Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Analyst and Media Conference Call. I am Zandra, the Chorus Call operator. The conference must not be recorded for publication or broadcast. At this time, it's my pleasure to hand over to Mr. Mike Allison, CEO of VAT Group. Please go ahead, sir.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, a very happy new year to you all. Good morning and welcome to this short conference call on VAT's fourth quarter and full year high-level results release. With me this morning, the CFO, Fabian Chiozza, and our Head of Investor Relations, Michel Gerber.
I will start by elaborating on our Q4 and full year 2021 performance, and then Fabian will explain in more details the impact a change in accounting policy, driven by a decision of the IFRS Interpretations Committee, had on our results. Such changes applied retrospectively and consequently prior period financial statements will be restated. After our introductory remarks, you will have the opportunity to ask questions.
I would like to remind you that VAT will publish its full Q4 and full year 2021 results on March 3, together with an outlook for 2022 and an update on our midterm targets. Today's Q&A session will, as usual, be moderated by the call operator. Before I start with the review of VAT's fourth quarter business performance, I would like to thank the entire VAT team around the world who delivered an outstanding performance throughout 2021 by delivering at an extremely high level despite the ongoing challenges such as COVID-19 and the global supply shortages.
Overall, they made it possible for VAT to post record full year results for order intake, sales, EBITDA margin, and free cash flow, capturing not only the great market opportunities, but also by further extending our market and technology leadership in 2021.
Based on preliminary and unaudited figures, VAT's fourth quarter and full year 2021 results are substantially above the previous year periods, confirming the positive outlook given in the fourth quarter of last year.
In the valve segment, the Semiconductor business unit reported record results in 2021 as high capital investments in the semiconductor industry continued, and we continued to gain share and grow our adjacencies. Strong order momentum in the Display and Solar business unit confirms that the bottom of the cycle has been reached in this market.
The Advanced Industrial business unit benefited from recovering industrial markets supported by targeted growth initiatives. The Global Service segment also achieved record results driven by its increasing install base and our expanding product portfolio. The high utilization levels in the semiconductor fabs also drove increased demand for spares and repairs as well as consumables.
Let's have a look at Q4 2021 results. VAT recorded preliminary Q4 orders of around CHF 434 million, up 107% compared with the same period a year earlier, and 45% higher than the third quarter of 2021. The order pattern seen in the fourth quarter confirms the significant capital investment programs the end customers, especially in the semiconductor industry, plan in 2022.
However, this exceptional increase in order activity was to some extent driven by special factors. We estimate that at least 20% of Q4 orders represent a concentration of year-end order activity driven by longer lead times, price increases which were effective on January the first, last buy orders on end of life products, and finally, advance orders from smaller OEM customers.
Preliminary net sales commenced slightly above the guidance of CHF 240 million-CHF 250 million provided in October and amounted to approximately CHF 255 million, an increase of 36% compared with the same quarter a year earlier, and up 11% on the third quarter of 2021. This translates to a Q4 book-to-bill ratio of 1.7, and at the end of December 2021, the order book amounted to approximately CHF 461 million, 62% higher than the end of the third quarter of 2021.
As a result of the strong fourth quarter full-year 2021, preliminary orders amounted to approximately CHF 1.23 billion, up 69% compared to a year earlier, while net sales increased by 30% to approximately CHF 901 million. Preliminary figures indicate that VAT achieved a full-year EBITDA margin, including the impact of changes to IFRS accounting rules, of above 34%, a strong increase compared to prior-year period.
This excellent performance reflects higher sales volume and operational leverage as well as VAT's ongoing operational improvements. Higher investments to support the continued growth in 2021, VAT's preliminary free cash flow reached a full-year record level of approximately CHF 194 million compared to the previous year's level of CHF 147 million.
Looking ahead, the strong order growth in the fourth quarter and the high order backlog indicate a continued healthy business environment going into 2022. Despite ongoing supply chain constraints across the entire industry and the ongoing COVID pandemic, VAT expects a solid improvement in its 2022 results.
