with reduced maintenance effort, and a further reduction in production cost per wafer. Finally, the G10 ASP sets new standards in terms of stability and performance in the gallium arsenide material system. It is the first system to enable robust, large-scale production of micro-LED and laser components. In doing so, we have remained true to our original market, optoelectronics. This system has set standards, particularly in the areas of particle reduction, automation, and wafer size. Multiple customers with innovative applications have already chosen this system. In addition to the sales achieved, the awards received from Coherent, TI, TSMC, and onsemi are proof cases of AIXTRON's focus on customer orientation.
We have grown from being a specialist into a reliable, high-volume provider in the modern semiconductor industry. In recent years, we have steadily increased the company's level of maturity in all areas, from quality to production to service. At the same time, we have optimized our internal structures and processes to achieve scalability for further growth. I am very pleased that the era of ZIG and GaN power electronics has been the strongest demand driver in 2023, representing about 80% of our equipment order intake for the year. This strong development is a result of further capacity expansion activities of our customers, but also great strides we've made in improving the uniformity of our G10-SiC multi-wafer system. Also in Q4, the biggest demand drivers were our systems for ZIG and GaN power electronics.
In addition, demand for tools for optoelectronics and LED, including micro-LED, has rebounded in the fourth quarter after a weak first nine months. Demand for our equipment has remained very strong, resulting in an order intake of EUR 641 million, up 9% year-on-year, driven by the strength of the growth of the end market our customers are serving. As a result of this, we can report a strong order backlog of EUR 354 million, up 1% year-on-year. Concluding this short highlight section, I would like to express a strong gratitude to the entire AIXTRON team that has made all these achievements possible in 2023. With this, I will now hand over to our CFO, Christian Danninger. He will take you through the full year 2023 financials. Christian?
Thanks, Felix, and hello to everyone. Let me start with the financial highlights of our income statement on slide 3. As Felix mentioned, revenues in 2023 were up 36% to EUR 630 million, with 74% of equipment revenues coming from power, 12% from optoelectronics, 11% from LED, and a 2% contribution from R&D tools. Gross profit was strongly increased by 43% year-over-year to EUR 270.79 million. EBIT at EUR 157 million are 50% increased, and net profit at EUR 145 million was up 45% year-on-year. Q4 2023 revenues at EUR 214 million even beat the very strong level of EUR 183 million in the same quarter of last year. As Felix mentioned, orders in the quarter and the year continued to be strong, and our backlog was slightly up, fueled by the mentioned strength in demand.
In 2023, we've made great progress on profitability improvements, with a 2 percentage point increase in our gross margin versus 2022, which came in at 44% and an EBIT margin at 25%. At the same time, we have decided to increase our invest into R&D in the year 2023 to a total of EUR 88 million, driving OPEX to EUR 122 million. In 2024, you will see another increase of R&D expenses by around a mid-single-digit million EUR number, before in 2025 it will go back again to the level we have seen in 2023 or even below. This is driven by the efforts to complete the G10 series and to start work on the next product generation in parallel. SG&A, on the other side, will remain flat in 2023.
In 2023, we again utilized tax loss carryforwards and capitalized some additional deferred tax assets in the amount of EUR 7 million due to the expected future profits. This reflects an effective tax rate of 8%. For housekeeping, for modeling purposes, we still recommend to apply a tax rate of around 15% in fiscal year 2024. Now to our balance sheet on slide 4. We ended the year 2023 with a total cash balance, including other financial assets, of EUR 182 million, which was below the EUR 325 million last year. There are a number of factors driving this decrease. First, we've seen, again, an increase in receivables due to this disproportionately strong sales contribution in the last quarter, especially in the last month. These receivables will be collected in the first month of the year.
Then we have seen the increased CapEx for the construction of the innovation center. Advance payments received from customers were flat year-over-year at EUR 141 million. Down payments represented about 40% of order backlog. Inventory levels at the end of 2023 went up to EUR 394 million compared to EUR 122.24 million at the end of 2022. This is the result of our strategy to load the supply chain early enough to secure on-time delivery of our products despite tight supply chains. And this was very effective in the years 2021 to 2023 and has secured us numerous orders even in very competitive situations. Now that we see that global supply chains are relaxing, we are adjusting our strategy and reduce buffer stock. Based on this, we target a reduction of inventory levels throughout 2024.
As a consequence of all of these factors, free cash flow in 2023 was negative at -EUR 110 million compared to EUR 8 million in 2022. And with that, let me hand you back over to Felix. Felix?
Thank you, Christian. Now let me give you an outlook to what we expect in 2024. First of all, we continue to work on our new series, G10 product generation. We have successfully launched these products, and we receive strong customer pull for these products. In silicon carbide power, the G10-SiC makes already the vast majority of our revenues in this material system. In gallium nitride, most of our existing customers have switched repeat orders to the G10 GaN, and in gallium arsenide, customers are testing and qualifying the G10 ASP. We can already today, few quarters after the launch, conclude that the G10 series is very successful and fully meets even exceeds our expectations. Furthermore, our customers bring many ideas for further improvement or enhancement of these products to us, such that the development work on the G10 series continues in 2024.
