With us in New York today, we have CEO Ben Gliklich, the head of electronics, Joe D’Ambrisi, and the head of semiconductors and assembly, Rick Frick, to talk us through today a little bit about what's happening in Element. Very interesting story in that, you know, the roughly two-thirds electronic materials, one-third industrial, they get stuck in our chemical bucket a little bit more, and I think they're a higher quality company than on average, for sure, in my space. And so what we're trying to do is branch out a little bit. Toshiya was gonna be with us, and he had an issue come up this morning, so he can't be with us, but Trevor from his team is here with us today.
Ben is gonna walk through, you know, maybe about 15 minutes, just kind of explaining their electronics business. Well, we'll focus on that today, that two-thirds of the business, and then we can get into some Q&A. Before I turn it over to Ben and team, though, I just want to say that we're required to make certain disclosures in public appearances about Goldman Sachs' relationships with companies that we discuss. The disclosures relate to investment banking relationships, compensation received, or 1% or more ownership. We're prepared to read aloud disclosures for any issuer upon request. However, these disclosures are available in our most recent reports available to you as clients on the firm's portal.
So with that, again, very happy to have the Element team, and I'll turn it over to Ben to walk us through a little bit, you know, the nuts and bolts of their electronics business. So take it away, Ben.
Thanks, Duffy. Thanks to everybody for joining. It's great to be here. We're excited to share a bit more detail about our electronics business, provide some insights into what we do and into our capabilities. I'm gonna make a couple of introductory comments here, and then I'm gonna turn it to our electronics leaders on my left and right, Rick and Joe. I'd note that there's a lot of content in this deck. We're not gonna go through it in a lot of detail. It's more of a reference document. We're really here to hit the tops of the waves and take your questions. There is some technical content in here, so for those who are more from Duffy's universe and chemical side, we've included a glossary in the appendix that will help with definitions and some of our abbreviations.
If you flip to slide three, this is an Element Solutions overview. So Element Solutions is a diversified chemical technology company, and we provide materials and process solutions that enable the performance and innovation for high-value supply chains. We are really focused on high-value end markets, selling to the very fragmented supplier base of large global OEMs. About 60% of the business is electronics. That's what we're gonna focus on here today. 40% falls into our industrial and specialty business. It's a global company, about 40% of revenue in Asia, 30% in the Americas and 30% in Europe, and a very strong cash flow generative company. The hallmarks of the business are stability of profit margins and stability of cash flows in all market environments.
Over the past several volatile years, we've demonstrated that outperforming markets from a financial perspective on the top line and preserving profit despite inflation and volume volatility. On slide four, you can see a very high-level overview of our electronics segment, and that's what we're here to talk about. We're leaders and highly differentiated within our electronics portfolio. We've got strong global positions in very high-value niche applications in our markets, and we're positioned importantly around the world and close to our customers. So it's a global footprint of market-leading businesses that fit together exceptionally well and are focused on emerging pain points driven by technology inflections. And that's what Joe and Rick are gonna be talking about today. Just very quickly, on the financials of this business on slide five, a couple of things to call out.
The first thing is trough to trough. So the last trough we saw in the electronics cycle was in 2019, before 2023, where there was a significant dislocation in the electronics market. Trough to trough, we grew 5%, 3% organically. But I'd note that the trough in 2023 was much deeper than the trough in 2019, and so that is substantial market outperformance. You can see that on the top right here, where, you know, the two big indicators we would point to are MSI and PCB square meters. We grew organically 3% against a PCB market that was down 2%, from a CAGR perspective, and MSI up 2%. Smartphones were down 4% annualized over that period of time.
So we've really outperformed our end markets, and the business is very well positioned today, both cyclically from a recovery perspective, coming off this very significant trough we saw in 2023, and from a technology inflection perspective. Again, Joe and Rick will talk in detail about these emerging trends in electronics hardware and how we're solving the pain points associated with them from a materials and process solution perspective. With that, let me turn it to Joe on slide six.
Thanks, Ben, and good morning, everyone. On slide six, just to level set everyone on the process of electronics manufacturing. Very simple terms, you have a semiconductor wafer that's fabricated by companies like TSMC and Intel and Samsung, and then sliced into an individual die. That die is then traditionally sent to a semiconductor packager, or what now is commonly referred to as an OSAT, company like ASE or Amkor or JCET, and they take that semiconductor die and put it into a package. Traditionally, it was done on stamped metal lead frame.
Interconnects were discrete copper, or rather gold or aluminum wires were used to connect, make the electrical connection between the chip and the semiconductor package and the lead frame. Then that was packaged in a mold compound, which would protect that semiconductor chip and those interconnections. A bare printed circuit board would be fabricated by one group of our customers, and then that chip package would be sent to a contract assembler or an electronics manufacturing services company that would put that semiconductor package and a whole bunch of other components onto a circuit board, and then send it to box build, where final assembly of the electronic device would be done. This is the traditional technique for manufacturing semiconductor packages, and there are still millions of packages that are manufactured this way today.
And if you look at the evolution in the last 10 or 15 years of these technologies, they've really been incremental changes in the semiconductor fabrication. We've seen scaling that's continued to make smaller and smaller transistors, and in the printed circuit board side, and the IC substrate side, the same type of scaling to finer lines and spaces, finer feature sizes, and, and increased circuit density. The real sea change in technology, in the electronics manufacturing process, has been in the advanced packaging space. And, there's a tremendous amount of technology discontinuity that's going on in that space right now, and all of that prevents, presents rather, a tremendous amount of opportunity for Element Solutions. Ashley?