As mentioned earlier, a more detailed update on the outlook for 2022 and VAT's midterm targets will be provided with the release of the company's final full year 2021 results on March 3, 2022. For the first quarter of 2022, VAT expects net sales of CHF 270 million-CHF 280 million. I would now like to hand over to Fabian for more information about the impact of the change in interpretation of accounting standards. Fabian.
Thank you, Mike, and a very warm welcome and happy New Year to everybody also from my side. With today's announcement, we also like to inform you about the change in the interpretation of the accounting standard for cloud-based services that requires VAT to restate some of its previously reported numbers. Earlier in 2021, the IFRS Interpretations Committee clarified how implementation costs for cloud-based service costs are to be treated in the company accounts applying IAS 38 intangible assets.
As a result of this clarification in our analysis of implementation expenses incurred to date, costs for VAT's new ERP system can no longer be capitalized, but have to be expensed through the income statement as incurred. In accordance with IFRS, this change in the interpretation of the accounting policy will be applied retrospectively and consequently, the prior period financial statements will be restated.
For 2021, VAT estimates that the changes in the interpretation of the accounting rule will have a small negative impact of about -0.6 percentage points on its reported half-year EBITDA margin and about a -0.6 percentage points impact on its full year of 2021 EBITDA margin. Comprehensive details of the restatement in the P&L and the balance sheet will be provided with the release of our annual report on March 3, 2022. With that, I'd like to hand back to Mike.
Thank you, Fabian. In summary, these results demonstrate that VAT continues to perform across all sectors and that our growth initiatives around increasing market share, developing new adjacencies, and optimizing our service business are yielding outstanding results and continue to grow VAT above market rates.
Also, our focus on operational excellence and supply chain is allowing us to successfully ramp the company, improve our manufacturing cost structure, and deal with a very challenging supply chain situation. This concludes our prepared introductory remarks, and I'll now turn it back to the operator for the Q&A session. Thank you.
The first question comes from Sebastian Kuenne from RBC Capital. Please go ahead.
Yeah, good morning, gentlemen. Three questions here. First of all, your comments on pre-orders, you say 20% of the orders in Q4 are pre-orders, so roughly CHF 100 million. How do you define that pre-orders? Would that basically mean that the remainder of the orders has the usual delivery times of two-six weeks, and then the remainder is basically pushed into, well, Q3, Q4? I would like to have some clarification on that.
My second question, on Malaysia, you are planning the new plant, the extension, basically, or new plant there. Could you tell us again what the current staff costs are compared to assembly workers in Switzerland? And you also mentioned that the selling prices there for your valves in Malaysia are lower.
You mentioned that in a conference call, and I would just like to find out or have some detail on how much lower the prices are locally with your selling prices. Finally, on the SEMI organization mentioned that they expect 10% of equipment growth this year for the entire SEMI equipment market after 39% growth in 2021.
Now, this seems a bit odd given that the order backlogs of all these companies are so large and the run rate into Q1 and Q2 is so massive. It would basically imply a very sharp drop-off in the second half. Do you see the same? Are you very cautious on the second half of the year in terms of order intake? That would be my questions. Thank you.
Okay. Thank you. Yeah, you know, we've just had the analysis of our order book, so we're still digging through the results. It's quite a complex picture to work out because there is so much volatility in the order patterns right now driven by supply chain challenges, the individual OEM's capacity, the high growth rate, COVID, lead times.
You know, it's a very confusing order picture. We said at least 20% is driven by these sort of one-off effects. You know, when customers place orders, we can see the request dates, obviously, of those orders, so we can tell how much is one-off, how much is scheduled for the second quarter, the third quarter.
Interestingly, in our Q4 order intake, about, let's say above 35%-almost 40% of those orders were for the second half of 2022. You know, we get a good picture of that. As I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we also had you know we introduced price increases to counter the supply chain cost inflation, and they came into effect first of January.
