Dear ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the conference call of SÜSS MicroTec SE. At our customer's request, this conference will be recorded. As a reminder, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. After the presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. If any participant has difficulties hearing the conference, please press the star key followed by zero on your telephone for operator assistance. May I now hand you over to Dr. Götz Bendele, who will lead you through this conference. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you so much. Yeah, this is Götz Bendele. It is my pleasure and my honor to lead SÜSS since the beginning of May, which was a week and a few days ago. For those of you who have not had any contact with me in the past, I'm a physicist by training. Spent a lot of my professional life in the semiconductor industry, here in Europe, but also in the U.S. and in Asia and Taiwan. Semiconductor industry is certainly what I'm passionate about, and that is one part of what attracted me to SÜSS, and which I enjoy very much now that I'm here.
At the same time, I think, if I looked at SÜSS initially from the outside and now for the past week and a half, also from the inside, I think it is a technology company with a very significant potential, which we've already seen to some extent in the development of the last roughly couple of years. I'm very happy to take over SÜSS at a time when it is performing well. I certainly would like to build on that together with my exec colleagues, Thomas Rohe, who joined as a Chief Operating Officer with me at the same time at the beginning of May, a week and a half ago, and Oliver Albrecht, who is also still somewhat new, but has been with SÜSS, I think now for at least a year and change.
I think the three of us are together looking forward to unlock some of the potential, some of the additional potential that we see, that I see in SÜSS, in terms of growth, in terms of new business, in terms of operational excellence. It's definitely too soon to go into more details of how we want to accomplish some of those things. That will be for another time, but I very much look forward to meeting, I hope some of you at some point in person again at various events as we hopefully see the tail end of the Corona pandemic. In the meantime, I look forward to working with you in the way we've been used to over the last year or so. Before I hand over to Oliver, I would like to ask Thomas Rohe to say a few words and also introduce himself.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you, Götz, and hello to everybody on call. Well, my name is Thomas Rohe. I joined SÜSS also in May as Götz already mentioned as the Chief Operating Officer. I'm also a physicist by training and have right now more than 20 years of experience in different positions in development, operations, also in the semiconductor equipment manufacturing industry and also other manufacturing industries. I'm really happy to be here and very excited also to join SÜSS because I think there's a lot of potential in the company to drive and even improve operational excellence, which we will hopefully see very soon and will report also to you in the near future. That's from my side. Thank you very much and I'm really also perhaps happy to meet you in person hopefully soon, and hand over to Oliver right now. Thank you very much.
Good morning, everybody, welcome to our first quarter conference call today. Before starting to present you the figures, I would also like to introduce to you Stefan Lutter. Stefan Lutter, he is the Head of our Business Unit for Bonder. He is with us, and we have also with us Franka Schielke, which is our Investor Relations Manager. Let's start this on page three with our figures at a glance. I can say compared to the previous year quarter, we have received strong improvements in sales and profitability. Order entry increased by more than 17%. Sales went up by 26%. We see strongly improved gross profit and EBIT margins compared to the previous year quarter. Free cash flow and net cash rose considerably. In this year, we have no one-off effects from the closure of our activities in Corona.
Regarding our business segments, lithography, there we have a strong quarter, especially for coaters, developers, and mask aligners with significant EBIT improvement. In our bonder business, there we have received a good order entry in the first quarter, but lower sales due to postponement of tool shipments into Q2. I will explain this later on in my presentation. Photomask equipment business, you know it's a lumpy business quarter- on- quarter, but we have received also a good sales level in the first quarter. MicroOptics improved earnings margin at stable sales and order entries. I would like to highlight some more key figures on page four. On page four here, let's jump directly into the sales of the group. Sales, as I mentioned already
Went up by 26%, up to EUR 52.6 billion. A strong increase compared to last year. Our gross profit margin improved by 8.4 percentage points to 32.9%. EBIT, EUR 1.4 million. The EBIT margin, 2.7%, also a strong increase. If we compare it to the last year, so EBIT margin was not as good as in Q3 and Q4 2020. This is because one of the reason is that the first quarter normally is the weakest quarter in terms of sales. The sales level was below the last two quarters in 2020. Finally, our quarterly EBIT margin also depends on how much sales is contributed by our photomask equipment business unit. As I already said, we had some postponements in shipment. We have some mask aligner tools ready for shipment, which we couldn't ship out due to missing import license from our customers in China.