At the same time, we are starting the work on the next generation of products in parallel. This allows us to secure our strong market position in the near term and also lay the foundation for further growth in the mid and in the long term. To have enough space for all of this, we have decided on the construction of the AIXTRON Innovation Center in our headquarters location in Herzogenrath. Construction work on this clean room facility had started in Q4 2023, and by now, large parts of the outer shell of this clean room have been completed. The project is fully on track with respect to timeline and budget. Due to the efforts going along with the construction of the Innovation Center and also the technical equipment needed for its operations, we expect CapEx in 2024 to surge to around EUR 100 million-EUR 120 million.
In the following years, we expect CapEx to return to the normal level of EUR 30 million-EUR 40 million that you have seen in the recent past. Now, let's turn to the most recent developments in our end markets. Demand in gallium nitride is stable in 2024 on a very high level. We see that existing customers continue their expansion plans, and additional new customers are entering the market. In many power electronics applications, gallium nitride is substituting silicon as the material of choice, and the growth is now carried from a very broad range of applications across many voltage classes, from roughly 100 volt to 650 volt, with some customers even working on higher voltage classes such as 1,200 volt. In contrast, the recent developments in the EV market have led to a moderate slowdown in silicon carbide capacity expansion.
Customers continue to pursue their ramp and capacity buildout plans, but many have somewhat reduced the pace and speed of the buildout. This leads to a moderate reduction in the number of silicon carbide units that we expect to ship in 2024 compared to the previous year. At the same time, we continue to gain market share in silicon carbide with new customer wins in the last quarter again. In 2024, we expect the market for lasers and micro-LEDs to continue at a decent pace, both making reasonable contributions to our revenues. In micro-LEDs, some customers plan small to medium-sized pilot lines, while high-volume production and real volume ramps still seem a bit further out. We all have read an announcement from one of the micro-LED players this morning. This announcement does not affect our plans for revenues for 2024 and 2025.
Finally, in 2024, we expect red LEDs to kick back into the game and make pretty sizable contribution to our revenues. We expect this to have an impact on the Gross Margin in 2024 in a range between 1 and 2 percentage points due to the lower gross margin profile of this application. So overall, we expect that our strategy of serving various uncorrelated end markets with our system will be successful again in 2024. Based on this, let me now present our full year guidance for 2024 on slide 6. As a starting point, we have asked ourselves how we can modify our guidance practice to even better guide the capital markets throughout the year. Many thanks for the input from some of you who have nudged us to review our previous practice. Now, what have we done?
We have reviewed the guidance practice of other semiconductor equipment players, and based on that, we have decided to provide you with a revenue indication for the following quarter from today onwards. Why are we doing this? Our business follows some quarterly seasonal patterns. They can be big. They can be big in timing effects between quarters depending on whether shipments are reflected in one quarter or the next. We therefore want to make it clearer and more predictable to you that our annual guidance will hold up even if the next quarter, for example, may show some volatility. On the other hand, we have decided to drop the guidance regarding order intake.
No other company in our comparison of guidance practice is providing guidance regarding order intake, and we have seen that the timing effects related to receiving large orders and the arbitrary quarter end dates have led to surprises and sometimes confusion. As you are used to, we are continuing to guide the new financial year revenue, typically in a range of 10%-14% versus the guidance midpoint like we did in the last six years. Gross margin and EBIT margin will be in a 3% range. This stays unchanged compared to the previous year. Also to be clear, as we continue to grow, our bandwidth of guidance in absolute terms will grow. This year, we are at about 13% bandwidth related to mid to the midpoint, fully in line with the ranges of the last six years.
With this, we expect revenues to come in at a range of EUR 630 million-EUR 720 million. At the high end, this would be 14% growth compared to 2023. We expect a 2024 gross margin of 43%-45%, so somewhere around last year's level, and an EBIT margin between 24%-26%. We expect the development to be driven by ongoing strong demand for power electronics and an additional volume from the remainder of our businesses. On Q1 2024, in line with the usual seasonal pattern, sales in the first quarter of the year will be a bit slower than the annual quarterly average. In Q1 2024, we therefore expect revenues between EUR 100 million-EUR 120 million. This is significantly above the previous year's level, and we are expecting a good start into the year.
For completeness, we have kept our U.S. dollar euro budget exchange rate at which we record US dollar denominated orders and backlog at $1.15 per EUR. This has just a minor effect on the orders and backlog, as only less than one-third of those are recorded in U.S. dollar. Finally, we would like to give you in this place also an indication towards 2025. In 2025, we expect a continuation of our growth trajectory with a further significant growth in revenues. We expect in 2025 the next wave of silicon carbide power shipments and gallium nitride volume expansion to kick in. For now, we expect a stable demand in optoelectronics for 2025. This may, of course, change in case the micro-LED volume production gets started, which would add further momentum on top of what we have just discussed.
With these exciting growth prospects, I'll pass it back to Carsten.
Thank you very much, Felix. Thank you very much, Christian. And Beatrice, I would like to hand it then over to you to start the Q&A.
Yes. Thank you very much, Carsten. Ladies and gentlemen, if you would like to ask a question, please press nine and star on your telephone keypad. In case you wish to withdraw your question, please press nine and the star key again. Please press 9 and star to register for a question. One moment for the first question, please. First up is Olivia Honychurch from Jefferies. Over to you.