There's quite a bit of pre-ordering there, and we could tell that from the average volume we see from those customers, and triangulate back to what we think is this one-off effect. As you said, somewhere between CHF 85 million-CHF 100 million, we think is in these one-off impacts.
It still gives us a very healthy intrinsic run rate in the business. If I jump to your last question as part of that, I think you're correct. 10% seems pretty anemic for industry growth at this point. There is nothing right now that would say we see a slowdown in the second half.
I do think the first half will moderate a little bit because of the overall supply chain challenges and companies like ourselves trying to deliver at higher rates. I think the market wants this high volume, but I think some of it will push into the second half. I think you'll see CapEx estimates increasing during this quarter, and I expect them to be more in the 15%-20% range for the year at least.
I think the market, again, would take more if the supply chain could deliver at a higher rate. Malaysia, you had some questions there. Staff costs somewhere between a quarter and a third on assembly workers. As you get into the professional workers, the change is half to sometimes similar price depending on the skill set. Sorry, the question you had on pricing-
Yeah.
Yeah.
We had a discussion and either you or Michel was mentioning that the retail price or the price that you charge your customers locally in Malaysia are lower than the price you charge from Switzerland. That you have basically lower price or different price lists locally in Malaysia.
No, no.
Because the customers know that you produce in a low cost country, so there's kind of an adjustment for that. I would just want to have some clarification.
Yeah, let me clarify that because it really isn't the case. We have a global price list independent of where a product's manufactured because you know, it's hard to actually define the cost differences. Production equipment's the same price in Malaysia as it is in Haag. It's mostly the labor and some of the more commoditized supply chain items that we can get at a lower cost in Malaysia.
We don't disclose that to our key customers because we have to balance that across the globe. In fact, we make different products in Malaysia compared to Haag, which is really key. I think I've mentioned many times that in Malaysia, it's our latest products that are being adopted by the market.
That's why it's harder to predict the actual ramp of Malaysia because that depends on the adoption of our customers' new equipment. It's pretty much a different product set that we have in Malaysia compared to Haag, which is good because it makes it difficult for the market to try to segment the pricing of our products and allows us to balance our pricing a lot better. Intrinsically, there's no price benefit. We may choose, because of slightly lower costs to offer different products into different market segments to drive our market share, for example.
Take some benefit from the slightly lower costs. But it's not a massive difference in cost, you know, between manufacturing in Malaysia and manufacturing here.
Okay. Understood. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Sandeep Deshpande from J.P. Morgan. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi.
Hi, can you hear me?
Yes. Yep.
My question is on the timing of these orders again slightly. I mean, can you talk about how these orders were taken in past years? Did you have price increases in January in past years? Did you have this bunching of orders from some customers placing large orders for the full year, potentially ahead of time in past years?
O f course, also, did you also discontinue products in past years which could cause bunching of orders? You know, I mean, can we look back to the past to explain what has happened in terms of the orders, at least at 20% partially at all?
Yeah. I think this year is different. We had some, for example, on obsolescence, we have a couple of large products, where because of electronic component challenges, we're moving to a new generation of controllers and moving customers to a new product set. That was a fairly large amount worthy of mentioning. We've normally got obsolescence happening, you know, across every quarter.
This was a couple of big ones that were coming into effect. The price increases, we generally do in every year. This was a slightly larger one due to the supply chain, inflation we're seeing, and we announced that this was taking place on the first of January. I would say there was much higher uptake of the old pricing than we see normally.
That was definitely unusual. I think one of the other things we're seeing that the small OEMs are quite often participating in the legacy sector and they've been growing pretty fast, especially some of the Asian smaller OEMs. They're really trying to secure production slots against the larger OEMs and placing almost full year demand in the fourth quarter.
We saw some very sizable orders from smaller customers that, you know, for example, one we would expect CHF 5 million-CHF 10 million per year from this specific OEM and, you know, we saw a CHF 15 million-CHF 20 million order come in to represent the size of growth they had and also trying to tie down their production slots. It was quite some unusual ordering.