The sales in bonder business was below our expectations. This is due to a postponement of a large tool into April, with a sales volume of about EUR 4 million and a decent margin. That is the major reason why the sales volume of bonder is below our expectation. Regarding free cash flow, you can see from EUR -8.3 million, free cash flow went up to EUR 9.1 million, also a strong increase. Our net cash position increased to EUR 39.2 million. We have enough headroom available. Let's move over to page five. On page five, this slide shows you our quarterly order entry, and in the first quarter, order intake was again on a very high level, with in total EUR 81 million. This is the second highest order entry in SÜSS history, as you can see here from the chart.
Overall, the order entry level increased over the last years to a quarterly average of about EUR 70 million now, the order book amounted to EUR 148 million. Advanced packaging applications and 5G are the main business drivers. In lithography, order entry is up by 23.8%, mainly driven by a high demand for coaters, developers, and mask aligners. The order entry in the bonder segment increased by 61% to EUR 9 million. This is due to a higher demand, especially for temporary bonders. As I said, photomask equipment is a lumpy business, which consists of few but high volume contracts. Order entry decreased slightly in the first three months by 6% to EUR 12.2 million. Here we have received some tool orders from our major customer in Taiwan, we have also got a nice service contract. In addition, we have got an order for another scanner from TSMC.
Order entry at MicroOptics grew by 28% to EUR 6.9 million, and the demand from our automotive customer is recovering. Regarding the regional splits, order intake from the Asia Pacific region remains the dominant region with 60.8%. We have increasing demand from Chinese customers. For example, in February, we got another package deal of about EUR 50 million from one customer. This includes 11 ACS300 Gen2 coaters. It includes also one mask aligner, and it also includes four manual bonder systems. Our order entry outlook remains strong. Let's move over to the next page and to have a closer look on our business segments. Starting with lithography. Here, sales from mask aligners grew by 21% and up to EUR 10 million, and sales from coaters grew by 27%, up to EUR 50 million. In total, our sales in this business division increased to EUR 32.2 million.
With this sales increase, our gross profit margin improved to 32.6%, and the EBIT margin increased to 8.4%. Compared to last year, last year we had closing costs, and in the first quarter, we had closing costs of EUR 3.7 million. This is now finished, and these figures now are without any special effects from closing costs. Regarding photomask equipment, order entry remains on a high level, but slightly decreased. The sales volume increased strongly to EUR 11.3 million. The gross profit margin decreased slightly to 38.9%. The EBIT margin increased to a higher sales volume with better fixed cost coverage. As you know, here, especially in this business, our margins depend on tool specifications on the one side, and it depends also on country by country, in which country we are selling the equipment. Bonder.
Order entry increased due to a high demand for temporary bonders, but sales decreased and are lagging behind our budget due to the postponement of a tool shipment into April. The tool is shipped in the meantime. This tool has a sales price of around EUR 4 million with a gross profit margin about 50%. This has a major impact on our sales and also profitability in the first quarter. Our outlook regarding bonder remains very positive. MicroOptics, here we see a recovery of our order entry and sales. We have received a slightly better gross profit margins and EBIT margins. Regarding the completion of our clean room, I can say there's a slight delay of about three months, and at the moment we are ramping up.
We start to bring in our first production tools in the clean room, and we will start production then in the second half of this year. I will move over to page seven and in order to give you our market estimates and also the outlook of the markets. Here I can say we expect a continuously strong order entry in the average of about EUR 70 million per quarter, but there is still some uncertainty due to the COVID pandemic, especially regarding the supplier chain. Here we see some impacts on that supplier chain. The forecast for the semiconductor market growth for 2021 ranges from +4.1% up to 18%, so there is quite a good outlook for the future. The mega trends is fully intact, and we see future demand driven by emerging technologies like 5G, IoT, high performance computing, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and autonomous driving.