This is admittedly an oversimplification of the hundreds of manufacturing steps that are used to manufacture an electronic device, but it's really intended to show the diverse range of solutions that we provide to our customers that span the entire process of electronics manufacturing. If you look at, semiconductor fabrication in the upper left, we are a provider of proprietary metallization chemistries that form circuit pathways on a semiconductor chip. The majority of front-end of line semiconductor manufacturers really, consists of a lot of high purity, but mostly commodity chemicals and gases, and Copper Damascene and bump metallization that we provide are just a couple of the very few proprietary processes that are actually, used in semiconductor fabrication. For printed circuit board and IC substrate fabrication in the lower left, we supply every chemical step in the process.
The only steps that we do not provide are the mechanical steps in making a printed circuit board or an IC substrate, like drilling and lamination, as an example. In the case of a conventional printed circuit board, those semiconductor packages that are made by integrated device manufacturers and OSATs, along with the bare printed circuit board, go on to contract assemblers or electronic manufacturing services companies, and then they mount these components onto a bare printed circuit board, and then final electronics assembly goes on to box build. The point of this slide is to illustrate all of the areas in the electronics manufacturing process that Element Solutions touches. And the number of areas and the breadth of those areas that we touch are unique in the industry.
There is no other single competitor that we go up against in all of these areas of electronic device manufacturing. And we believe that's important to electronic OEMs in our industry, and I'll tell you a little bit about that in an upcoming slide. Ashley? So we are organized into businesses, largely the way our customers are organized. We have lines of business that serve the semiconductor industry to start, that you see on the left, foundries, IDMs, and OSATs. And those lines of business are organized really by their core capabilities, what we call the key capabilities, that you see there. The first is metallization. Essentially the forming of conductive pathways in a semiconductor chip or in a semiconductor package.
Although it says wafer metallization as that core competency, it's really more appropriate to say substrate metallization, because we're not only metallizing silicon, but we're metallizing a number of different substrates that could be part of that semiconductor chip or that semiconductor package. It could span all the way from mold compounds to insulating layers to other materials like glass, as an example. In semi assembly, we're providing various attachment solutions for chip attach and die attach, and a broad portfolio of die protection and reinforcement technologies to go along with that. We'll come back to thermal management in just a bit. Our capabilities in circuit board assembly is in the center, very similar to what you see in semiconductor assembly, except the scale and the performance specifications are completely different in those.
Still very important, but just different, and typically an order of magnitude larger in terms of size, if not more. And instead of die attach then, so you're gonna see component attach and package attach, and you're gonna see component protection and reinforcement. Same fundamental technologies that we use in semiconductor assembly. And the same is true for circuit board assembly. Those metallization technologies that we use to fabricate a printed circuit board or an IC Substrate are very similar to what we use in wafer-level packaging when we're providing metallization solutions for the semiconductor package or the IDM or the OSAT. So some of these growth themes are driven by the mega trends in our industry. Rick is gonna talk about that in just a couple of slides.
Many of them are driven by the emerging challenges that our customers in these various disciplines are facing. A good example is thermal management. When you put a lot of processing power, especially at a, as an example, in high-performance computing applications, we've all heard stories of where someone has a Bitcoin mining server, and you put it in a room, and it can heat the whole house. These generate a tremendous amount of heat, and that heat needs to be managed. It needs to be removed from the device, and if not, you're gonna have reliability and performance challenges when you have those thermal challenges. On top of that, there's a lot of different materials in an electronics package.
There are metals, there are polymers, there are other inorganic materials like silicon and glass, and they all expand and contract at different rates when they're heated, and that, in and of itself, becomes a reliability challenge. So if we're going to metallize a semiconductor package, that metal needs to move at relatively the same rate as a piece of silicon or a piece of glass or another piece of metal. And that's a really difficult challenge that the industry faces today, and it's one where a significant portion of our innovation resources are dedicated today, is to solve the challenges of thermal management in the package.
Not only do we have internal innovation resources working on it, and now we've made a recent acquisition of a pretty unique technology that helps us solve some of these thermal management challenges, and Rick is gonna talk about that as well in just a few slides. Ashley? So a few slides back, we took a very high-level look at the electronics manufacturing process. Historically, those process steps were performed by companies that largely stayed in their lanes. If you were a you know foundries made chips, OSAT packaged those chips, PCB fabs made boards, and IC substrate EMS companies put the whole package together and assembled everything. But as advanced packaging continues to evolve, those discrete lines between all those functions in an electronics manufacturing process are really getting blurred.
There are a significant amount of convergence of all of those process steps at the semiconductor packager or at the advanced packaging applications, and our solutions sit at the center of that convergence. The diagram below or in this slide shows just a few of the solutions for forming circuit pathways and for interconnecting those circuit pathways together, two of the fundamental things that we do in the electronics manufacturing process. And all of these solutions that are necessary to construct an electronics device are interdependent with one another. So if you have one single reliability failure in any part of an electronics package, then obviously that package is gonna be scrap, it's gonna be a yield loss.
Our ability to provide those integrated solutions to our customers in a full suite, the full breadth of our portfolio, is again, it's unique in the industry, and it's something that electronics OEMs value. They want to know that if there is a die attach material that's in contact with a bump pad, a bump metallization pad, how is that going to interact with each other? We're the only company in a position to be able to understand that, to be able to generate data around it, to be able to predict what that reliability is, and be able to work with an OEM, with our suite of processes and solutions.