Thanks. One quick follow-up. I mean, in terms of your capacity, if your orders remain at these levels, I mean, do you have capacity to supply through 2022?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's too early to call where the industry run rate is for us right now. You know, as we look at the order pattern and analyze this, we'd say around the 300 million may be what the demand is. I think when you look at the investments we're making in Haag in the short term, I think we can get up to that level. It's tighter than we wanted it to be for sure. The speed of the industry I think has been much faster than we anticipated. Our Haag facility, we're running about CHF 650 million. We plan to take that up to CHF 750 million this year.
Our Malaysia, our current run rate is over CHF 200 million, and we expect to get that closer to CHF 300 million by the end of the year. I think we're comfortable we can ramp our production facilities to meet this demand. It's certainly tighter than we had expected. Hence, the decision to move ahead with this phase two Malaysia makes a lot of sense, and we're trying to accelerate that as much as we can.
Thank you.
We will take the next question from Michael Foeth from Vontobel. Please go ahead.
Yes, thank you. Good morning. Happy New Year to all of you. Three questions. The first one is you talked about those price increases. Can you give us an idea of the sort of average percentage price increase across your products, so that we have an idea of the price impact for 2022? That would be the first question. The second question is, in terms of supply constraints or constraints in general, how and how far are you constrained from your supply chain to deliver products to your customers today?
D o you have any short-term constraints related to sort of the Omicron wave in terms of availability of your workers in factories? That would be the second question. The third one is if you could give us an idea on the 2022 and 2023 distribution of your CapEx plan in terms of annual CapEx spend. Thank you.
Okay. As you can imagine, the price increase topic is super sensitive because it's applied differently depending on agreements we have, so we're not gonna release any details of that price increase at this point. On supply constraints, I think these are pretty much across the board.
You can imagine after a 30% year, you know, to have another 30% growth year, you see limitations across many different elements of the supply chain. I think the two key ones we've been faced with was raw material, so mostly aluminum, which we now have secured pretty much the supply we need for 2022, so that's in good shape. Electronics components remains very complex. You get constraints jumping up every day there.
I'd say they've got a bit better recently compared to, say, the third quarter, where we really had some challenges. We're working very hard with second sources and new qualifications to try to minimize risk there. We've recently just also completed a very detailed audit of our supply chain because I think we've communicated before that about 70% of our production parts are outsourced.
We've gone into a lot of detail to look at our supply chain capacity. I'd say in general, that's in good shape. We have a couple of suppliers that are challenged, so we're looking at second sources there and qualification of new parts. I think it's all manageable.
It's just an enormous amount of work and we're also driving some slightly higher costs as we drive those qualifications, et cetera. I think at the moment we're doing well. You've seen the guidance for the first quarter. We continue to ramp. You know, I think we can ramp the business this year up to the CHF 300 million per quarter.
As we get above that level, we certainly have to continue investing in Haag and in Malaysia. You know, we expect that new facility in Malaysia to be up and running towards the end of 2023 and into early 2024. Still quite a lot of work to do between now and then to ensure we have the capacity.
We have a very professional supply chain team here driving it. Fabian, do you wanna comment on the CapEx distribution?
Absolutely. As you remember from our announcement in December, the total initial investment will amount to approximately CHF 160 million over the period 2022-2024. I do expect here some front load of the CapEx in this year and also in the following year. The CapEx to sales ratio will increase somewhere between 5.5%-6.5% of sales for this year and next year. Before then we will return again to the band of 4.4%-5% over sales.
Okay. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Robert Sanders from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Hi. Good morning and Happy New Year. I just had two questions really. One is, in terms of the source of the semiconductor upside, would you say that it is driven mainly by logic foundry, or you think it's across the board, I guess? That'd be my first question, then I have a follow-up.
The CapEx distribution right now. I think right now it's definitely a high percent going into logic and foundry, not just at leading edge, but also in the mid and lower technology nodes. A lot also going into the memory sector across DRAM and NAND.