These factors are driving the demand for our tools. With this, I would like to finalize my presentation and we can confirm our guidance for 2021. Still our sales expectations range between EUR 270 million-EUR 290 million and EBIT margin we expect here a range between 9%-11%. I see also it depends a little bit on the sales volume. If you come out on the upper level of the sales volume, then I also expect a positive impact on the EBIT margin. This, I think, goes parallel to the sales volume. Free cash flow ranges between EUR 12 million-EUR 18 million. That's all for the moment. Now we are happy to answer your questions and I would like to hand back to the moderator. We are looking forward to answer the questions. Thank you very much.
Thank you. We will now begin our question and answer session. If you have a question for our speakers, please dial zero one on your telephone keypad. Now to enter the queue. Once your name has been announced, you can ask a question. If you find your question is answered before it's your turn to speak, you can dial zero two to cancel your question. If you're using speaker equipment today, please lift the handset before making your selection. One moment please for the first question. The first question comes from Johannes Ries, APUS Capital. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yes, hello. Good morning. Hello, Mr. Bendele, now at your new position. We are happy yourself, although we are invested in both companies, your old and your new. First starting with the overall situation also coming back what Mr. Albrecht had said. Is it right to assume that the strong demand has unsure developed that April is also maybe has supported this and there is no signs of weakness in the market because there is a structural growth and the structural growth get also maybe a second leg despite all this technology drivers by this geopolitical things that should be built additional capacity, in China as always, not totally new, but also in Europe and especially in U.S.
Well, so you summarized it, I think, in a way that I would probably support that the market has been strong, and it at this point appears to continue to be strong for a number of reasons, political, industrial. What's important is of course for SÜSS that we continue to enjoy this and leverage this for our own growth
Initially, of course, at some point also go beyond that. I think that it's probably not a surprise for you or anyone to hear that I do have growth ambitions that go beyond simply growing with the market. Again, how we want to accomplish that, it's a little too soon to talk about at this point. If you ask me, do I see any indication of a weakness for the coming quarters? I don't see that, and it is a question I obviously asked when I joined, whether people in the company see that. In that sense, I fully support what Oliver said. Oliver, I think you obviously have had more conversations than I've had with customers, with colleagues. You want to add to that?
Yes, I see also a continuous growth in the market. We see some bottlenecks in the market. We see that our customers are expanding their capacity. As we already explained in the last conference calls, we see a strong demand for our coaters, for mask aligners, especially in China at the moment. There's a strong demand for mask aligners, which is from us in terms of margin and profitability, a very good situation. Also what our previous Chief Executive Officer said, we see also in bonder business, we see here for us a strong market potential and a growth opportunity with our new systems.
Is it right to follow on, maybe that MicroOptics, if you are ramping up your clean room now in the second half, should also see clear acceleration because of the orders which will come or you have partly already received from the automobile industry?
We see here, S&O or our MicroOptics business unit last year has suffered a little bit from the COVID pandemic, especially automotive clients. They have reduced their demand. S&O went into short-time work for two months. Now we see that the demand is recovering. We have got some nice contracts from the automotive industry. We expect the growth this year in this segment, of course, and therefore we need this second clean room. We need the capacity to cope with this increasing demand, especially for the automotive industry. This second clean room is mainly dedicated to the demand from the automotive industry. Here we want to invest in more automatic tools, which also will help us then to reduce our costs in this business segment.
Okay. That also may be the base for the imprint business in the future at your equipment sales. Maybe another topic which is also highlighted always is the shortage of components, even for the suppliers like you. As you can see any bottleneck of maybe components, or are you fear anything as you handle it so far? Therefore, the sales have not been limited, in other words, even in the first quarter by shortage of any component, and it doesn't look at the moment that there is a risk.