Thanks a lot for taking the question. The first one is on, on micro-LED. You did mention, Felix, in your statement the announcement we had from AMS last night. You said there will no there'll be no impact on 2024 and 2025. I'm just wondering if you could explain why that is. AMS hosted a call this morning where they said that they still have about EUR 150 million worth of obligations for their micro-LED project in fab. I'm sure not all of that relates to AIXTRON's tools, but does that mean that you still had tools to ship to them and, and that therefore you were enforcing those obligations, or is it that the majority of your tools had shipped as of the end of last year?
So please allow – thank you very much for the question. So please allow us to secure customer confidentiality in this case. I think that this is always how we behave with our customers, so I cannot comment on the exact details, yeah? On a higher level, what we have stated, we have planned, for the years 2024 and 2025, a moderate amount of micro-LED revenue, as I have stated, with a decent number of tools going out, getting shipped. However, we clearly had the expectation or had baked the expectation in the guidance we have provided and the indication towards 2025 that we have provided that there is no real volume ramp yet, only individual tools from individual customers, yeah? Like building up a pilot line, doing R&D purposes, trying out different things. This continues in 2024, 2025.
It's still a decent amount, quite some high double-digit millions of revenues, but it's not a volume ramp, volume ramp clearly being EUR 100+ million, EUR 200+ million, which will come on top by the moment micro-LED really kicks in.
Okay. That makes sense. Thanks, Felix. Maybe just a follow-up on your 2024 guidance. The midpoint of your revenue range implies 7% growth in sales. Can you just talk about the pits and takes within that? I know you mentioned in your comments that silicon carbide may be down this year, but how may we expect GaN to perform alongside that? And I suppose what could drive you to the higher end of your guidance range? Would it be the power or maybe more of the comeback in the opto or the LED business?
Thank you for the question. Yes. Let me shine some light on what we see and what we are expecting here. So with our order pipeline, we are shooting clearly for the upper end of the guidance, yeah? That's very clear. And with this, we have baked in that there's a bit of a slowdown in the silicon carbide market. I think we all read the news about EV ramp, EV rollout. We have been a bit precautious here because we don't know how much, so to say, customers shift their orders, yeah, and how much of the pipeline will materialize. So there's a clear pipeline in place to get to the upper, upper half of the guidance, yeah? This slowdown is a bit difficult for us to quantify. I think at this point, nobody exactly knows how it unfolds.
I mentioned also, we continue to have the customer design wins in silicon carbide, so that's adding to it, which is also why we make a pretty strong statement towards 2025. This is really backed by an Excel spreadsheet, kind of. And on the other hand, we have seen towards the end of 2023 that the situation around export licenses has been getting kind of back into normal. Nevertheless, we don't know whether this continues on an ongoing basis or whether there's any problems coming back, yeah? So the lower end of the guidance considers that there may be some disturbing effects from the market and from export licenses, while a normal, in quotes, scenario points more towards the upper end of the guidance. Can I say it like that?
That's really helpful color . Thank you. And maybe just one final one from me, if I may. For 2025, you talk about strong growth. I think your wording for 2024 was growth. So can we assume that the level of growth in 2025 will be greater than what you're expecting for this year?
Definitely. Yes. So, let's not go into semantics about strong and the declaration, yeah? But I mean, I'm thinking clearly about teens of percent or even more for the year 2025.
Thanks a lot.
Thank you.
Next up is Gustav Froberg from Berenberg. The floor is yours.
Thank you very much for taking my questions as well. Just two from my side. Could you maybe give us a little bit more color on new customer wins in silicon carbide, whether or not they are large or small, the ones you are winning? And then as a follow-up maybe to that, so two and a half questions. It sounds like you are also seeing some competition maybe at one of your existing silicon carbide customers. Could you maybe update us on how you see dual and triple sourcing playing out on the silicon carbide side and whether or not you think this will occur at other customers? And then, yeah, just on gallium nitride, could you give us a split for 2024 as to how you think this will play out in terms of new and existing customers?
I hope I get all the questions. Let me get started. Otherwise, I need your help, yeah? So related to new customer wins, in the past quarter, in the Q4, we have been able, in fact, to win again, a handful of new customers, quite a decent number of customers. Among those, both smaller customers but also very large customers. I think I can put that here. I don't want to give details in this place. So it's been a very successful quarter for us in wins, which is also why I mentioned that, yeah? Now, in terms of dual and triple sourcing, I think the silicon carbide market in the end will be so big, and our customers are planning such big ramps, yeah, that a dual vendor strategy we may see in many places.
Every customer has their individual philosophy about how to set up their supply chain, their fabs. But a dual supply chain in many cases can be the place. We, on the other hand, are not afraid of that scenario. Our tool is offering because we use the multi-wafer system a very, very high productivity. And therefore, our assumption is that in case even though the dual sourcing, we will provide the majority of the tools in a dual-wafer scenario, yeah? So we are not concerned for that one. And with respect to the gallium nitride, I need your help. What exactly?