If an OEM needs to figure it out from another set of companies, they're gonna go to this company for die attach, they're gonna go to this company for bump metallization, they're gonna go this company for polymer reinforcement. OEMs find value in that. They find tremendous value in that, in the breadth of our portfolio. And then, Ashley? So most of you are probably familiar with the term More than Moore. As semiconductor scaling became more and more difficult, and Moore's Law, we started to deviate from Moore's Law. We weren't getting twice the transistors and twice the performance at a lower cost every time we went down, up to a lower node or a smaller node in semiconductor fabrication.
In fact, somewhere around 14 nanometers, that performance benefit got less and less, and somewhere around 7 nanometers, the cost of delivering those performance benefits got less and less. And so the industry turned to advanced packaging as a way to solve this solution and get improved performance. And it was done by taking what were essentially big monolithic chip designs that had all the functionality of a semiconductor chip on one piece and disaggregating that function. So you could make some of the most critical functions at leading-edge nodes, like 7 nanometers and 5 nanometers, and you could make some more pedestrian requirements or functions of a semiconductor chip, like memory and things like that, at 28 -nanometer or 40-nanometer nodes. And that provides a significant cost benefit.
Now, it's still, when you look at, you know, a prior technology package with a homogeneous integrated package today, the costs are significantly more. We believe that the value associated when customers go to heterogeneous packaging is more than 2x-3x the value of the package that people often see. Because the number of advanced material solutions and chemistry solutions that we use to make a heterogeneous package are significantly greater than just the cost of the package itself. We believe that's important.
When you're going from a 2.5D package where you've got a single layer of chips disaggregated on an IC substrate, and when you move to something like 3D package, where you're stacking active chips on top of one another, and you're putting 2 layers , 3 layers , or 4 layers, potentially, of high bandwidth memory together, that just exponentially multiplies the number of technologies and solutions that we can provide to solve customer challenges about how they package. What's neat about the packaging industry is that there's very little standardization in the packaging industry today. The industry would love to go down that path, they're simply not there. And you're gonna see a lot of these companies that have either proprietary designs or branded designs that are important to them, and they like that.
That's good for us, because standardization leads to commoditization, and that leads to a greater number of competitors that we would prefer not to see in these spaces. Specialization is fantastic for us because it gives us an opportunity to innovate, rather, and to provide technology solutions that are unique to our customers. Rick?
Okay. I think we've all heard of some of these megatrends. Now, we'll focus on three of them: artificial intelligence and data centers, electrification, and sustainability. And what's happening in the industry is that the chip designs, the advanced packaging designs, are all changing how the customer needs to think about, packaging or, or presenting an electronic device, right? And so all of a sudden, they have to make decisions they didn't have to make in the past about material interface, you know, how they react, interact with each other. And a lot of it is, driven by, you know, different power concerns. We talk about thermal. So if you think about artificial intelligence, and you read up on the different chips they're using, these chips, they measure data center utilization by how much power is being utilized by the data center.
These chips require a lot of power. When you have all that power going into a chip, you think about that, all the metallization we're doing is circuitry, so it's channeling the energy to run the actual chip and processor. The boards are pretty dense, so they put a big NVIDIA chip, let's say, in the middle, and they put all the other chips around it. All of a sudden, that chip, that board can work. The other chips have different problems. There's a lot of heat going in there. So all of a sudden, they have to think about how do I make that chip perform. They spend a lot of money on it in the different packages. So the needs have changed.
So with needs changing, it creates an inflection point in the industry, where the customers are asking us, say, "Hey, you know, you guys can provide a breadth of solutions across, you know, from the wafer level up to the PCB board. You know, how does a solder paste work with an underfill? How does this circuitry work with, you know, the final finish on a PCB board?" And so we can have those discussions with the customers and provide those solutions. It's also creating opportunities for us to gain market share in areas where, you know, previously they would choose to just do the same thing they've done for the last 20 years. So these inflection points are very important for us. So if we move on to electrification. Electrification, you know, you think about electric vehicles, right?
These are, you know, it's a whole change, right? You think about an internal combustion engine; we've had 100 years or more to develop those. Now, electric vehicles over the last 10 years have kind of come on, and you think about all the challenges of putting an electric drivetrain together, right? You know, the same things that matter to an internal combustion engine, weight, you know, longevity, durability, matter to these drivetrains, but they're all electronic. So things like attaching the inverters to the drivetrain become more and more important. So one of our products is Silver Sintering, allows them to low weight, high durability, attach the inverters to the drivetrain. That's something they didn't have to think about before.
So as we build our portfolio around these megatrends, we're building our products, building our solutions portfolio to address all of these needs that are changing. And it's really a real change in the environment. Our You know, our customers, you know, they don't, they don't understand it. As Joe said, all of a sudden, you know, it used to be you're compartmentalized in what you did, in the electronics industry. But now, you know, TSMC is doing advanced packaging, they're doing chip design, they're doing, you know, wafer level, right? They didn't do that before, right? And so all of a sudden, they're asking us questions about how do we, how do we do this? Or what materials do we need to use, and how do they work together better?
And then if you look at sustainability, you know, this is less a technology change, more of a, you know, it's either regulated, and/or, you know, there's a lot of companies who want to buy into this. How do we reuse metals? You know, how do we reuse water? How do we, you know, make sure that, you know, we can address the needs of our customers, our consumers, our stakeholders around sustainability? A lot of the materials that were used in the past, are materials that, you know, regulators and/or companies don't want to use moving forward. They're dangerous materials. I mean, you know, in the semiconductor industry, the electronics industry, there's a lot of materials that, you know, if we listed them, maybe you'd say, "Well, those are bad materials," right?
