Hello everyone. It's 9:30, and I think it's about time that we began. My name is Bernhard Schweizer, investor relations contact at INFICON, and I have the pleasure to host this Microsoft Teams session. Thank you for joining the INFICON web conference on its third quarter 2021 results. With us today are Lukas Winkler, CEO of INFICON, and Matthias Tröndle, CFO of INFICON. The management team will first present the results and then take questions. During management's prepared remarks, participants are kindly asked to turn their microphones and cameras off. Thank you. You should have received by now a press release on the Q3 results, together with the links to the accompanying visuals for this web conference. All these documents are available for download in the investor section of the INFICON website, www.inficon.com.
As we are in a Microsoft Teams session, you can pose written questions during the presentations using the chat function. This should be the second icon in the top right-hand menu. Management will take these questions after their prepared remarks. You can also signal that you would like to ask a question over the microphone. We ask you to use the third icon functionality to raise your hand. Just click on the Raise Your Hand symbol, and you will be added to the queue of people who would like to ask questions. I would also like to inform you that we record this web conference to archive the audio file later on the INFICON website. The oral statements made by INFICON during this Microsoft Teams session may contain forward-looking statements that do not relate solely to historical or current facts.
These forward-looking statements are based on the current plans and expectations of our management, and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks that could significantly affect our current plans and expectations, as well as future results of operations and financial condition. We undertake no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. Having said all that, I would like to hand over now to Lukas Winkler. Lukas, please.
Thank you Bernhard. Greetings and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us today to review our results for the third quarter of 2021. A year ago, we had to announce one of our worst quarters for many years. Now, 12 months later, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation changed completely. The demand for INFICON products is above our capacity. The global supply chain is overheating, and the geopolitical situation, especially the U.S.-China conflict, makes the situation even more complicated. In total, with revenues of $122 million, we reached almost the record level of our second quarter 2021, just finished three months ago. On slide number three, you can see the key figures of the reporting quarter. Sales growth was almost 33%. If you deduct the impact from foreign exchange rate fluctuations and the small acquisition we made five months ago, the organic growth rate was still above 30%.
The book-to-bill ratio, again, far above one. Our backlog increased to even higher record levels, something that we had never experienced before. Press release, we spent $60 million in the third quarter alone for capacity around the world. Over the next three months, we will expand the capacity by 50%, compared to the level that we used to have in 2020. High sales volume improved gross profit margins, but increased operating expenses. We finished the quarter with an operating income of $22 million or 18% of sales, compared to $10.5 million or 11.4% of sales for the same quarter a year ago. Net income reached $16.8 million, or 13.8% of sales. Tröndle will review the numbers with you in more details later. While I now go through some important developments in our target markets up front.
On the next slide, number four, you can see the sales breakdown into our four key markets, as well as the regional sales trends. The pie chart shows an increased contribution from the R/AC and auto, as well as the general vacuum market, at the expense of a lower contribution from the semi and vacuum coating market. That is only due to the base effect a year ago, with a low contribution from the R/AC, automotive, and general vacuum market, and has, in no means, an indication of a weaker semi and vacuum coating market at all. The trend chart on the right-hand side indicates the importance and the dependency on Asian customers one more time. Almost 50% of our products and services get sold to Asia. China being by far the largest size and growth-wise.
Let's do a quick analysis market by market, starting with the smallest one on slide number five. In the security and energy market, sales increased 12.8% year-over-year, and with a 14.5% sequential decrease, reached a level of $5.3 million only. The security side of this market remained depressed, and we only sold a few HAPSITEs to a handful of customers. The largest potential customer, the US Department of Defense, is testing our new generation of HAPSITE products, but the first larger order cannot be expected before 2022. Nevertheless, we are really happy with the test results and the expanded capabilities of the new product generation. It can be used to detect narcotics like fentanyl as well as explosives, besides all the traditional and non-traditional warfare agents.
