Aehr Test Systems (AEHR) 2022 Q1 法說會逐字稿

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Aehr Test Systems' First Quarter Fiscal 2022 Financial Results Call. Today's conference is being recorded.

At this time, I'd turn the conference over to Mr. Jim Byers of MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to Aehr Test Systems' first quarter fiscal '22 financial results conference call. With me on today's call are Aehr Test Systems' President and Chief Executive Officer, Gayn Erickson; and Chief Financial Officer, Ken Spink.

Before I turn the call over to Gayn and Ken, I'd like to cover a few quick items. This afternoon, right after the market close, Aehr Test issued a press release announcing its first quarter fiscal '22 results. That release is available on the company's website at aehr.com. This call is being broadcast live over the internet for all interested parties, and the webcast will be archived in the Investor Relations page of the company's website.

I'd like to remind everyone that on today's call, management will be making forward-looking statements today that are based on current information and estimates and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These factors that may cause results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements are discussed in the company's most recent periodic and current reports filed with the SEC. These forward-looking statements, including guidance provided during today's call, are only valid as of this date and Aehr Test Systems undertakes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements.

And now, with that said, I'd like to turn the call over to Gayn Erickson, President and CEO.

Thanks, Jim. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter fiscal '22 earnings conference call. Thanks for joining us today. Hey, Ken, I think if you could make sure you're muted over there. Thank you. Let's start with a quick summary of the highlights for the quarter and the strong business momentum we're experiencing, and then I'll give an update on our expectations for increased revenue growth this fiscal year.

We're off to a strong start for fiscal '22, finishing the quarter ending August 31st with record bookings for a single quarter of $20.7 million. Since the end of the quarter, we have announced an additional $19.4 million in bookings, bringing our total bookings for the fiscal year to over $40 million as of today's date.

Our strong bookings include several sizable orders received over the past few months from our lead silicon carbide test and burn-in customer for our FOX-XP wafer level test and burn-in systems and full wafer WaferPak Contactors to support testing of silicon carbide devices for electric vehicles. Each of these silicon carbide-focused XP systems is configured to test 18 silicon carbide wafers in parallel in the footprint of a single test wafer test solution while contracting and testing 100% of the devices in parallel on each wafer. This Fortune 500 customer is a major automotive semiconductor supplier, and we continue to work closely with them to achieve their test and burn-in requirements and capacity needs. They continue to forecast orders for additional FOX systems and WaferPaks this fiscal year, and a significant number of systems and WaferPaks over the next several years, driven by electric vehicle semiconductor test and burn-in demand.

We're seeing very strong demand across the industry for wafer level burn-in of silicon carbide devices and continue to ramp our FOX multi-wafer test and burn-in systems and full wafer WaferPaks to meet the silicon carbide market opportunity, which we believe is only just beginning. We're currently in detailed discussions with multiple major silicon carbide suppliers regarding their wafer level test and burn-in needs. This includes at least one potential customer that is moved on to wafer evaluation and benchmarking of Aehr's FOX-XP multi-wafer system for test and burn-in of their silicon carbide wafers. We believe we will add several new silicon carbide customers over the next 18 months that will ramp into production on our solutions.

Silicon carbide power semiconductors have emerged as the preferred technology for the electric power conversion and control of the electric engines in what are called traction inverters, as well as the onboard electric vehicle battery chargers. Our FOX family of products are cost-effective solutions for ensuring the critical quality and reliability of devices in this market, and we anticipate that wafer level test and burn-in will become the industry standard for quality and reliability screening of silicon carbide devices.

Aehr's FOX-XP solution allows for one of the key reliability screening tests to be completed on an entire wafer full of devices, testing all of them at one time, while also testing and monitoring every device for failures during the burn-in process to provide critical information on those devices. This is an enormously valuable capability as it allows our customers to screen devices that would otherwise fail after they are packaged into multi-die modules where the yield impact is 10x or even 100x as costly. With the most cost-effective solution in the market to address this opportunity, we believe that Aehr has a chance to achieve a significant, perhaps, dominant market share for silicon carbide wafer level burn-in.

In addition to the devices in electric vehicles, the energy infrastructure market that includes charging stations, wind farms and solar panels in both solar farms and for individual homes and businesses, all are markets that are consuming more silicon carbide devices then electric vehicles today and are growing at a rapid rate over the next decade. We believe it is very clear that this infrastructure is going to need to grow to support the electric vehicle demand. Many countries including the United States are putting in place government subsidies and infrastructure for these charging stations, wind farms, and solar farms to be installed to support a greener, more sustainable and reduced carbon emission world.