I think the split I saw recently was about 60% into logic and foundry and about 35% into memory. That was for the full year of 2021. I don't know yet what the distribution was like in Q4 because you know, we're really the first to announce at this point and haven't seen where the CapEx is going.
Clearly, you know, this trend I've mentioned before on the CapEx per wafer driving the logic and foundry business is certainly still very much alive, with the CapEx numbers you see in high-end logic especially.
It'll be very interesting to watch DRAM in the first half of the year, because I do expect that, CapEx per wafer ratio to increase also in DRAM. If that continues to grow, then I think it could be one of the main drivers, you know, to take us over the $100 billion this year in CapEx.
You mean WFE not
WFE.
WFE.
Yeah. Yeah.
Just on display, you know, could you just talk when you say it's rebounding, is that OLED driven? Is that OLED and LCD? Can you just give a bit more color on what's actually happening there? Thank you.
Yeah. I mean, we saw strong order intake in Q4. I mean, sizable order intake compared to the rest of 2021. Most of that was coming from OLED projects. Yes. There was some legacy LCD there, but majority coming from OLED.
Thanks a lot.
The next question comes from Timm Schulze-Melander from Redburn Atlantic. Please go ahead.
Hello there. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my question. I just have two. The first, could you perhaps just talk a little bit about your aftermarket business and the stocking and you know what kind of distribution of parts you have, and if there are any challenges there. It looks like it executed very well in 2021. Looks like it's going to execute well in 2022 despite the challenges. I just wanted to know if there are any sort of constraints or anything we need to be aware of there. Thanks.
Yeah. The service group performed extremely well in 2020, but also in 2021. Tremendous growth in both years. I think that's been driven by the high utilization rates in the fabs for sure. You know, wafer fab utilization rates are above 97% right now. At probably the highest they've ever been on average.
You know, that's driving a very high increase in consumable spend, especially. Also customers are repairing things immediately, because every piece of equipment is highly valued right now. Constraints in that business, I think we see probably less because there's not the same level of electronics components required. You know, most of our consumable business is metallic parts with elastomers are the two main raw components there.
We've had less challenges there, apart from just the general demand increase, trying to ensure we have enough machining capacity. Consumable business is very strong. The repair business is very strong, again, because the installed base of valves is growing exponentially. You know, we're capturing a higher percent of that, because customers want the high performance.
In this high utilization environment, they don't wanna take chances on third parties and substandard components, so they're more likely to buy the original OEM parts. We're seeing strong performance there. We're also taking share back in Korea. You know, we've had a couple of successful lawsuits there against third party component providers that were clearly infringing some of our patents.
We're gaining share back in Korea, which is helping. Lastly, our retrofit order intake has been very strong. The challenge in that business is getting actual time on the production equipment to upgrade it and put in the new retrofits.
You know, that's trying to get machine time right now is very challenging, but the order intake and the expectation for that to continue into 2022 is very strong. I think all the main parts of our service business is performing at a really high level.
Great. That's super helpful. Just coming back to this challenging supply chain. I mean, your comments around how proactive VAT has been on the raw materials, on the multiple, you know, multisource sourcing, and second or third supplier qualifications, it looks like, yeah, actually investors probably shouldn't be too worried about things from a VAT Group perspective. Have you seen any limitations of your ability to ship products because of supply chain problems further down at your customer site, for example?
Yeah, I think that's the hardest thing for us to predict because, I mean, obviously supply is determined by the weakest link in the supply chain. So far we haven't seen too much of an issue there.
I get the feeling we are gonna see some challenges at our customer side on production capacity based on some weaker links. That's what makes guidance very difficult, is to try to balance that with our own production ramp, but also what's happening in the broader industry.
I think that will ultimately mean a smoother 2022 because this huge demand that is required in the first half of the year, I think some of that will push into the second half just because of those supply chain concerns.