Yeah. Just you talked about, seeing sort of, a stable, a little bit of growth for, for this year and then maybe into next year as well. Could you break this down into, new customers and, and maybe new entrants into the market and, and existing customers ramping up and expanding their capacity?
Yep. Thank you. Okay. No, no, no, I get it. Yeah. So we see both. We see that, that existing customers continue their volume volume ramp plans, yeah? Some faster, some slower. There's really a vast mix, I would say, yeah? At the same time, I mentioned that we see that gallium nitride is more and more getting broader in terms of applications addressed, yeah, from the power drill, from the electric bicycle, battery-driven applications, solar plants, whatever you have it, yeah, low voltage all the way to high voltage and, and, and in some cases, even highest voltage. And based on this very widespread of applications, we see again new entrants coming into this market, yeah, companies who, some of them who is very large as a company now starting and taking on gallium nitride efforts, yeah?
We've seen in the Q4 even companies entering the gallium nitride, large companies entering newly into gallium nitride, at a first shot, right, with big orders, yeah, very big orders, yeah? So the gallium nitride trend we can see is really having a momentum, a strong momentum, and a continuing momentum.
Great, s tuff. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you. Next up is Michael Kuhn from Deutsche Bank.
Yes. Good afternoon. A few from me as well. Maybe question by question, that could be easier. Firstly, on your sales guidance, as usual, in three elements, and one element is sales from new orders, which is EUR 190 million-EUR 280 million. If I remember correctly, in the last call, you spoke about lead times currently of 9-12 months. Would that indicate that you expect strong order intake early in the year, or is there another interpretation?
This is a very difficult question. You may apply more logic than we have when we made the guidance, if I'm very honest with you. Difficult to answer that on a very serious note. And maybe I add here, we are trying to give a little bit of detail here, but you need to keep in mind, yeah, that new orders are really only one factor influencing the full-year revenues, yeah? There's other factors as well. It's just too early in the year to tell you that in detail, and we will update you for the planning over the course of the year as soon as we have a better view.
Okay. Understood. But let's say your statements on lead times are still the same, or given that you spoke about export licenses coming in quicker again, we might think about 6-9 months again, which was, I think, the case like 2-3 years ago?
We are not there yet. We are clearly targeting, within a year's timeframe to go to shorter times again, yeah? We currently have the paradox situation that we have a very high level of inventory. You've seen it in our numbers, yeah? But on the other hand, some suppliers are still on a bottleneck situation, so it really depends, tool type by tool type, yeah? So it's too difficult to put it as a general statement.
All right. Understood. And, as you just spoke about, inventories, I think temporarily, you guided for lower inventories at the end of the year. Now, they went up. Is that kind of a strategic inventory buildup, which would again point towards the expectation of short-term orders being placed, or are there other reasons involved as well?
Yeah. I think, you know, we had the strategy to really build, build large amounts of inventory because, to, to escape the supply chain crisis, which is now clearly over, yeah? And with that, we are now changing the strategy, towards, we see the supply chains relaxing, yeah? We see, shipment times, from our suppliers, coming back to a normal, yeah? Not with all suppliers, but with, with most of them. And throughout the year 2024, we clearly expect that trend to continue and then all suppliers to get to a normal. And with that, it's very clear we will now focus on reducing those inventories more back to levels that you have seen in the past, yeah? But as I mentioned, it depends really part by part, supplier by supplier, yeah?
So I think by the mid of the year, we will be able to give you a much more detailed view on that one, yeah? We are just as the trend has reversed, we now reverse our strategy, and we now together with our suppliers work what this new strategy means, and we start step by step to implement that.
Understood. Thank you. One more on cash. Do you expect a positive free cash flow this year?
Yeah. I mean, there's several elements flowing in, but, I mean I will not be able to give you a definitive number, but of course, the direction is absolutely clear, yeah? I mean, we're expecting to drive the inventories down, and results will be positive. And then on the other side, we'll have the CapEx for the InnoCenter. But the overall CapEx should be clearly a positive Free Cash Flow. The number we will see.
Perfect. Then very last question, housekeeping, because I did not get that point exactly during the call. On R&D expense, what was your statement there for, 2024 and 2025 on phasing off those cost items?
Yep. It's good that we clarified this. It's very important. What we indicated is that we will see some additional R&D expenses in 2024 in the range of EUR mid-single-digit million amount compared to 2023. And the reason for that is that we are having a parallel situation now where we are completing finalizing the G10 systems and in parallel starting the work on the next-generation platforms. But we are expecting this then to go down in the next year, in 2025, to a level of 2023 or even below.
Okay. So an abs indeed down in absolute terms, not just.
In absolute terms. All in absolute terms.
Perfect. Many thanks.
The next question comes from Martin Marandon from Oddo BHF.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. My first question is on micro-LED. Could you maybe comment more broadly about what is your latest view on the micro-LED industry and if you perceive this micro-LED project cancellation as related to one specific customer, or if micro-LED adoption could be somewhat delayed from what you previously thought? And I have a quick follow-up.