In the energy side of this market, we have been able to be one of the only providers for the biomethane gas applications, and we set new standards in the environmental and landfill gas detection market. For the last quarter of the year, we do not expect large changes compared to the first three quarters of this year. Moving to the refrigeration, air conditioning, and automotive market on slide six, where our sales increased over 27% year-over-year, but decreased 8.3% compared with the second quarter of this year, and reached $24.2 million. We experienced a stable refrigeration, air conditioning market, a very dynamic lithium-ion battery testing business, and the continuation of a, let's call it, a more weaker traditional auto market. Industry 4.0, digitalization, and fully automated quality inspection applications in conjunction with tighter specifications are the main drivers.
The market for refrigerator and air conditioning manufacturers. E-cars drive the need for more lithium-ion battery capacity, and the need for safer batteries drives the higher demand for quality inspection instruments, such as the new INFICON ELT3000 lithium-ion battery leak detector around the world. We will certainly end the year 2020 on a new record level for the whole market in the refrigeration automotive applications. Now, let's go to the semi and vacuum coating market on slide number seven, where sales increased almost 40% year-over-year, but decreased 6.6% sequentially and reached $59.2 million, with the major contribution coming from the semiconductor device and equipment manufacturers. All the major players in the supply chain of the chip-making industry continue to invest in the latest state-of-the-art technology for analog and logic chips, as well as memory chips.
The China semi initiative continues, but unfortunately, the U.S. trade and technology restrictions remain in place, and generating revenue, especially with the chip makers such as SMIC, became even more cumbersome. On the other hand side, we enjoy a steep increase in businesses with Chinese equipment manufacturers, where we have no U.S. export restrictions. Semiconductor market will remain the most attractive growth opportunity for INFICON, not just from a financial point of view, but also technology-wise. If you can develop and sell products for advanced semiconductor application, then you can serve all other markets as well. We continue to work very closely with equipment manufacturers as well as device manufacturers to develop new sensor solutions and methods to assure high-quality mass chip productions.
In the meantime, everybody is aware of the current supply shortages, and all prominent chip manufacturers have announced plans for new fabs, some of them supported by government incentive programs. The semi market will keep us very busy for the coming years. 2021 will be a record semiconductor year, and we foresee also a good 2022 as well. Final investments in OLED flat panel and optical coating technologies will remain flat. Finally, we had a record third quarter in this year in the general vacuum market, where you can see the results on slide number eight, with sales over $33 million. That reflects a year-over-year increase of 29.3% and a 10.6% sequentially compared with the second quarter of 2021. Chinese customers, as well as sales to our European private label distribution partners, represent the majority of the growth.
As you know, we sell analysis, measurement, and control products for many different industrial applications to private label partners, primarily vacuum pump manufacturers, but also via direct sales channels to industrial OEMs and distributors in order to reach and serve 10,000 of small and midsize customers around the world. 2021 will also be a very successful year in the general vacuum market. Let me close my part of the presentation with an outlook slide, which is on number nine, for the whole year 2021. Despite the uncertainty, the outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic, and unfortunately, the continued China-U.S. issues, we are quite confident to reach new annual records. On one side, semiconductor will remain very dynamic, and we have to expand our capacities to keep up with the increased demand. The vacuum coating applications are not at record levels, but they are quite solid.
The e-car trend will continue, and the need for safe energy supply systems offers plenty of growth potential. The same is true for green energy initiatives. With a high number of newly launched products, we have paved the road for additional sales growth beyond 2021. The only concern that we have currently are constraints on the capacity side, on the supply chain side, and unfortunately, on the export license discussions that we have with the U.S. government to even reach higher revenue based on the order intake that we currently enjoy. With that, I'd like to turn over to Matthias Tröndle, who will give you more details about our financial performance. Matthias, please.