I would not say that there is. What we see in some cases, we see some bottlenecks. We see that lead times extend a little bit. Therefore we also set up a task force in our house to qualify a second source, to qualify alternative suppliers. Also what is very critical for us is the trade war or the trade barriers between U.S. and China, and therefore, this task force, one of the main topics for this task force is to replace U.S. parts or parts from U.S. origin by European or Asian parts that we do not suffer too much from possible trade barriers.
Okay. Maybe a question to Mr. Rohe, if you already can answer it. How much you see maybe potential to improve the efficiency of the production at SÜSS? Because in some regard, a bottleneck and maybe it was not always optimal in the past, as you know. How much opportunity you see in Taiwan? There was no mentioning of the Taiwan production, but if I learned it from the last call, it's also maybe one angle to handle the growth going forward.
Thank you very much for the question. Well, for sure, I see potential there. I hope you can also understand that after one and a half weeks, I cannot say, okay, how much potential. For sure, there are some topics which should be addressed pretty soon. Also concerning the manufacturing in Taiwan, I've not been the chance to go there. For sure we will try after the COVID pandemic, go there pretty soon and have a look at what we can do there. For the moment, I cannot tell you exactly what we are planning to do in the next future. What I can tell you, there is potential and we want to address it pretty soon.
My final question is.
Excuse me, I can add something.
Oliver.
Sorry.
What I would like to add to this is I think the setup of the Taiwan production is an important step for us. We need it to increase our capacities. This is one reason. For example, this year we would like to assemble about 25 tools here. We started with the ACS200, now we also increase our product portfolio in Taiwan with the ACS300. In addition, as we already mentioned, we are going to transfer our scanner business to production and assembly of the scanner into Taiwan. Taiwan is very important for us, in terms of production capacities, but also in terms of proximity to be closer to our customers and also to extend the supplier basis for us to have more Asian suppliers.
Maybe as a final import, maybe two-part of a final question. You mentioned two things, Mr. Albrecht, in your statement. First, you expect an average EUR 70 million in orders per quarter. That would be a reduction compared to Q1. Is it only, I think, a rough maybe figure, which could be also fluctuate upwards, downwards. It's not a clear guidance if I got it right. You mentioned this EUR 50 million deal in China. How much is in the first quarter figure, or is it spread over maybe a couple of quarters or so? Maybe, only to see how much this one deal impacted Q1.
First of all, regarding the order entry, what I wanted to say is that, as you might remember, in the past, we said order entry is about EUR 60 million in average. Now we are saying that we see, how can I say? A continuous increase. What I want to say is that we see now an average EUR 70 million. As you said, the order entry in the first quarter was EUR 81 million. If you look back to last year, we have received one quarter was about EUR 90 million. It's not the exact guidance. It's more to say that this is a trend, and the trend is increasing of course.
The second question was regarding this package deal.
Last year, we have got some package deal from the Asia Pacific region, and this is another package deal with EUR 50 million, 11 coaters. This helps us also to benefit more from economies of scale. The sales will be reconciled during the second and third and fourth quarter. You do not see it in the sales volume in the first quarter.
The order intake was fully booked in Q1 or was it?
Yeah, the order intake is fully booked in Q1. It's fully included in this EUR 81 million.
Okay. Thanks a lot.
You're welcome.
Our next question comes from Christian Sandherr, Hauck & Aufhäuser. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yeah. Hi, good morning, everyone. Maybe first question, you also mentioned that you had some issues, sending, I think, mask aligners to China. How big of an order was that? Basically, how much of, yeah, ready-to-use machines are still held back? Do you have any visibility that this will change over the foreseeable future?
I think this is a regular procedure. This means that the Chinese government updates the import license every year. Here we are talking mainly about customers like universities, smaller customers.
Okay.
A lot, a number of tools, and here we have, I think about eight mask aligners, and the total volume is roughly about EUR 2 million.
Okay, cool. Thanks. Maybe second question on working capital. You seem to have improved the working capital sales ratio in Q1. Is it something that's sustainable, or do you expect a normalization over the next quarters?