Mm-hmm. Thank you for the question. The first part of your question, I understood, was a broader view on the Micro-LED, yeah? We see that Micro-LED is not ready yet for volume ramps, predominantly due to challenges of the industry with the transfer. So the Micro-LED gets manufactured on a wafer with semiconductor processing technologies with our equipment for the EPI and other equipment to structure the wafer to make the Micro-LED so that on the wafer, you have millions and millions of Micro-LED. This is all working, yeah? This is mature, yeah? However, then, we all know the Micro-LED needs to get transferred from the wafer onto a new carrier substrate. And this transfer step, which has nothing to do with the initial semiconductor processing elements, is still providing difficulties to the industry.
That is why, when we provided the guidance, we have said we are expecting for 2024 and the indication towards 2025, that it's only not from our side, for AIXTRON, a number of sales of tools for R&D purposes. We are discussing with some customers who want to build up a pilot line of a number of tools to test out pilot line operations and start, so to say, to check the reliability. But we are expecting for the next two years, due to this effect, not yet a volume ramp. Now, at the same time, we really see that the entire industry, all the display makers, are focusing on getting the micro-LED up and running. So we have seen new players entering the space, big display makers.
We have seen the structures of partnerships and collaborations, I would say, getting tighter, yeah, with some of the large players, making moves such as taking equity investments into the EPI providers or into the chip providers, yeah, where you can see the investments that is going into this is getting large. And from that, you can derive that there is a decent amount of seriousness behind this in order to bring this in the end to a success. And I think an indicator for that, that the industry continues and is really focusing on getting at some point. I think we don't want to give any indication for timing, yeah? Therefore, we only have baked in, yeah, R&D and pilot line revenues in our guidance, yeah?
And I don't want to dare forecast because the step is so far away from us that we simply don't know, if we are honest, yeah? But we have seen that at the Mobile World Congress, Lenovo showed a transparent micro-LED for, I think, a notebook. AUO did some stuff on the CES. That was an automotive dashboard, yeah, so to say, super, super high-end cool thing. We've seen Samsung reveal transparent ski screens at the CES in Las Vegas, yeah? So if you see those names behind it, it's really the big display guys, yeah? And I think they are not there to demonstrate that they have a great R&D team, but it's kind of to create appetite, potentially also to talk to some customers, yeah, once this is mature. So we see that the industry, I would say, is getting a different stage.
Maybe we are from the Gartner Hype Cycle, out of the first boom, hoorah, there's a new thing, and it comes tomorrow, rather, well, it takes a little more time. It also takes bigger effort. Maybe it takes more capital involved, yeah? But we really see that some of the big guys are behind it, and you can be assured that AIXTRON is in the value chain for all of these efforts, yeah? So sorry, it was a short question, long answer.
No, thank you very much. That's very helpful. Maybe just a quick follow-up on that. I think the fear of today and what was released yesterday, the press release, is maybe that Micro-LED doesn't work for smaller displays. Is it something which could happen in your view, which is credible, that Micro-LED never enters the smartwatch or smartphone market?
So we have no specific insight into this customer. Also, I have no specific insight what the reasons and so on were. I have a market view, and I have my own opinion on this one, yeah, which I'm happy to share with you. And my personal and own opinion is, or our company opinion is, that we believe that for the smartwatch, the Micro-LED, is expected to be very suitable. Why? The number of pixels is a relatively small number. For example, if you compare it with a mobile phone, yeah, the smartwatch is a device which is being carried all around, yeah, in all-day situations, so to say.
So the benefits of the micro-LEDs, yeah, the very high brightness, the very low energy consumption, probably has one of its sweetest spots in this application, while the display, the cost of a display for the smartwatch, also in relation to the overall BOM of the device, is relatively low, yeah? So, the entry point initially, typically for consumer product, right, at the beginning, it's expensive. Then everybody works on over the years of getting the cost down, and in the end, it's cheap and high volume, right? So to say, the sweet spot about high cost but high performance is really given in this application, yeah? That is our general opinion about this application.
Thank you, then. That's very helpful. And maybe a last one, if I may, on GaN. We see some GaN players like Navitas talking about price parity of GaN for smartphone chargers, but also others like Infineon or STM talking about GaN being integrated into automotive starting 2025. Some are talking about using GaN in AI, for servers as well. So I was just wondering what's your view, the most important drivers for GaN this year, and how do you see GaN adoption play out in the next couple of years with all of these applications?
I think the true answer is all of the above, which I mentioned about the broadening, yeah, which also gives us the confidence for the continued momentum, yeah? I would put it like this, to shine a little more light on it. I think in the early phase, when the gallium nitride was started in the first in the phase 1A and 1B, gallium nitride was only used as a discrete device, meaning one transistor, yeah, that can switch either very fast or very powerful, yeah? Very fast, that property was used in the smartphone charger or notebook charger to make it small and lightweight, yeah? We all remember how it went from the big heavy brick that you have to carry around to, like, the little, little lightweight thing that we all have now these days.
That is the property of a fast switch. The other one for the discrete device is in the data center, in the server, right? Very high power, hundreds and hundreds of servers, yeah, big energy being consumed, and gallium nitride makes the energy consumption less, meaning it's greener and cleaner, yeah? So that was, I think, the phase 1B. Now, what you have indicated is gallium nitride has a second fundamental property. And the second fundamental property is that what you cannot do with silicon in high power, you can make out of gallium nitride integrated power devices. You can make GaN ICs, yeah? And such a gallium nitride integrated circuit can help you to combine a lot of functionality in a very small space, but not only for logic, for the compute function, but really for power and for switching.