Thank you, Lukas, and good morning, everyone. As usual, I will cover our Q3 results and comment our guidance for the full fiscal year. Let me begin with our revenue segmentation, which starts on slide 11. Revenues for the third quarter of 2021 came out at $122.2 million, compared with $92 million in our third quarter of last year. This represents an increase of 32.8%, taking into account the positive currency impact of 1.8% or $1.6 million and a small contribution from acquisitions of 0.3%, we achieved an organic growth of 30.7%. Mr. Winkler has already discussed the details of the different end markets. We can highlight that similar to the first and second quarter, sales in all markets did grow compared to Q3 previous year.
All double-digit, the semi and vacuum coating market did grow by nearly 40%, and the general vacuum market reached with $33.5 million a new quarterly high. Compared to Q2, the general vacuum market did grow by 10.6%, while the other markets showed a decline, partially driven by supply and capacity constraints against our record numbers from quarter two. With that, quarter three of 2021 was the third quarter in a row with more than $120 million of sales. Now let's take a look to the regional composition of the total revenue. Europe reached 26%, North America, 24%, and Asia-Pacific ended with 49% of total third quarter sales. Compared to Q3 previous year, we had the highest growth in Asia with very strong 57%, followed by Europe with 16% and North America by 13%.
Asia showed the strongest absolute growth in semi and vacuum coating, all other markets did grow as well, especially the refrigeration and air conditioning market by a strong 74%. Europe showed also an increase in sales of 16%, mainly driven by two end markets, general vacuum and also in the refrigeration and air conditioning market. Let's go to slide 13. The gross margin for the third quarter of 2021 reached 46.8% compared to 45% in the same quarter of last year. The margin percentage did increase by 184 basis points. Higher volume, good capacity utilization, and the market and product mix could compensate rising material costs, partially due to shortages and broker utilization, higher transportation, and customs costs. What happened on the cost side? We spent $10.8 million on R&D in Q3, an increase of 11%.
As a percent of sales, the expense decreased to 8.8% in the third quarter from 10.6% in the last year. Additional headcounts, higher R&D material costs, plus higher external costs related to our development efforts did drive this increase. In SG&A, selling, general, and administrative, the expense level showed a $3.2 million increase to $24.4 million. New hires and performance-related costs in form of commissions, bonus, and sales performance incentives did drive this increase. Foreign currency impacts have been slightly unfavorable in this quarter. As a result, for the third quarter, we achieved an operating profit of $22 million or 18% of sales after $10.5 million or 11.4% in Q3 of last year. This corresponds to an increase of around 109%, which means the result more than doubled. The income tax expense for the third quarter was at $4.9 million, which represents an average tax rate of 22.7%.
The global tax rate is comparable to last year and the last quarter too. Nothing special, I would say. The net profit, therefore, reached $16.8 million, or 13.8% in Q3. This compares to $7.9 million or 8.6% in the prior year, 113% increase in absolute numbers. As a consequence, we have more or less the same development in earnings per share. This went up by 112% and stands at $6.87. Let's move to the balance sheet. Our net cash position reached $42.2 million, which is $1.3 million higher than end of last year in December, and $16.5 million higher compared to the last quarter. Operating cash flow, which you can see on the bottom right, reached with $21.9 million a good and solid level, representing about 18% of revenue. This was approximately 40% or $6.4 million higher than last year. The inventory turns improved further, reached 3.1 turns.
The DSO ratio, which represents the accounts receivable, was with 52.1 days pretty stable. The working capital, which consists out of AR, accounts receivables, inventories, minus accounts payables, closed at $146 million, clearly higher than end of last year. The majority of that $17 million increase has contributed to a $14.8 billion increase in inventory, which is driven by the obvious business growth. The balance sheet shows a solid structure as a 62% equity ratio and no long-term debt. Those were my comments on the balance sheet in Q3. Finally, let's take a look to the outlook. Mr. Winkler has already gone into the details and the assessment of our end markets. The business situation of our end markets looks quite positive for the current year. Also, the global economic and also political situation remains somewhat fragile. We assess the outlook for the current year optimistic.