Regarding working capital, if I look, we definitely have improved our working capital compared to last year. We are working hard to reduce, for example, trade receivables and also to reduce contract assets. Here we have got some progress. On the other side, if you look into the working capital of the first quarter, you can see that compared to the year-end figures, our inventory increased. This is mainly due to the fact that we have to build up some stocks in Taiwan. We still purchase material for Taiwan over our site in Starnberg. Here we will change in the future the procedure and the approach. We had also started to stock and to increase the stock of some critical parts because we don't want to lose time in the production, in the assembly.
We have seen in some cases that we could not continuously assemble the tools because some critical parts were missing. To avoid this step, this was the reason why we increased our inventories.
Right. Okay, perfectly. Thanks. That's it for my side.
Our next question comes from Robert Sanders, Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Hi there. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to address a bit more this whole hybrid bonding opportunity at companies like TSMC. How much more dollar opportunity does this give you, and are you now qualified? I think TSMC is in a qualification year, I presume you are now exclusive. How should we think about this revenue opportunity from hybrid bonding versus, for example, wafer level concepts, which it seems like wafer level will stay in mobile and HPC will move to hybrid bonding. Thanks a lot.
Stefan, would you like to answer?
Yeah, I can. To answer specifically for the customer, we did not yet sell or ship hybrid bonding equipment to TSMC. We are still mainly working with institutes to essentially develop, demonstrate, and qualify the hybrid bonding process. One important institute is imec in Belgium, who is using our equipment. We have sold the hybrid bonder that Oliver mentioned previously, the EUR 4 million tool to an institute customer. On the institute level, we are qualified for hybrid bonding. We can demonstrate very good results. The customer that you have mentioned, TSMC, we are certainly in discussions with them. We cannot provide any further information at this point in time regarding that specific customer. What we do expect going forward is indeed additional sales contributions from hybrid bonding, as we have also described during the presentations that we have shown on last year's Capital Markets Day.
This is certainly one of the largest growth areas that we want to grab a share of. Yeah.
Got it. How should we think about the split between cyclical business and technology business within your mix? I think Besi talks about 15% of their business being pure technology business. Which is, for example, TSMC, Intel, AMD, and stuff like that. I guess when I look at your business and I contrast Kulicke & Soffa and Besi, Kulicke & Soffa guided down for fiscal 2022 because they see China pulling in aggressively, but they don't expect that to sustain. You could take a view, given the structural trend, that the 2022 could be a better year than 2021.
Yeah. We are seeing the qualification phase at customers like TSMC, and we are actually expecting additional growth for 2022. That's true. What we have to say is that for hybrid bonding, companies like Besi are mainly focusing on die-to-wafer hybrid bonding, whereas we are focusing on wafer-to-wafer temporary bonding, and that is also two, not necessarily competing, but complementary technologies that will be used at customers like TSMC. The fact that die-to-wafer bonding-
Sorry, go ahead.
The fact that die-to-wafer bonding is going up or down does not necessarily mean that wafer-to-wafer bonding will follow the same trend.
Wafer-to-wafer is already in the market in CMOS sensor and stuff like this. That's what you're referring to?
Yes.
Opposed to die-to-wafer, which is the kind of key opportunity which you are not currently leveraged in. Okay. Got it.
That is correct. Yeah.
Okay.
TSMC is actually working on both. They are working on die-to-wafer for their SOIC process, but they are also working on wafer-to-wafer, not only for CMOS image sensors, but also for future generations of SOIC.
Got it. The Besi AMAT partnership is out of scope for you guys at the moment. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Cheers. Bye.
Our next question comes from Jürgen Wagner, Stifel. Please go ahead. Your line is now open.
Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you. I have a question on your full year guidance. Until what month this year can you turn orders into sales? How is the reentry into the scanner business progressing? Do you have enough people, enough material, et cetera? Thank you.