I think the industry is just now getting on the train. What can you do all with these GaN ICs? Yes, that's definitely one of the further growth drivers, while the other driver, the I would call it the better transistor, yeah, the better power switch, also gets their market share gain. This is all happening in parallel.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. The next questioner is Andrew Gardiner from Citi.
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Thanks for taking the question. First of all, I appreciate modifications you guys have made, the approach to guidance. I think that does help. One thing in particular I was interested in talking to you about was the fact that you've given us a forward-year guidance. Yes, maybe a bit vague, but you're at least giving us something on 2025, which I think is very helpful. When you're giving us that, is would you say it's more based on your view of the end market and how things are going to transpire, or do you feel like you're getting more feedback from your customers in terms of what their plans are, what tool requirements are, the type of capacity that they're going to add?
Therefore, yes, you can clearly see a bit of a, let's say, digestion phase in silicon carbide this year, but, you know, they're giving you, you know, feedback that suggests, yes, there is indeed going to be another phase coming next year. It's not just you trying to call the cycle. You're basing it on the customer feedback. Thank you.
Andrew, you're spot on. In silicon carbide, so let's go market by market, right? For some of our market, it's a general statement based on end market view. For example, gallium nitride, what we just discussed, right? We see this broadening ongoing. It's just discussed, yeah? And we take it because there are so many players more on an end market view, yeah? And in silicon carbide, as you have hinted and suggested in your question, it is literally concrete discussions with customers about certain ramp plans when certain fab construction projects are getting concluded. Remember silicon carbide? The one topic is the ramp, yeah? The other topic is that many customers are going through new fab construction projects, yeah? And there's timelines to finish the fab.
And we have very concrete discussions with quite a decent number of customers, "Hey, my fab finishes then and this and then. And then in this, I need this number of tools. And the number is not just, you know, one or two," right? So there's a, for especially for silicon carbide, a concrete pipeline, yeah, with concrete customers and concrete numbers behind my statement, yeah? And as said, yeah, just for the completeness across our markets, for the lasers and micro-LED market, we just have no growth baked in in our assumption. It's just stable and flat, yeah? So there's no, no additional momentum baked in. And yes, if then at some point the micro-LED really comes, that goes on top of all these statements. That's not in yet.
That's correct. Thank you. And perhaps a quick one for you, Christian, on the gross margin outlook for 2024. I understand the point you're making about, you know, if LED were to grow within the mix, then naturally, that would be a pressure on the gross margin. But you guys had also explained that, we're only in the initial phase of the G10 migration, which is, you know, previously, you've said is a higher gross margin tool. So in terms of those moving pieces, you know, why are we not seeing some of the more positive impacts of the G10 broadly? And then I suppose if I think into next year, if power is growing more strongly next year, then why wouldn't gross margins expand in 2025?
Thanks, Andrew, for bringing this up again, yeah? This is really important to get this fully understood, yeah? In this year, we are seeing this additional wave of traditional LED shipments coming. And as I mentioned, this will impact our overall gross margin around the 1-2 percentage points, yeah, somewhere in this area. And we see this for this year, yeah? And next year, then with an improved pro end market mix, improved product mix, we should see this effect go away. And very specifically on the G10, margin profile and competitiveness of the systems, we do not see a margin erosion, yeah? How it exactly will play out in 2025 depends, of course, then on the mix between you know, the transition old system to new system generation to the G10s.
But as they are so competitive, we see that trend completely there, yeah, in SiC, completely strong, or going into the G10 SiC in the GaN and AsP, we will see how fast it goes.
Thank you, Christian.
The next question comes from Lee Simpson from Morgan Stanley. Over to you.
Great. Thanks so much. And thanks for squeezing me in here. Maybe if I could, I mean, I think it's quite clear your rationale for not giving an order book guide. But I think maybe in the past, it's always been the assumption that order book would deliver ahead of the sales in the out year. So would it be fair, given that we have a looming 2025, that the order book should at least be higher than the sales you've guided for 2024 as we go through 2024? But as I hear things, perhaps things will be lumpy, certainly with regards to silicon carbide, as a market driver.
Well, I think could very well happen.
Okay. Maybe as a quick follow-up to that, I think you, you mentioned that, gallium nitride for power would stretch up to 1,200 volts. You know, considerable, you know, voltage limitations being breached there. Where, where do you think the, the applications would be that, would adopt the 1,200-volt use, of gallium nitride? Thank you.
With 1,200, I think that's a very good question. With 1,200 volts, you can address two very large-scale applications. The one application is you can use it in the or gallium nitride 1,200 volts, you can use it in the onboard charger, right? And you can not only use it in the onboard charger but even for the high-voltage car architectures, like an 800-volt battery system, yeah? 800-volt battery systems is typically fined. For example, Audi/Porsche has that in their high-end platform, yeah, when you want to charge when you want to charge 500 km within 20 minutes, yeah, you need the super high power, yeah, to go through, yeah? And then typically, you use a higher voltage for the for the battery. So you can use it for that one, yeah?