Therefore, we have increased again our guidance, and we expect sales of around $490 million-$510 million, with an operating income margin of 18%-20%. The last slide shows our corporate calendar and the upcoming dates. The next events will be in March next year. Early March is our Q4 and fiscal 2021 conference call, and end of March, we will conduct our Annual General Meeting. With that, I would like to close the presentation, and we are, as usual, ready to take your questions.
Thank you, Matthias. As I said, participants could also ask questions by the chat function. We do have a written question from Alexander Horvat. Let me just read that out to you. You mentioned that certain bottlenecks in sourcing and in the logistics have limited your growth and created additional costs. Could you please give us an idea in what region and revenue growth rate and earnings could have been without those limitations? What is your assumption regarding the bottleneck? By when do you expect the sourcing and logistics bottlenecks to be relieved?
Thank you, Bernhard. Let me take that question, at least from an overall point of view. If you look at the dynamic of the order intake side, we are clearly sitting on a backlog that has reached a level that we have never seen before. If you look at our increased lead times for certain main product lines that increased by up to two months more, and assuming that we can go back to that kind of a lead time that we used to have, we can assume that this advantage of a little bit more than one month worth of shipments. Without bottlenecks and some supply chain restrictions, probably for the full year, would have reached a higher sales volume of, let's call it approximately $50 million more, assuming no restrictions.
Now, on the cost side, I do not know all the details, but I think Matthias can refer to that later, how much more cost we had to incur due to the supply chain constraints. On the second part of the question, when do I expect getting out of this situation? I think we have to see it from three different points. One is the internal point. When are we ready to have a higher volume or higher capacity on the tool side and calibration side? That you can expect by middle of next year. We should be fully ready to shift a much higher revenue level based on the internal capacity. On the external side, on the supply side, I believe it will take a little bit longer until everybody has adjusted to the higher supply chain levels. The third pillar is the political side.
There, unfortunately, I do not expect a quick release of any of the U.S. trade restrictions that we currently deal with. I just want to give you maybe some practical examples how that works. We are still waiting for one of the larger orders to get the export license, and we wait now for six months. Having said that's something that we have no influence on. We simply have to wait and file an additional pile of papers to convince the authorities that what we do has no direct risks for the U.S. security level. Those are the three elements that I would refer to the end of the bottlenecks. In terms of cost side, the gross profit impact, I have to refer to Matthias. He might have a little bit more meat on the bone.
To give a little flavor, when we talk about the constraints and the issues with broker costs and supply and logistics constraints, we can say that the impact on the gross margin side is around 0.4%-0.6% in quarter three. It's pretty substantial for us, and we try, of course, to optimize and improve. I would say our sources and our power is somewhat limited, and we need to live with it and try our best.
Okay. Thank you. We have a queue of questions. We will take them in a top-down order. I thus ask now Marta Bruska to go ahead with her question, to switch on her microphone and camera and talk to us. Marta, please.
Hello, good morning. I have a couple of questions, if I may, please. I will take them one by one. Firstly, I got a little bit confused on your R&D comment. I think in press release it states some $24.4 million, while in the income statement, when I go down, I see $10.8 million. Does it mean that the difference is what you capitalized, or was that $24.4 million referring to some more quarters, or how shall I understand that, please?
I don't know. I have to refer to Matthias. I certainly can confirm that we do not capitalize any R&D cost, but there might have been typo somewhere. I'm not 100% sure.
Yeah, Marta, I think you had a good catch. Unfortunately, the $24.4 million is not correct. I must admit that we said $24.4 went into research and development, which is not the case. Sorry for that. What we said in our presentation, that's the correct number. It's much lower. We switched, obviously, SG&A and R&D costs. Sorry for that typo or for that error. What we presented is correct. As Lukas said, we never capitalized any major R&D activities in our books. We always expense and as we go. Yeah. There is no burden.