Normally, I can say if we get an order entry up to September, then we can bring it into sales. What we see here a little bit is that our delivery times are increasing in some cases regarding some specific tools. We also see that we have to rearrange some things in our production in order to accelerate the lead times, to reduce lead times. This is a little bit the bottleneck for us. We see, for example, in our bonder business that here the tools are quite specific and yeah, highly complicated. Here we have longer lead times. If these are, let's say, manual tools, smaller tools, then there's no problem then to reconcile this order entry up to September into the sales volume. I think this was the first part of your questions. The second part was, can you repeat it again?
Of the scanner business, the reentry. Do you get enough people, and how is it going?
Yeah. I think this is a good question because, as we announced last year, that we would like to close down our operations. Of course, we have dismissed some personnel, some staff in the U.S., and now we are transferring the assembly to Taiwan. This means we have to transfer all of the know-how to Taiwan. In the meantime, we have identified some of the key personnel we could reactivate, and all these people are also willing to travel to Taiwan and to stay at our Taiwan site for a certain time period. At the moment, it's okay for us. We are finding the right people. I think it's like planned. At the moment, no difficulties.
Okay. Thank you.
Our next question comes from Malte Schaumann , Warburg Research . Your line is now open.
Yeah, hello. My first question is on the temporary bonders and the order intake you saw in the first quarter. Was that placed from your lead customer? Was that one of the newer guys? What does the pipeline look like? What is the market activity, especially in temporary bonding currently and for the upcoming quarters?
This is Stefan Lutter again. The orders that we got in the first quarter are from a new customer. This customer is coming from the III-V material segment, silicon carbide to be specific. Power device related. For the existing customers, specifically for the 3D memory area, we see a little bit of a recovery in the 3D memory segment. We are expecting orders that we have planned later this year. We also see new customers like the silicon carbide case I mentioned, including other countries, to add to the order entry.
The new customers will also be in the III-V area, application area?
That, and also an expansion of, let's say, memory technology to new countries like China. I think we've talked about the activities in China. Chinese customers are adding technology, and that includes 3D memory as well. We are expanding our footprint from the existing customers in Taiwan and Korea into the China region.
Yeah. With respect to silicon carbide, are you already in talks with additional players in that area?
We are currently talking to one main player only, but that is a leading company in that segment.
Okay. Do you think that the opportunity is larger so that you might enter other players as well? Or is that mostly focused on the one-
There certainly is an opportunity because our temporary bonding technology becomes attractive as scaling goes on from 6 in - 8 in wafers. This scaling is essentially what opens the window to introduce our temporary bonding technology.
Yeah. Okay, good. On the scanner business, on the timeframe, I don't know if you'd like to elaborate on the potential timeframe when order placements take place. I think these were expected for the second half of this year and then revenue generation rather next year. If anything has changed within the timeframe of your lead customer with the scanners.
I do not see any changes at the moment from the time schedule of our customer. We have got a lot of interest. We have got an indication regarding what could be a potential volume for orders from this major customer. In the meantime, I think nothing has changed at the moment.
No. Okay. Good. Thanks.
As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad now. We receive one more question from Johannes Ries, APUS Capital. Your line is now open.
Yes, maybe two or three follow-on questions. First, on silicon carbide, can you a little bit explain how you use your temporary bondings? In what step of the production?
Mm-hmm. Yes, I can explain that. Temporary bonding is used to basically thin down the silicon carbide wafer.
In the beginning, customers start off with a relatively thick wafer material, 350 µm in thickness, up to 500 µm in thickness. This silicon carbide wafer is attached to a silicon carrier by temporary bonding using temporary bonding adhesive, and then that wafer is thinned down to sub 100 µm.
Okay. I see. For to use this expensive material more efficiently, but make it thinner, therefore it's your technology used. Okay.
Exactly. Also in the final device, that wafer needs to be thin in order to deliver the performance that the issue required.
At 6-in and smaller, it was done in another way. Yes?