The other application, 1,200 volts, is you can employ it in the main inverter as a potential substitute for silicon carbide as an alternative.
Sure. Perfect. Maybe just a quick one. I thought it was interesting that you talked about the supply chain dynamics for micro-LEDs and where you thought some large display players would come in, particularly with their raft of IP and process IP they have in micro-LEDs. But it's always been and you've sort of alluded to this, I think, in the margin. It's always been an issue, mass transfer, moving from a sort of optics platform to CMOS silicon. What do we think here? I mean, maybe, again, personal view. What do we think here could be that which, you know, cuts the Gordian knot? Are we going to see magnetics take hold, or is there another technology that helps us breach the mass transfer problem? Thank you.
Oh, I think the person who has that answer has a gold nugget in his hand. I think there are many really smart people in this world, CTOs of companies, senior scientists getting their head around it. I have to admit, I cannot, unfortunately, give you the answer to it. I can only tell you that in fact there is a gigantic breadth of technologies in place or under scientific evaluation right now, yeah? Be it a laser-based transfer, yeah, to cut them out, be it based on fluidics and printing, be it on something, putting stuff in a liquid, adhering with magnetics. I think you were alluding to that one. Others still working with transfer stamps, yeah?
Then there are other technologies trying to do that with a MEMS device, like a little gripper, yeah, trying, like, an excavator on the construction site to grip the micro-LED and put it somewhere else in another place. But with a MEMS device, a couple of 10,000 or 100,000 in one step, honestly, I think nobody at this point really knows. I think that's really the roadblocking point, yeah, that's holding this whole industry off, yeah? I can only describe to you the problem. If I would have the answer in my sleeves, I could also be much more concrete about the timing for this market, I believe.
Great. That's, that's a very good answer. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Didier Scemama from the Bank of America.
Yes. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. Sorry for a very stupid question, but, you know, I mean, you know, obviously, AMS said on their call this morning they are, they want to get rid of the, or at least resell the equipment they bought from you and from other suppliers. So my.
Didier, are you still there?
I'm sorry. Did you get disconnected?
Okay. Then we take the next question, and maybe he'll start in again.
Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Yes. Just a second, please. Let me just check. Just a moment. I'm sorry. We have Didier still in the line. So, please, Didier, you can go ahead now.
Hi. Can you hear me now?
Now, yes. You got.
Yeah.
Got cut off after a few words. Please say it again.
After I said AMS, I got caught off. Anyway, no, I just wondered, do you I mean, they, they said on their call this morning they want to sell the equipment they bought from you and some other suppliers. So is that could you buy back the equipment from them, or would you have to compete in a sort of a gray market with them from either other Micro-LED chip makers? Or, and that's my stupid question, really. Can this equipment be repurposed into something else than Micro-LEDs, like GaN and SiC, or not? Thank you.
I cannot comment about the types of equipment they have from us, yeah? Again, this is customer confidentiality. I think we need to sort all this out. This is also a new statement to me, yeah? I think it needs some time to really, really get that out. Please, understand that we cannot take a position here.
Okay. Okay. No problem. And on the R&D, I was just a bit surprised by the mid-single-digit increase you're over here. So your R&D sort of is much more, let's say, volatile on a quarterly basis. So why is it so volatile? I mean, I would have thought R&D was more of a fixed cost. Or have you got a lot of consultants or variable cost in R&D that we should be aware of?
I mean, overall, you're right, yeah? We are very much making sure that we keep fixed costs at a certain level, yeah? And then the peak loads that we have to drive these improvements, yeah, these, you know, final improvements on the G10 series, as Felix explained, we're working with external resources. So flexible resources allowing us then also to drive this down without any problems, yeah? That's the strategy that we follow. If these efforts should go down then, when this parallelity resource, yeah, finalizing the current platform and then focusing on the next ones.
Okay. And do you care about, you know, commenting on whether micro-LED system just in general, can that be repurposed into power electronics or opto?
It depends on each type of equipment. We can't make a general statement here.
All right. Thanks very much.
Thank you. Now, we're coming to the next questioner. It is Jürgen Wagner from Stifel. Floor, it's yours.
Yeah. Good afternoon. Thank you for letting me on. I have a question on your market share in power. Yeah, how is that at the moment or has been shaping out last year in GaN and silicon carbide? And, also the slowdown you have been mentioning, where do you see that? Thank you. I mean, in silicon carbide, right? Thank you.
So the market share, our market share in gallium nitride, remains very high, yeah, in the high 90s. Our market share in silicon carbide, we see somewhere between 50%-60%, putting us in a clear number one position in silicon carbide, yeah? Regarding the slowdown in silicon carbide, this is an overall pattern which we observe, yeah, across multiple players, yeah? Just as a market pattern overall, not a specific player.
Okay. And your underlying assumption is that it will quickly come back or, in 2025?
Yes. In 2025, as we have indicated.
Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. And now, we're coming to the next questionnaire. And we have in the line now, let me just check that. I'm sorry. It is, Gianmarco Bonacina from Equita. The floor is yours.