So how do you get rid of those materials and create a more sustainable environment? So that when you make the electronics, you know, you're supporting, you know, that stakeholder. And so a lot of the work we've been doing in sustainability is we do a lot of recycling of metal. We've been working very hard to make sure no bad materials are in our products, and also promoting that with the customers, and they respond very well to that. And as the regulations change, it becomes a little bit of a challenge sometimes, but you know, we stay ahead of that and make sure that we're addressing those customer needs. Oh, yeah, Kuprion. Oh, Kuprion. All right. So this is an acquisition we made recently. It's a pretty exciting one.
Great, great team out in San Jose, California. ActiveCopper. So they make a product that is a nanoparticulate copper that turns into a paste that we can, you know, screen print in different areas. We use it for thermal management. We're working on through-glass vias. We're looking at something called thermal or electric trenching, which is all addressing things mostly around AI, because, you know, all the electricity is used, all the heat that's going that's being generated, you wanna be efficient. And our plating solutions are great, and we've used them forever in PCB applications. We use them for die attach, package attach, but they can't do. You can't plate copper to address these needs. So this is a printable copper. And so we've been working on it.
We're building it up. We're working with a lot of key customers. There's a lot of interest, and it's really a product I think that's gonna address a lot of the needs of these megatrends moving forward. The people who walk into the doors of our San Jose facility, if you knew the customer list, you'd be pretty impressed, but everyone is kind of giving us a wow factor on this one. How do we get it done?
It's great. It's a very exciting opportunity. We, we put in our early assessment of potential opportunities associated with certain applications, and it's a limited number of applications here on slide 14. We're still learning, as we go up the curve from, you know, customer interest to high-volume manufacturing, but the opportunities associated with this over the medium and long term are tremendous. Which is a good transition to slide 15, which is: what does this mean, you know, for our growth algorithm, or at least the electronics near-term growth algorithm?
We say near term, because there's really only a modest Kuprion contribution assumed on this slide because of the uncertainty of timing, because of the things we'll learn as we move from, you know, proving that the product works, which we've done, through to our own high-volume manufacturing applications work at the customer level and getting it into their high-volume manufacturing. But there's a significant amount of customer pull, just can't quite ascertain timing associated with value from that investment. We've broken down sales ex metals by the businesses we just took you through. And then what's the five-year market growth expectation? How do we outperform, and what are the, what are the drivers of that outperformance on this slide? I'll start with the circuitry solutions business, where we talk about 7% five-year market growth expectation. That's from Prismark.
That's their latest expectation for the PCB market growth, and we give ourselves 2%-3% outperformance of that market, driven by where we participate in that market, primarily at the leading edge with IC substrates, which are critical to emerging needs around advanced packaging. This is probably the area where Kuprion can contribute the most in the near term, and that would drive further outperformance should that hit. When we say near term, we're talking about, you know, 2 years or so. The circuit board assembly business, the 4%-5% market growth expectation comes from Prismark's electronic systems growth algorithm or forecast.
Our outperformance there is driven by some of the innovation we're doing with new alloys for higher reliability, sustainable products that we've introduced, and some of our polymer-based thermal interface materials and electronic, you know, call it protection, that we've been investing in. Circuit board semiconductor assembly is the most exciting area here, and this is market growth from advanced packaging. Our outperformance opportunity is driven by our thermal management materials, right? So that's Argomax and some of the other materials we use here that are supporting our semiconductor assembly customers. Think about that as the OSAT. I'd point to the fact that given this significantly higher growth rate from this part of the business, semiconductor assembly is on track to be 20% of the business within the next three years.
What that means is that the overall growth algorithm will accelerate. Semiconductor assembly is also a medium-term opportunity for Kuprion, so you could see even further outperformance from the semiconductor assembly business as you look out. Your growth algorithm here, we're talking about high single digit organic growth, will accelerate over time given the mix shift in the business and Kuprion's, you know, ramp period. And finally, wafer level packaging, that 6% number is MSI, and we expect to outperform that nicely, driven by the ViaForm transaction that we did last year and some new applications that are emerging for the copper damascene technology associated with hybrid bonding.
And so that's a smaller business, but that's also outperforming our other businesses, further contributing to the acceleration in the growth algorithm as you move out a couple years from now. What does that translate to? It translates to a high single digit near-term organic growth trajectory for our electronics business, growing faster over time. The incremental margins in this business, excluding the impact of our pass-through metals, are north of 35%. So we're talking about, you know, easily double-digit electronics EBITDA growth in the near term and accelerating. And with that, we will end our prepared remarks. A couple minutes longer than we thought.
Yeah.
Hopefully-
A lot of stuff.
Of helpful content. Let's take some questions.
Awesome. And so, those on the line that want to ask a question, there's a text box in the bottom. You can punch it in there and we'll get it. We've got a number, we're probably gonna run over, it looks like. So I think the first question that we've gotten in a couple different ways so far is basically, you know, how do you assess your competitors? Who are your primary competitors? How are you different, you know, in those product chains versus competitors? I think is probably the first one.
Yeah. So as Joe was talking about earlier, we're the only participant in our markets that can speak to this breadth of technical solutions. And so that gives us an ability to think differently about customer pain points. We're not using one product.
Mm-hmm.
But we can look at the suite of materials that are used. We have, you know, viable competitors, large competitors, but they're different in each of these applications. And the traction we're getting from our more unified electronics business, which has been a big initiative over the past 3 years , 4 years, is reinforcing that differentiation.
Mm-hmm.