Thank you.
in the balance sheet, yeah.
Thank you. Thank you very much for the clarification. Just to be clear, it still increased quarter-over-quarter by about $1 million or so, but, yeah. Then the second question is about the outlook for 2022. Some of your broader peers, like I referred to VAT, sees the market growth for the next year in low teens. Do you have any indication? It seems like it could be still relatively capacity constrained. I heard your comment with regard to your own ramp-up roadmap a little bit with Q2 perhaps seeing a full benefit of the new capacity increases. How do you think of 2022?
Let me say that, again, there are two items that I like to mention. First, I agree with most of my peers, the market itself probably will grow somehow in the low 10%. At the end of the day, it's also a question of how much of the backlog can we reduce during 2022. From an order point of view, I expect the market being in the low tens, or maybe around 10%, the more we can reduce the backlog, the higher we should go above this rate in terms of revenue that we should reach in 2022. It's dependent on our ability to increase capacity and also to work with, hopefully, a easier supply chain that will adapt to the higher level compared to 2021.
I'm sorry, my network is really poor because of the video streaming. The market in low 10s, and then you will be up or down versus the market from your statement?
From a revenue point of view, we should go higher because we will reduce our backlogs.
Yes. Exactly. That's what I expected. Okay. Just very quickly on the China. Can you give us an estimate how big it is currently, and specifically for semis, and with regard to also the context of the political situation in your comments there. Would there be an idea to relocate some capacities also there when you think of adding capacities? Would China and/or a factory in China be an idea?
Let me start with the last part. No, we are not going to add capacity in China, especially not for the semiconductor market. Our Chinese operation has been built up to utilize the good cost level in China, and we use it only for, I would call it low-tech products, not for high-tech products. The high-tech products, we will certainly keep outside of China. Regarding to the political situation, I think I would be the wrong guy to really comment. I simply hope for a good outcome, but I'm not a politician, sorry to not answer that question. From a growth and size point of view, China will be our most important sales region this year. We will be the number one position, basically, bigger than the U.S. market. I don't think it will stop that quick.
I think it's more than 50% of the growth is coming from the semiconductor market now in China, which has been close to zero, let's say, 5-10 years ago. Now it's already 50% of the exposure. The second largest part is coming from refrigeration, automotive, especially with lithium-ion battery manufacturers. Also very nice, the general vacuum market has been very positive for us as well. China certainly will represent roughly, if I look in the next 2-3 years, probably more than 25% of our potential revenue. It will be dominated by semiconductor and automotive, especially battery activities in China.
Thank you very much. I let other people as well take the queue. Thank you very much.
Okay, the next person to have raised his hand is Joern Iffert . May I ask you to switch on your microphone and camera, Joern, please?
Hi. Good morning, Lukas. Good morning, Matthias. Good morning, Bernhard. Thanks for taking my questions. The first question would be please on the semi market again. In terms of fab builds, in terms of product innovations on your customer side, I know it's early, but can you give us an idea what you see also for 2023, 2024, or what is chatted among your customers for this time period in terms of semi growth? Second question would be please on the gross profit margin. It's a quite significant downturn versus your target ratio of around 50%. Why is it not there more pricing power? What are the pricing actions for 2022? What else can you do to bring the gross profit margin back to around 50% by 2022? The third question, can you share with us on the book-to-bill? Are we speaking about 1.3, 1.4 times?
Also maybe the magnitude of the order backlog versus around 12 months ago. Thank you.
Okay. Let me take those questions quickly in the same sequence that you asked it. Nevertheless, there are at least two indications that in semiconductor market, we will have a positive situation that has to deal with the number of announced new fabs that the large semiconductor company would like to build. If, let's say, the majority of those announcements will actually be executed, we will have enough additional businesses to continue the growth that we currently see, because it takes somehow between one and three years to actually build a fab. All the announcements that have been made recent months, the actual build-up of those fabs will happen in 2022, 2023, and then eventually go into 2024.