Yeah. Good afternoon. A couple of questions from me. The first one is, on the SiC outlook, you are ending 2023 with the same backlog you had, at the end of 2022, so about EUR 350 million. What makes you confident that you can actually achieve growth, and not achieve the same revenue level you had in 2023? The second question is, on silicon carbide. If I heard you correctly, you said that you had some new customer win. Nonetheless, silicon carbide will not grow in 2023. So is this because your big customer will reduce the, let's say, the level of orders in 2023, and the new one will make smaller orders? Or if you can maybe elaborate a little bit more. Thank you.
So first of all, on the growth, I had indicated towards the beginning of the call that based on our pipeline, we are shooting for the upper range of our guidance, yeah? Nevertheless, the lower one takes some precautions on potential negative effects, yeah? That's our assumption for the growth guidance that we have provided for this year. When you ask for the backlog and compare the backlog end of 2022 with the backlog end of 2023, you have to take into account that at the end of 2022, a number of shipments in the double-digit million EUR range didn't go out, yeah? Which is why also in 2022, we came pretty low with respect to the revenues, yeah?
While in 2023, everything that we wanted to ship, we also could ship out. So, the effect, yeah, that the backlog was stable in two years one after another was, so to say, mostly dominated by a one-time effect at the end of 2022. I think this is what you have to take into account, yeah? So and then when you put that in line, then everything makes sense again as an overall pattern, yeah? So with that, let me come to your second question in silicon carbide. Well, we all know that in general, for AIXTRON for our market, the orders are lumpy, and they come in chunks. I mean, the customers order when they order, and they build a fab. Typically, fabs are getting built out in stages or in waves, yeah? And those waves are just falling how they fall.
I think this is a general statement upfront. It's not like a continuous pattern with one customer ordering every quarter one tool, and the other customer every quarter, two tools, yeah? So to speak, in a continuous basis. But it's rather, here's an order for 10. Here's an order for 5. Here's an order for 20, whatever, right? So first of all, the orders fall as they fall, yeah? And now, in this pattern of customers sharing their forecasts with us because they, of course, want us to prepare ourselves and to prepare our supply chain such that we are then able to deliver, yeah? Based on this pattern, we have simply seen that, 2024 is gonna be a bit slower. However, the pipeline is building up strongly for 2025, which is the basis for the statements we've made on this call.
Thank you.
Thank you very much. The next question comes from Madeleine Jenkins from UBS.
Hi. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to get a sense of the order behavior at the smaller silicon carbide customers, I guess, kind of outside the five major device players. I was just wondering if it tends to be kind of smaller units, and they're ramping slowly, or whether they're placing sort of bigger orders and aggressively trying to get into the market. Thank you.
Well, I think it depends first of all, what is the smaller customer, right? In many behind many customers, we see very large groups or many of our new customers, we see very large groups, very powerful groups who are now entering silicon carbide. So when we say smaller customers, in some of the cases, we mean a very large, a very powerful company who is now entering silicon carbide and starting maybe with a small number of tools but clearly having very ambitious roadmaps behind it, yeah? So, yes, in some cases, this is customers starting with a small number, doing their R&D, doing their customer qualification, however, having quite substantial ramp plans behind it, yeah?
I think with small customers, we do not mean a larger, well-equipped startup or something like that, yeah, which may order, I don't know, 2, 3 tools per year, yeah? But we rather talk about some of the big semiconductor companies who really say, "Nah yeah. Silicon carbide is such a big game. We wanna be part of the party.
Okay. That makes sense. And then just my final question. I don't know if I've missed this, but could you please provide your current lead times if you can? And also whether you see any risk of push-outs of orders in your backlog and how this kind of might impact your revenue guide. Thank you.
I think I didn't get your question. Can you repeat it, please?
It's not easy to understand.
Sure. Yeah. So just your, your current lead times and then also.
My lead.
Are you seeing any risk of push-outs of orders in your backlog and how this may impact your revenue guide? Thank you.
Yeah. So our current lead time is around 9-12 months. And push-outs, we have seen in one single case but not across the board. So no unusual pattern.
Okay. Thank you.
We have a follow-up question coming from Olivia Honychurch from Jefferies.
Hi. Thanks a lot for taking another of my questions. Just one from me, another on silicon carbide. You said in answer to an earlier question that you've won a number of new customers, some small, some large. I'm wondering if I can ask as to whether that large customer we can think of as being one of the, the top five or the top-tier players in, in SiC, or is it one of the second-tier or, or newer entrants into the market?
Olivia, I had expected the question comes in every of our calls, yeah? So I get a you're getting a smile on my face. That's absolutely fine, yeah? We have decided in this case not to shine light on this topic, yeah, because also there's quite some competitive dynamics behind it. Please hold on and allow us to not answer this question directly.
All right. I thought I'd ask. Thank you.
Thank you very much. There are no further questions. With this, I hand the floor back to Carsten.
Thank you, Beatriz. Thank you very much for taking part in our call. I got a few emails at the beginning that some had difficulties to access the call in time. So our sincere apologies for this. Whenever you think you have missed anything or have any additional questions, please give me a shout. And as I already said at the very beginning of the call, we will put a transcript on our web page in the next couple of days so that you also have all the information there. And I think we are all looking forward to speaking and meeting you next couple of days and weeks. And wish you a good day.