Yes, that's correct. 6-in and smaller wafers were still temporarily bonded, but a different debonding method was used. The debonding method for 6-in wafers and smaller was thermal slide debonding. Essentially, the wafer stack was heated up so that the adhesive gets soft, and then the two wafers could be slided off from each other. Now with the transfer to 8-in wafers, there is a technology switch from slide debonding to mechanical debonding, very much like we have also seen in the memory market, where slide debonding was still used a little bit on the 200-mm wafer format. Once the transfer to a 300-mm happened, quite a few years ago already, the technology changed from slide debonding to mechanical debonding, because the mechanical stress of sliding the two wafers off of each other increases exponentially with the increasing wafer size.
There will always be inflection points where technology changes are necessary. The next inflection point for memory, for example, will be the transitioning from mechanical to laser debonding as the memory devices are getting thinner. For silicon carbide the inflection point now is from slide debonding to mechanical debonding.
Okay. Was that always in your plans, that it could be a new additional market? We hear the first time, I think all listeners in the call. Is it something which was clear but you didn't talk about so far?
We have to say that it was not a strategic plan to penetrate for 8-in silicon carbide wafers. It was basically that the opportunity came up, and it was a perfect fit for the equipment that we had developed for the memory industry. It's a new market that we can serve with existing product portfolio.
Okay. How much machine you need there? To my knowledge, the silicon carbide market will go up 10 times in the next five years. Therefore, how many machines are needed? Is it very efficient what you are doing, or do you need comparatively a number of machines? How is the throughput in that regard?
In the temporary bonding process, that is typically a three-step process. The first process step is to bond the two wafers. The customer is taking that wafer and is going through the thinning process. After the thinning process, the wafers come back for a debonding step. That is the second machine. The third machine is a cleaning step, where the adhesive residues need to be cleaned. Typically three machines from SÜSS are needed to do the temporary bonding, debonding, and cleaning. One machine can do around 10-15 wafers an hour. This customer that we are working with is essentially getting a first equipment set consisting of three machines, and they can run 10 wafers an hour through that process. Now the number of machines essentially scales with the demand the customer has.
That throughput will not scale. It will always stay in the 10-15 wafer range.
Okay, super. That's very helpful. Another technology question. imprint, the technology you're creating with your MicroOptics solution. Is it still the case that we can expect here a very interesting market starting in 2022?
Oliver, would you like to answer or should I?
I can more or less only in general terms answer on this question. Maybe you can give more technical insight. Yeah.
What I can say is that we have on the roadmap to launch a fully automated imprint cluster for 2022, and we do speak to customers that are very interested to get such a system. The market is there and SÜSS will come up with a product offering for an automated tool next year.
Okay. Maybe another. I don't know, I asked this question before, but I hear more and more. We had just this announcement of IBM with this 2-nm process. They talked that you only can really use this by using gate-all-around such as a front-end technology, but also maybe related to back-end. Is a gate-all-around also a driver for your business going forward? Or is it something which is maybe you can handle with the traditional back-end solutions?
That is a question I cannot answer. We do not know the IBM process flow in that level of detail, and we have not seen specific questions.
No, that was more on the gate-all-around is not only specific to IBM. Also TSMC looking at this for other solutions as a packaging solution.
Yeah. We do not expect the packages to change. If you look at TSMC's webpage, they are still promoting the traditional processes like InFO or CoWoS, which they are going to combine with a new SOIC process technology. Any device that is produced with the new SOIC process, a new front-end process technology, will still reuse the same back-end processes that TSMC has developed. I would expect a similar situation for other front-end technologies as well, that they would still go into similar back-end packages.
Nevertheless, if we look to what Applied is doing with Besi and your Austrian competitor.
Set front-end and back-end coming closer to, as I said, is a trend going forward, and it's also something you're looking at now.
We are looking into that. We are closely watching what EVG and ASM and AMAT and Besi are doing. We have some strategy prepared on our side.
I expect this. Thanks a lot.
We haven't received further questions at this point. Another reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press zero one on your telephone keypad. If there are no further questions, I will hand back to the speakers.
If there are no further questions, thank you very much for attending this call. We are looking forward to speaking to you soon, latest in August when we are presenting our second quarter results. Thank you very much, everybody.
Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your attendance. This call has been concluded. You may disconnect.