The silicon carbide power semiconductor device market is expected to increase over 500% between 2020 and 2026, growing at a compound average growth rate or CAGR of 36% to $4.5 billion, according to Yole Research's latest forecast. And a report from Deloitte forecasts that the total electric vehicle industry will likely grow at a CAGR of 29% yearly from 2020 to 2025, before reaching 31.1 million vehicles by 2030 and securing approximately 32% of the total market share for new car sales. Market research firm Exawatt estimates that the total market for silicon carbide wafers for power semiconductors just for electric vehicles in 2021 will be 130,000 150 millimeter equivalent wafers and the total market will exceed 1.23 million 150 millimeter equivalent wafers by 2030. These stats highlight the tremendous opportunity Aehr Test has in front of it with its wafer level test and burn-in solution for electric vehicle semiconductors.

In addition to our success in silicon carbide applications, we continue to see signs of strengthening in the silicon photonics test and burn-in market. During the quarter, we received and shipped our first order to China for our FOX solution for production test of silicon photonics devices, expanding our customer base for silicon photonics with this new customer that serves international as well as China markets.

Several other customers addressing the silicon photonics market have also forecast additional FOX system and WaferPak or DiePak contactor capacity needs this fiscal year. These include needs to address incremental production capacity as well as capacity to address new customer and new product qualification and engineering. Silicon photonics devices address the 5G and data infrastructure industry, as well as several other key markets and Yole Research predicts that the silicon photonics market will grow at a 36% CAGR from 2020 to 2025.

Our customers are using our FOX wafer level solutions for 100% test and burn-in rather than just quality and reliability sampling of their integrated silicon photonics devices, as this step is used to stabilize the devices before they're integrated into the fiber optic transceiver modules.

Silicon photonics laser transmitters, like other photonics devices, have a characteristic whether emitted output light power decays with time before it stabilizes its output power. This decay can be an issue for high-speed transmission bandwidths and our devices with multiple lasers transmitting different wavelengths or multi-channel transmission which is very typical in 5G infrastructure and data centers.

Our FOX systems allow our customers to test all the devices on their wafer at one time using our proprietary WaferPak Contactors up to 2,000 watts of power per wafer. This energy plus added thermal energy up to 150 C temperature allows the stabilization to happen very quickly in hours or days rather than weeks or months, and our solutions are very cost-effective way to do this at the wafer or singulated die level before putting this into the full fiber optic module per system.

We currently have five silicon photonics customers that are shipping silicon photonics-based products to their customers using our FOX solution. We see a significant opportunity for growth as we expand these customers and add additional new silicon photonics customers.

Additionally, for the first time companies are making public announcements of adding optical transmission and reception to semiconductors beyond just the silicon used for this combined silicon laser transmitter and optical detection receivers used in discrete fiber optic transceiver modules. Companies like Intel and Nvidia are talking about integrating fiber optic transceivers into their core and graphics processor units or CPUs and GPUs. This is very exciting and we believe an enormous opportunity for Aehr Test with our unique position of having a cost effective and proven multi-wafer solution for testing and burning-in or stabilizing silicon photonics devices at a massive scale while still in the wafer form. Stay tuned for more news on this in future calls.

We also continue with multiple programs using our FOX systems for production test and burn-in of new devices for 2D and 3D sensors for mobile devices. These devices include some really exciting new applications and even completely different functionality than as ever been seen before. I wish I could talk more about these devices, but our NDAs are extremely clear and preclude us from talking in panel about these programs and products. However, what I can say is we expect to see meaningful bookings and revenue from these programs this fiscal year and continue to be optimistic about this market space into the future.

With all the growth opportunities starting to gain momentum, let me quickly touch on our supply chain. On our last call, I noted that given all the issues with semiconductor shortages and rising costs of material costs and lengthening lead times across many industries, there had been reasonable concerns about our supply chain and ability to meet capacity needs for systems and contactors. As we are proving now, Aehr has the manufacturing infrastructure and supply chain in place to ramp to significantly higher revenue levels. We have been ordering long-lead components for systems and WaferPaks particularly for the enormous opportunity we see for silicon carbide that is gaining momentum, and we have been able to maintain reasonable lead times to meet customer requests.

Our supply chain is holding up to the increase in demand and we're ramping all of our sub-suppliers to meet the customer bookings and forecast we are seeing. Aehr has a very robust supply chain with world-class contract manufacturers and subsystems of our test systems, contactors, WaferPak aligners and DiePak cameras. These are very mature subcontractors that have successfully supplied the subsystems to Aehr for years. In all cases, these suppliers have capacity well in excess of Aehr historical shipments and the ability to ramp significantly higher as well. We are very confident in our ability to meet the customer forecasted demand plus considerable upside.

As we discussed and anticipated last year during the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Aehr Test has emerged a stronger company with more production customers, more markets and applications and higher value products than we had before the start of the pandemic. With our record bookings and the strength of our semiconductor test and burn-in solutions as well as the positive response we're getting from multiple new potential customers in the silicon carbide space, we are confident in our growth and are raising our guidance for revenue for the year. The hard work we've put in over the past several years is finally starting to pay off for our customers, our financials and our shareholders, and we're excited about the large market opportunities ahead and the future for Aehr Test Systems.