We've been introducing new sort of— It's not more- it's more than marketing tools, technical tools to show how our materials work together.
Right.
Those are also getting a lot of traction. So we are typically a market leader in the niche applications in which we participate, with viable competitors, but, you know, with a very differentiated solution set.
Okay.
You know, to list a few of our competitors on the circuitry side of the business, we compete with a business called Atotech, which is part of MKS. We compete with DuPont. There are some very, you know, good technical companies out of Japan. On the assembly side of the business, it's a completely different set of competitors. You know, Heraeus and Henkel on the semiconductor assembly side of the business. And then on the front end of line and some of the back end of line, you've got, you know, large, you know, Japanese conglomerates like Hitachi and Sumitomo that participate in those markets as well.
Okay. And then, a lot of people were, and don't worry, but would say that the aggregate of your business isn't as good as, let's say, pads and slurries , which is what most of the chemical analysts know, kind of, as the electronic materials. But, you know, they, they don't grow as fast, so fine. But commoditization is something that worries everybody. If you look, let's say, at the last five years, kind of in your verticals, what's happened with your market share? And I think more importantly, what people want to know is if you took the top three or four competitors in each vertical, is that group gaining market share or losing? Meaning, what everybody fears is, you know, a Chinese player comes in, commoditizes one of your profitable areas, and it, it goes away.
Do you see that in your business, like, when you look over the last, you know, five years, let's say?
The moat around our business is not a specific piece of IP or a specific manufacturing process. The moat around our business is twofold. It's innovation which is incremental development. We're not going to, you know, a room with a blank sheet, with a blank sheet of paper, trying to come up with the next big thing. Our customers come to us with future designs and future requirements, and we solve them by making small modifications to what we already have. There are very rare step changes in materials science. Kuprion is one that we think could actually fit that bill, but they're very rare. So most of our innovation is incremental development, which makes that hurdle for a new entrant very, very high.
Mm.
Because we know what the customers need, and we have a sort of know-how internal to the company that built what the customer has needed for, you know, decades. Many, many products, life cycles. So that's the first part of the moat. The second part of the moat is the technical service.
Mm.
Our customers rely on our people on site to support their high volume manufacturing processes. Our customers are high volume manufacturers. They're not chemists, and so we work to support the chemistry and make sure it's in balance.
Mm-hmm.
That's a big difference from front-end-of-line semiconductor, where there isn't a significant technical service requirement, because every manufacturing process is designed to be copy exact with incredibly high purity levels.
Yeah.
The circuit board business and the assembly business, that isn't the case. So yes, there are some local competitors at the very low end but we maintain or in fact, grow our lead over them through incremental innovation supporting customer needs.
Okay.
So, you know, commoditization, you know, happens at the very low end. It hasn't happened at the high end, and we continue to invest to support that gap. Now, growth in these markets is happening more at the high end than at the low end.
All right.
So growth in these markets is happening in the IC substrate market, in advanced packaging. It's not happening in circuit boards for televisions.
Right.
What we're seeing is market share is migrating because only the leading players are participating in those leading applications.
Mm-hmm.
You know, our position, we feel, is sustainable.
Mm-hmm.
Our share, at the high end, is growing.
Okay, okay. And a little bit different, within your electronics business, what's your auto exposure, ICE versus EV? And then within EV, how much is kind of specific to the U.S. and Tesla?
We haven't broken down market exposure by business before. What we've said is that we get about 1.5x-2 x the value on an electric vehicle versus an internal combustion engine car. That is not just from electronics market expansion, it's also from our industrial solutions business, where there are more fasteners in an EV versus an internal combustion engine car.
Yeah.
Interestingly enough.
Mm-hmm.
The EV opportunity for the business in electronics is not just units, it's also technology adoption.
Mm-hmm.
So we have, you know, Rick was talking about Argomax and Sintered Silver. It's not just about thermal management, it's also about reliability, and it is the best, you know, it's a category killer for power electronics.
Mm-hmm.
But it is not on every high performance EV today.
Mm-hmm.
Some of the legacy OEMs have, you know, design cycles that are way longer than Argomax has been prevalent in the market, and therefore, it hasn't been integrated into the latest designs.
Yeah.
We're gonna grow with EV unit growth, and we're gonna grow with adoption of Argomax and similar technologies. Kuprion, for example, can also meet a lower performance need for power electronics, power semis.
Yeah.
And so, you know, we feel like we've got a very good position there, and it's not just units, it's expansion in the market. I don't know if there's anything you want to add.
No, we do a ton of customer segmentation there. It's really interesting when you look at it, 'cause there, we have a segment we call kind of, we need something now.
Mm-hmm.
So a lot of the higher end vehicles, kind of, were not investing in EV development, needed a solution. So, you know, they use essentially screws to attach their inverters, which isn't very efficient and isn't very durable. So they started with that a nd now they're moving towards our solutions, which are provide them lower, lower weight, higher reliability. So that trend is moving to more and more of the markets, trying to look for a solution that is more modern than maybe a physical attachment.
Okay. And just because it's timely in your business there, a couple people have asked you what's the impact, do you think, from the earthquake on your business in Taiwan? What do you think the impact will be on kind of the greater electronics industry?
For starters, I'll say it was, it's terrible, it's very scary. We're fortunate that all of our people are okay, their families are okay. Our sites are, by and large, okay. We had a small issue that we will be able to resolve pretty quickly at one of our sites. We won't be down for any material period of time. It's early to assess an impact on the broader supply chain. I don't know, Rick, if you have a view.