I think from a VAT standpoint, we're doing pretty well. I wouldn't be too concerned about our ability to ramp and produce. I mean, COVID is always uncertain. Nobody is in control of that one. So far, the precautions we've taken there and the way we are executing on the health and safety aspects is also very strong.
That's great. Very helpful. Okay, thanks very much.
The next question comes from Craig Abbott from Kepler Cheuvreux. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, good morning, everyone. Just to come back on the pricing situation at the moment, you made it clear that the price increases you implemented for your customers from January is a sensitive issue. Looking on your procurement side, I mean, could you maybe just give us kind of like a ballpark, you know, indication of what kind of supply, you know, price increases you're seeing and expecting in the coming quarters?
Do you feel relatively confident that in the balance you're passing most this on and therefore, you know, you're looking for sort of a stable growth margin in 2022 enabling you then to generate operational leverage on your fixed cost base. Is that a fair assumption? Thank you.
I mean, this is a very challenging situation because you know, traditionally in semiconductor, our business has operated by reducing costs over time and doing product redesign and finding ways to do things cheaper and faster. It's very unusual, in fact, to see price increases. I don't really don't wanna get into our costs and what we're seeing as our input costs, because we're having very challenging negotiations with our customers, as you would expect on this topic.
We're trying to create the right balance. We have to be fair, and I think part of the reason that VAT is doing so well in the market is because we're reaching a strong equilibrium with our customers between value and price. If we extend that price too hard, you know, it's just gonna create very heavy competition with our key customers.
We're trying to balance that total cost equation and offset some of the input costs by improved efficiency and lower costs in Malaysia. At the same time, there are some, for example, aluminum raw material has in some cases gone up 20%, some cases higher, where we have to pass on some of that cost.
It's just no way of escaping it. The total cost overall, I really don't wanna get into that, the same as with the price increases, because it's a very contentious topic, and I think it's, you know, just the less we say about that to the broader market, the better.
Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you very much.
The next question comes from Remo Rosenau from Helvetische Bank. Please go ahead.
Yes. Hi, thank you. Before you mentioned that Haag runs at a run rate at around CHF 650 million a year, which will be going up to CHF 750 million. Then you said Malaysia will go from CHF 200 million to CHF 300 million. If you take 750 and 300, this gives me CHF 1.05 billion.
On the other hand, you said that you can ramp up your sales capacity this year to around CHF 300 million per quarter, which would give CHF 1.2 billion. In an earlier conference call, you, however, also said that with your existing capacities, you think you would be able to process CHF 1.4 billion of sales. I'm a bit confused here. How much could you actually do with your current capacities?
Yeah. Well, on top of the factory capacity, you've also got some service business that is not related to factory capacity. So there's between CHF 100 million and CHF 150 million of additional sales that come from other sources unrelated to that factory capacity. So with that number I stated, we can get to CHF 1.2 billion.
On top of that, we plan to ramp Haag up towards CHF 800 million, and Malaysia, you know, more towards the getting close to CHF 500 million. So we would get pretty close to CHF 1.4 billion overall with the existing capacity if we push that. But we need the additional headroom, hence the additional investment in the second Malaysia facility.
You've got to add the Haag capacity, you've got to add the Malaysia capacity, and then somewhere around about, let's say CHF 130 million-CHF 150 million in additional sales from other sources.
Okay. That's very clear, Mike. Thank you. In addition to that, I mean, if you would, I mean, of course, the 1.4 would at the earliest be possible in 2023, I guess. If you would push it to that limit, would then the operating leverage turn into a negative leverage? Because as we all know, going towards 100% utilization rates, actually costs go up, not down. What is your take on that one?
No, I don't think we would see any increase in operational costs really because our overhead's not growing at the same rate. Overall, I think we would still be improving our EBITDA margins. You know, even with the cost increases that we're seeing across the board, our plan is to maintain or grow our EBITDA position today.
If you look at our 2021 results, if you take out those IFRS numbers, you know, we're pretty close to the top end of the corridor we said we'd operate in around 35%. You know, our plan is to continue delivering at a very high level.