Based on the number of new announced fabs, we should see a continuation of the semiconductor business even into 2023, 2024, at least from a CapEx point of view. The semi chip volume for the end users depends then on the actual demand. From a CapEx point of view, we certainly will see and enjoy a nice growth. On the gross profit margin, maybe two comments there from my side. One is that the product mix, the current product mix that we have, is more related to equipment manufacturers. It's a little bit skewed towards the higher volume for equipment manufacturers, and those products tend to have a lower gross profit margin compared with the products that we ship to the chip makers, the end users that we call them.
Having a higher exposure or higher growth rate on the equipment manufacturer side, that usually has a negative impact into our gross profit margin. That's a product mix issue. Secondly, it's a combination of what already Matthias mentioned, higher brokerage fees, higher logistics cost, and so on, which costs a lot of money on one hand side. You also asked about can we turn that into higher prices? Yes, we do, but we do it very carefully. We do not want to have a bad taste with our large accounts. With the large accounts, we do it very selectively. With newer accounts and with all the new products, we certainly have higher pricing than before.
For existing customers, very loyal and long-term existing customers, we try to share the pain with them and not just ask for a higher price, even if we could, because that would destroy our good reputation with those long-term customers. On the book-to-bill ratio, we do not disclose the details. Because the dynamic and the timing of certain shipments might create some wrong impressions, because we have products that we ship in two weeks, and we have products that we ship in six-nine months. A book-to-bill ratio is not immediately something that will turn into revenue. What I can confirm here is that we have, I believe now, was it five or six consecutive quarters, something like that, with a book-to-bill ratio above one.
As I indicated in the first question, if we would not have any kind of bottlenecks, we probably would be able to ship CHF 50 million more for a full year total. Therefore, the book-to-bill ratio, I'm not going into the details, but I can confirm that the majority of the increased orders is coming from semiconductor customers as well as equipment factory manufacturers.
Thank you for this. If I may follow up on the gross profit margin. With the scale benefits, this may be improving product mix on the end user side and maybe also some productivity gains after the capacity was ramped. Do you expect it to approach around 50% again in 2022?
If all the bottlenecks will be gone, and especially also on the electronic side, on the supply side, and going back to a more balanced product mix, and a higher content of software, we should at least aim to get close to 50% again.
All right. Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Thank you, Joern, for your question. We have Michael Foeth still on the queue, and after that, I will go back to the chat function where we have additional questions that I will read out to you. Now, Michael Foeth, please go on.
Yes. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Just two questions from my side. The first one is regarding your R&D spend in the quarter. It was down versus the previous quarter and also versus the previous three quarters. I was just wondering what explains those dynamics in R&D spend. Is that a saving measure to compensate the lower gross margin, or should we expect it to go up again in the fourth quarter? The second question would be if you could quantify your investment and CapEx plans relating to the capacity expansion, both for this year and also for 2022, please. Thank you.
On the first question, it has certainly nothing to do with balancing the gross profit kind of weaknesses. On the R&D side, this is always a long-term spend. It has never been managed on a quarterly basis because R&D projects are usually long-term. The fluctuation on the R&D side has to do with the timing of the state of certain R&D projects. Usually, R&D projects are very expensive at the end of a project, where we have to even buy a lot of material for prototypes, and so on. Therefore, the fluctuation only had to do with the distribution of the project ages, let me call it like that. It has nothing to do with any kind of short-term impacts. The R&D costs are on a high level, and I don't expect that they are going down on absolute terms.
They might go down as a percentage of revenue, but not in absolute terms. On CapEx plans, yes, we will have probably a new record in CapEx for 2021, and we even expect in 2022 a relatively high CapEx number, but not as high as in 2021.
All right. Thank you very much.
You're very welcome.