Or just, is there any scuttlebutt about anybody who's, you know, in trouble, where they, they've lost maybe meaningful capacity?
It's early.
Okay.
I don't know anyone who's in that area of Taiwan who was affected yet. I mean, you know, if I think back years, you know, the weather impacts this industry, Japan, other things, it gets, it gives customers a little bit nervous.
Mm-hmm.
But that area of Taiwan that was affected doesn't have a ton of our competitors or us or even the electronics industry in it. It's unfortunate.
Okay
... but, that all this happened, but I haven't heard anything yet-
Okay
That's gonna impact the supply chain.
Okay. Then another question, just around the variability of profit within the portfolio. So the average is 22% margin. What this gentleman is asking, if you kind of say, let's take 30% as a threshold, what percent of this business would be above 30%? Are there like, you know, 10% that maybe has 40% margins or something like that, that kind of carries a segment? Is there something where, you know, you've got outsized contribution from a business or two?
We have to take metal price out.
Yep.
So what we did in the analysis you saw on these slides is we fixed metal price at 2023 levels. And so that takes the noise of metal price volatility out, but we didn't remove the price of tin specifically-
Right
that we sell on a pass-through basis.
Okay.
If you took that out, you know, that's a $300 million or so in 2023.
Mm-hmm.
You're gonna see the margins significantly higher ex metal. That is the way we look at it. Within each of the verticals we just went through, there is significant divergence in different products.
Mm-hmm.
Within the wafer-level packaging, semi-assembly, circuit board assembly, and circuitry businesses, you've got products that are significantly higher growth margin and, you know, below average. Where the growth is coming-
Mm-hmm
Skews towards higher margin applications.
Okay.
And by the way, there's also metal in wafer level packaging. For example, we're selling gold and there's a lot of copper, you know, that weighs on margins, where we're not backing out the fluctuation or the value there. There is, driven by, you know, as evidenced by the 35% incrementals, room for the margins in this business to expand.
Right.
What you saw in the performance of this business over the past couple of years is margin stability.
Mm-hmm
in a highly inflationary period.
Right.
You know, I, I think that there's real upside over the medium term.
And we're constantly working on it. I mean, we're working—like, even, like, I'll just take some of our lower — We're talking about metals being lower margin, but, you know, recycled, and we are very active buying recycled tin, let's say. And with that, our margins are, if we use that tin, our margins are greater, right? So the more recycled material we can do and process, the better we can do, versus, you know, mining the material. So we constantly are working this all over the world.
Okay. And then if you go back to that slide seven, that you showed the different pieces of the chain and kind of where you are, where you're not. If we think about inorganic growth over a longer period of time-
Sure.
Do you want to get into more of those spaces where you're not? Or would more of the focus be going deeper in the spaces that you're already in?
Inorganic growth is focused on investing behind our businesses.
Mm.
And so buying businesses we deeply understand, that are better inside of our company than outside, meaning with synergies that make our company better, meaning they improve our value proposition to our customer.
Right.
We're not interested in going into some of the commodity, you know, bulk chemicals Joe mentioned, that are important in front-end of line, because they're commodities and, you know, they're not gonna be critical. They're not gonna be solving pain points for customers.
Right.
They're not, a nd therefore, they're not gonna carry the margin or the value opportunity associated with solving pain points for customers. There are some areas where we could go deeper.
Mm-hmm.
There are some capabilities that we'd like to add.
Mm-hmm.
It's very hard to get into new markets organically here.
Right.
It's not an electronics material, monolithic market. It's a series of niche applications, which we're trying to explain with slides like slide seven.
Right.
And so there are some niche applications that are high value that we'd love to be in, and could enter in organically.
Mm-hmm.
We'd also like to continue to consolidate.
Okay. And then, you know, for this electronics business, a lot of people throw out, you know, some different, you know, MKSI, Entegris, DuPont segment, Rogers. You know, if you put those together cumulatively and comp that versus you on a bunch of different stuff where you'd have more data than we would be able to get, you know, how would you say you comp on growth, on, you know, margin expansion possibility, on free cash flow yield over time? You know, where do you end up being better? Where do you end up being behind?
We will grow less than pure play semiconductor companies through the cycle, because that market is going to grow faster. The base rate is higher.
Got it.
But our capital intensity associated will be significantly less.
Mm.
Similarly, you know, if you think about margins, less CapEx, EBITDA, less CapEx margins, they'll compare favorably.
Yeah.
So the growth rate won't be as high, but we will still grow really nice. And I think that what we're trying to support here is there's an inflection in this market, cyclically and secularly, that we are critical to, and will benefit from. So the growth rate from this business will accelerate over time, and it won't require significant capital or OpEx to meet those needs. So you're gonna see margin expansion, you're gonna see EBITDA less CapEx that is favorable to the companies you suggested there, that are more semiconductor-oriented. And so your sort of business quality metrics will be higher with significant growth.
Sure. Okay. And then somebody was asking, just on this year, like at the midpoint of your guide, what are you expecting for top line in that, you know, volume growth on the electronic side? Are you seeing customers double order, as people are getting excited? And do you buy into kind of the inflection and things improving rapidly throughout the year, or are you seeing any warning signs?
Yeah. So, you know, we were mid-single digit organic growth at the midpoint across the overall portfolio.
Mm.
With greater growth in electronics than in industrial. We saw a very encouraging start to the year particularly in the semiconductor market.
Mm.
Those data points, you know, continue to hold true. And there is energy, there has been energy entering the year about an acceleration in electronics in the back half. At the high end of our guidance range, we have some assumption of that acceleration occurring.