Okay. Bottom line, if the supply chains work, you could process basically 1.2 billion this year and 1.4 next year if everything goes smoothly and the demand is there.
That's the top end of the capability.
Okay.
I mean, that's assuming everything goes perfectly well, which is, as you know, life can be a little bit different to that. We're certainly targeting getting to that level of output.
Okay. My last question. I mean, you didn't elaborate on the price increase exactly, but will it be enough to fully compensate for the higher input costs in 2022?
The price increase alone may not be enough to compensate for that. You know, we've got a lot of additional supply chain cost reduction processes. We put in place a very disciplined process now to cut costs. We have a major program called Darwin we've been running now for three years.
That's done a great job in reducing our cost structure. As we continue to ramp Malaysia, we'll also benefit from that. You know, so that's why I'm saying I don't wanna talk too much about the price increases and input costs because it's multidimensional here.
Okay. Great. That's very clear. Thank you very much.
The last question for today's call comes from Didier Scemama from Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Oh, thanks for taking my questions. Apologies, earlier I was on mute. Most of my questions have been answered. I just wondered if you could maybe give us a sense of where you think your major OEM customers in the semiconductor equipment sector inventories might be.
Obviously, the order intake you've announced today is quite eye-popping, and I think I understand you did your best to try to, you know, sort of, indicate what might be over-ordering or, you know, or orders brought forward from next year. But have you got a sense of where, you know, inventories at your customers might be? Pretty much all of them talked about supply constraints in the last quarter.
Do you think that with those sort of orders, they are gonna be more comfortable, or do you think that strength sort of carries on, at least through the first half of this year or if not the full year? Thank you.
Well, I think the strength from what I'm seeing from the end market, with CapEx announcements and actually talking to some of these players myself, the strength of 2022 certainly looks very promising. I think, as I said earlier, trying to predict right now, the run rate and where the industry's at is super complicated because the inventory positions are really volatile.
You know, some OEMs may have high inventory positions in some components and then not on the others. It's back to who's the weakest link. That's what makes our guidance extremely tricky. It's very hard to tell. I think we need a little bit more time, maybe a couple of quarters, to see where we're really at in the industry.
I'm hoping by the third of March, when we do our full release, we'll try to give a market update for the year and give some idea of what that means for VAT. There's too many complexities right now to give that make it a very accurate number.
Got it. Then just to piggyback on the previous question. If I summarize what you said, I think, you know, roughly CHF 1.2 billion run rate probably for the first half seems accurate. Would you say that perhaps you could be operating at around CHF 1.4 billion run rate by the end of this year as you add capacity? Is that a sort of good summary?
No, I think that's still too high. When I say I mean, CHF 300 million, you see from our output right now, we're not at that level yet. Even by the end of the first quarter, you've seen our guidance, so we're not at CHF 300 million yet. I'm saying that's what the order intake would demand if we could fulfill it at least for the first half.
We're not gonna be at that level yet. A higher number would be into 2023. That also then depends on the outlook for 2023. Is the CapEx spending going to continue at this elevated level or high level, or is this a new run rate? I think they're the questions we don't know yet.
Certainly seems like the pace of digitalization and just the growth in advanced processing and requirements into the memory market should keep that CapEx running at extremely high levels into 2023.
Okay.
I think it's very optimistic on that.
Maybe final quick one. I mean, it sounds like the major reshoring programs to the U.S. are going to start to have an impact on WFE demand in 2023. Do you have a view on this? I know it's probably further removed away from you guys, but do you have a view as to whether you get orders from your semi capex customers already now, or is that later in 2022 or even in 2023?
Well, interestingly, the order profile from our largest customers is pretty smooth. We're not seeing, you know, we're seeing increases, but we're not seeing these dramatic increases that we've seen with some of the smaller players. I think the larger OEMs have this more under control. That's why I'm saying I think the intrinsic run rate could be getting closer to CHF 300 million.
Yep. Fair enough. Thank you so much, and congrats.
Thank you.