Thank you, Michael. We have a written question from Hamish Edsell in our chat. Let me just read that out to you. Please could you elaborate on the opportunity in battery testing for the automotive industry, both in the pre-installation stage and in the car service market? The penetration of e-cars in Europe at least, is already growing very fast. Is this a large sales opportunity for you in 2022 and 2023?
Let me start with the last part. Yes, it is certainly a nice growing market for us for the coming years. I would not only just refer to 2022 and 2023. Probably the last three to five years is kind of investment cycle into a lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity. And we are, I wouldn't say 100%, but more than 90% connected to the pre-installation and not to the service part of the lithium-ion battery market. So most of our products, and especially the very expensive, sensitive instruments, are only used in the quality control, at the end of the integration line to make sure that the lithium-ion batteries are perfectly tight and no oxygen can get, or air can get into the lithium-ion battery, as well as nothing should get out. Because lithium ion in connection with oxygen is an explosive mixture, and that's exactly what we like to avoid.
Our products are more linked to the CapEx part, or say 90% linked to the CapEx part of the battery market, not to the service and recurring revenue part.
Thank you, Lukas. If I look to our list of questions, I still see Joern having raised his hand. Do you have an additional question, Joern?
Just a general question, please, on the product innovations going for 2022 and 2023. Let's assume, please, a scenario the end markets would be flattish. With new product initiatives you have, can you add around $10 million additional sales, $5 million, $15 million over the next one or two years? What should be the magnitude we should think of, please?
It's more in the $10 million and not in the $15 million range.
Primarily linked to semiconductor?
The majority linked to semiconductor, but there's also one or two applications that are outside. I would say that it's about 2/3 of the additional volume, or let's say around $10 million, is from semi, and then maybe another $5 million from non-semi applications.
Thank you very much.
I see that Marta has another question. Marta, just take on, please.
Hi. Thank you. Yes, I would like to ask you about this Micron announcement where they had $150 billion for the next 10 years in investment into memory. Do you see some opportunities related to that for you? I guess you would. Can you take us a little bit deeper into what this means for INFICON, please?
I think we touched on that already one or two times, that the memory market is less sensor-intensive compared to the foundry market. Having said that, even for memory manufacturers, especially if they now start to use EUV technology, and Hynix and Samsung have announced that, Micron not yet. I expect that will intensify a little bit the sensorization of the end-user market, because they are going to use high technology as well. Under normal circumstances, we have a higher exposure to the non-memory chip manufacturers compared to the clean memory manufacturers.
Thank you very much.
Everywhere, whenever the new fab is built, that's a new opportunity for us to sell.
Thank you, Lukas, and thank you for your patience with us.
Thank you.
I nearly feared that you found another mistake.
No, I was correcting my note from the previous one, therefore I missed some. Thank you.
That's good. I'm happy. Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you, Marta. Thank you, Matthias. Manuel Peter has posted another question in our chat. Let me just read that out to you. "How much revenue could you theoretically turn over with the current installed capacity, not including supply chain issues? And how much will the capacity increase with the currently planned investments in 2021 and 2022?
Good question. I don't know exactly how well we would end up with, but I would assume that what we announced as our guidance is probably the maximum that we can achieve from a capacity point of view. As I mentioned before, we probably will end up kind of adding 50% more capacity by the middle of next year compared with the level that we used to have in 2020. That explains a little bit what we could do theoretically over the next few years, because we expect the continuation of growth and therefore invest in capacity.
Thank you, Lukas. Any more questions from the audience? Just raise your hand or switch on your microphone and camera so that we see that you have another question. If not, I would like to hand over for Lukas for his closing remarks.
Thank you for your patience. Thank you, Marta, for finding a quite big mistake in our written communication. It should not happen, but it's always highly appreciated if somebody finds those mistakes. I would like to just say thank you to all of you, wishing you a nice day, and hopefully see you face-to-face in the future, not using video conferencing anymore. It's still not the same feeling talking to a microphone or a video camera compared to talking to real people. Thank you for that, and have a good day. Bye-bye.
Thank you. Bye-bye.