Mm-hmm.
At the low end, we just sort of see normal seasonality. We have not seen or heard of double orders or anything around that. We're seeing true sort of underlying market improvement, I would say, or at least stability, if not improvement. Certainly improvement on the semiconductor side. And semiconductor is a good leading indicator.
Mm-hmm.
You know, saying in the industry, "Chips don't float.
Right.
Chips have a much longer supply chain than the circuit board market. So these chip orders are gonna, you know, get delivered, and they're gonna have to go on a substrate, and, you know, we're critical suppliers of that substrate and the attachment process of the chip to the substrate. So that's encouraging for us as we look to the back half.
And then on the slide that you showed, your volumes versus a couple of macros, I think it might have been.
Sure.
Where you outperformed basically over the last 4 years or 5 years. Is there a chance that you're just more defensive, so you do better than those macros in kind of a weaker, down type environment, but you would lose some leverage in the upward? Do you think you'll still be able to, y ou know, if we're up 6% or 8%, let's say, for a couple of years, can you still beat that metric by a couple points?
I would expect that we can.
Okay.
I think we can support that when we look at historical data.
Mm.
Given the innovation that we're bringing to market, I would expect that we will continue to be able to support that.
Okay. And then you mentioned incremental margins of 35%. For how long does that run out? You know, so 1 point of volume would get 35%. You know, when do you kind of hit a point of saturation a little bit where maybe that would start to fall? Or is it, you know, we've got a clear runway for a couple of years at that, that level?
You know, growth in this business, it tends to be from, it's certainly existing supply chains, and by and large, existing customers.
Mm-hmm.
You know, we have ample capacity in our sites. Most of what we do is formulation.
Mm-hmm.
And so, you know, the incrementals are not from volume utilization as much as they're from OpEx absorption.
Okay.
We've got a commercial organization that's supporting these customers already. We've got innovation resources supporting these customers already. We've got, you know, G&A to support our global footprint. Growth requires maybe new technical service, you know, maybe some feet on the ground in a new country. But by and large, the existing people can support growth in the business, and so I don't see an imminent inflection in incrementals.
Okay.
Certainly not in the medium term.
Well, I mean, there are changes, and the geopolitical stuff that's happening.
Yeah.
I was just in India a few weeks ago, and, you know, one of the things that struck me is that, you know, the Indian economy is investing in electronics assembly. If you talk to the people there, they want to employ the people in India, right?
Mm-hmm.
But they don't know how to, they aren't skilled in that. So we've been putting investment in universities.
Mm-hmm.
to train people on how to do electronics assembly. We've been putting investment in consortiums, to kind of pilot plants down there, to bring people in and train, I think we trained, they, they told me 10,000 people. But we're constantly, like, investing in that community, because there's billions and billions of dollars going to that. So you have to look at each individual economy, each situation a little bit differently, and that's where we're putting our investments. So I don't think, you know, the capital is, it's we're not a capital invest business.
Right. Okay.
But, you know, you've got to look at your situation, and then the situation of the country, and the situation of the region, and invest in that.
Okay.
That's what we're doing.
A couple more in queue here, and then, Trevor, I don't know if you've got anything, you can jump in.
Yeah.
So can you touch on customers in electronic segment a bit more? You mentioned TSMC, and the focus of offering kind of a full suite of capabilities. Are you seeing others move, either up or downstream and kind of becoming your customer? And how does that play on who wins in that space? Is it people coming downstream or the people going upstream?
We'll try not to use customer names here.
Sure.
But maybe what we'll say is, OEM engagement is greater than it's been b ecause of these emerging pain points, and interest in what we do has increased from OEMs. And then you've got large semiconductor companies.
Mm-hmm.
Like, the CEO of a large American semiconductor company talked about why he's interested in packaging-
Mm
the other day. It was because packaging was 15% of the value five years ago, and now it's 40% of the value. So the opportunity that the foundries see from packaging is much greater. And so they're moving down, and that's, you know, sort of from the silicon to the package.
Mm-hmm.
That's creating much more interface with them.
Okay.
And that, the vertical integration plays right into that.
Mm-hmm.
Because that gave us a much more important seat at the table with front-end of line, which will then drive, as they move more of their energy to back-end of line and packaging, greater opportunities for us.
I don't know if there's more you want to... I mean
It's a real dynamic environment out there.
Yeah.
It's, it's big. Yeah, and everyone, you know, I, I think, I think most of the companies that you would mention see packaging as a differentiator. So everyone wants to be in that space, right? They wanna, they wanna have the better, you know, the better board, right?
Yeah.
And there's a lot of partnerships being formed. So people, you know, who normally weren't in the packaging space are, you know, partnering with the OSATs, but there's also a capacity issue. I mean, you heard one of the customers in Taiwan just laying down some big investment in, you know, 2 CoWoS advanced packaging fabs that they're gonna put in place in Taiwan. And they said that AI, their AI bottleneck is package fab. So all these companies want in, and some of it is just how do you, how do you support all that? But as we said earlier, the materials needed, the technology needed is very different than it was, you know, 5 years , 3 years ago.
Okay.
This is probably worth talking about equipment, too, because their equipment providers are an increasingly important participant as you, you know, sort of are at the foundry and packaging level.
We call it the three-legged stool, right? You gotta have a customer, you gotta have a material, you gotta have a tool, right?
Mm-hmm.
We spend a lot of time working with the equipment providers, making sure that our materials work well on their devices.
Mm-hmm.
You know, even to the point where we have people in the fabs, we have people in the facilities, you know, fine-tuning performance.
Okay. Yeah, I'll jump in. Looking ahead into 2024 and into 2025, the market is expecting continued demand growth in AI hardware, such as NVIDIA GPUs, which requires 2.5D CoWoS packaging. Can you touch on where you might play within that CoWoS supply chain specifically, and other areas of your business that are most exposed to the AI supply chain?
Okay, let me try. Trevor, you can step in if you want.
Yes, sure.
But you know, so first off, right? All these newer chips are moving to wafer level packaging, right? So we play in wafer level packaging, right? So if you look at the ViaForm products, which is the copper, that extension that cut, you know, bumps the RDL layers, all those sorts of things, you know, nano copper, we play there on the wafer. And then if you look at how you have to put the chip down, assemble the chip, and put the chip down on the board, right? You know, we play in underfills, we play in adhesives, we play in die attach, we play in solder paste, right? And what's interesting about it is, like, it used to be that you could just take a, you know, a solder paste and an underfill and put them together, and they would work.
But, you know, what we've discovered, and we do a lot of R&D around, is how do you optimize that? How do you optimize the interface between those materials? Because the interface between materials on these new chips are becoming more and more important, right? And so, like, a company that's doing the CoWoS, they're asking us, they don't wanna do trial and error. They're asking us, you know, "How, all right, so what should we select?" Right? That's a great question to be asked for, for me, right? What should we select? Because we have the technology, we have the understanding to answer those questions. And to Ben's earlier point, is because we have such a breadth, right, across like, y ou know, the finish on a PCB board matters to what the chip you're attaching it to, right?
And so if we, if we weren't involved in final finish on a PCB board, we wouldn't understand that. But we are involved in that, so the customer, you know, customers you're mentioning, can ask us that question and say, "Well, what finish should I use if I'm gonna put this chip down on the board? And what solder paste or underfill or, you know, should I use with that?" And it's very technical, but yeah, the interaction with customers is incredibly valuable, and it's really changed over the last few years, 'cause customers don't wanna use new materials. You know, they don't wanna have to go through the hassle, but they have to because of these new packaging functions.
Kuprion has a very significant opportunity set in the medium term to solve some of the thermal issues we just talked about with power density. The pull from the largest foundries in the world for those capabilities is incredibly strong.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And there's challenges that, you know, it's hard to describe, but, like, if you think about just the electro- of the electricity utilized on, on these new boards, right? Like, trying to get the, the loss of electricity when you go from, you know, through the board to the chip is intense, right? Then the heat, right? What if NVIDIA says they charge $35,000 a chip, right, or something like that crazy. If it gets too hot, there's software that actually throttles it down. So it goes, you know, from 100% performance to 33% performance. Imagine paying that much for a chip, and then that, because it's too hot, you can't run it at an optimum speed. So all of these challenges become, you know, real, right?
Yeah.
They wanna solve for them. And like a Kuprion product, other products we're building on our portfolio, that's where we're investing, 'cause those are the pain points that'll really change the game. And to your point, you know, those are the pain points that people find value in and will pay for.
You've eaten a lot of inflation in raw materials over the last couple of years. If we exclude metal, how much benefit do you think you can get over the next couple of years? And then, of your sales, are any of them indexed, where those come down, and you kind of automatically have to pass it through, or is everything kind of a, you know, o r what percent, I guess, would you have a shot at kind of keeping that spread?
Sure. So, three pricing mechanisms across Element Solutions, right? The first is the pass-through metals, which we've talked about. We charge our customers what we pay for metal.
Mm-hmm.
If our customers want a fixed price, we'll hedge that metal.
Mm-hmm.
That's a direct pass-through with no margin, and that's tin and silver.
Mm.
There are some surcharges, so products like nickel and palladium, that are commodities, and we have an index. There is a modest amount of margin in some of those surcharges. When that price goes down, we lose those sales but it's not a material margin driver.
Okay.
I would say. And then there's negotiated price increases.
Mm-hmm.
where we go to a customer and say, "Our ability, our cost to serve you, has increased.
Mm-hmm.
We have a discussion, and we reset price on that basis. By and large, those stay.
Okay.
That's, you know, where we're preserving margin.
Right.
You know, we have not seen significant price pressure-
Mm-hmm.
over the past year and a half, despite what was a period of significant price increases.
Right.
And so we feel good about the price increases that we've had to take over the past couple of years. Raw material prices have stabilized.
Mm-hmm.
You know, the price of tin shot up recently, and so some of the pass-throughs, there's been volatility around. But the niche raws that we buy, that we're passing through those negotiated price increases, it's stabilized.
Right.
You know, and just like us, we had to negotiate price increases. Our suppliers, they're not gonna give us that price back.
Mm-hmm.
Though we are spending more and more time on procurement to try to recapture some of that value. The margin tailwind we have should certainly persist through the first half on a year-over-year basis. We'll see about the back half, if we'll still have that tailwind.
Okay.
We don't see a headwind-
Right.
Other than tin, which isn't really a headwind.
Right.
because it passes through, but it will have an impact on margins.
Margins. Yeah, yeah.
Optically.
Okay. Terrific. Well, listen, Ben, Joe, Rick, thank you guys very much for coming to spend some time with us. I'll keep us on track today. If anybody's got any follow-ups, you can certainly send me an email, and we can pass it on. We'll spend the day with Element today, so anything that we didn't get through that you'd like to know, please forward me an email. But gentlemen, thank you so much for coming and spending time with us today.
Thank you, Duffy.
Thanks, everybody, for joining.
Thank you.