For fiscal year 2022 ending May 31st of next year 2022, we are raising our previously provided guidance for full-year total revenue by approximately 80% to at least $50 million, which is over 3x our revenue from last fiscal year.

With that, let me turn it over to Ken to review our financial results and updated guidance in more detail before we open up the line for questions.

Great. Thank you, Gayn, and good afternoon, everyone. As Gayn noted, we're off to a strong start for fiscal 2022. We finished the first quarter with record bookings for the company, a single quarter of $20.7 million. And since the end of the quarter, we've announced an additional $19.4 million in bookings, bringing our total bookings for the fiscal year to over $40 million as of today.

Looking at our financial results. Net sales in the first quarter were $5.6 million, down 26% sequentially from $7.6 million in the fourth quarter and up 181% from $2 million in the first quarter last year. The sequential decrease in net sales from the preceding fourth quarter reflects a delay in receiving orders and time to ship during the quarter. Our fiscal Q2 will have much higher revenue and reflect profitability consistent with our operating model.

The fiscal Q1 revenues reflect a decrease in wafer level burn-in revenue of $1.5 million and customer service revenues of $473,000. The decrease in wafer level burn-in revenue is primarily due to a decrease in WaferPak/DiePak revenue of $1.6 million. System revenues were flat. The increase from Q1 last year included an increase in wafer level burn-in revenue of $3.4 million and customer service revenue of $231,000. The increase in wafer level burn-in revenues is primarily due to an increase in system revenues of $3.1 million and an increase in WaferPak/DiePak revenue of $325,000.

Non-GAAP net loss for the first quarter was $414,000 or $0.02 per diluted share, which excludes the impact of forgiveness of $1.7 million in loans from the Paycheck Protection Program, which we received in fiscal year 2020. This compares to non-GAAP net income of $870,000 or $0.04 per diluted share in the preceding fourth quarter and non-GAAP net loss of $2 million or $0.09 per diluted share in the first quarter of fiscal 2021 which excluded the impact of a non-cash net gain of $2.2 million and a tax benefit of $215,000 related to the closure of Aehr's Japan subsidiary during the quarter. The non-GAAP results also exclude the impact of stock-based compensation in all periods reported.

On a GAAP basis, net income for the first quarter was $696,000 or $0.03 per diluted share, which excludes the impact -- which includes the impact of loan forgiveness of the PPP loan. This compares to GAAP net income of $567,000 or $0.02 per diluted share in the preceding fourth quarter and GAAP net income of $107,000 or $0.00 per diluted share in the first quarter last year, which included the gain related to the closure of the Japan subsidiary.

Gross profit in the first quarter was $2.3 million or 40% of sales, down from gross profit of $3.5 million or 46% of sales in the preceding fourth quarter and up from gross profit of $227,000 or 11% of sales in the first quarter last year. The decrease in gross margin from the preceding quarter is primarily due to an increase in unabsorbed overhead costs to cost of goods sold due to higher revenue levels in Q4, which accounted for 3 percentage point decrease in gross margin and an increase in other cost of goods sold of just over 2 percentage points due to freight costs related to inventory purchases and an increase in warranty cost as a percentage of sales.

As I've noted before, because our manufacturing overhead costs are relatively fixed, we scale very well. As our revenues grow, the increases flow to the bottom line and our margin percentages are favorably impacted such as we saw in Q4 fiscal 2021 with 46% gross margin on $7.6 million in revenue. The increase in gross margin compared to Q1 of last year is primarily due to a decrease in unabsorbed overhead costs, cost of goods sold due to higher revenue levels in Q1 '22 accounting for a 21.5% improvement in gross margin.

Operating expenses in the first quarter were $3.3 million, an increase of $341,000 or 12% from $2.9 million in the preceding fourth quarter and up $860,000 or 36% from $2 million in the first quarter of last year. It is important to note that cost reduction initiatives put in place during the last fiscal year, fiscal 2021, including mandatory vacation days, shutdown days and executive staff pay reductions were removed during the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021 ending May 31, 2021, contributing to the increase in operating expenses.

SG&A in the first quarter was $2 million, an increase of $49,000 from $1.9 million in the preceding fourth quarter and up $439,000 from $1.5 million to preceding year first quarter. The increase from the prior year is primarily due to an increase in employment-related expenses of $374,000 due to elimination of cost reduction initiatives in place during the first quarter last year.

R&D in the first quarter was $1.3 million, an increase of $292,000 from $1 million in the preceding fourth quarter and up $421,000 from $900,000 in the first quarter of the prior year. The sequential increase in R&D includes an increase in consulting of $176,000, $61,000 in employment-related expenses and $68,000 in R&D project materials. The increase in R&D from prior year includes an increase in consulting of $184,000, $158,000 in employment-related expenses and $99,000 in R&D project materials. We continue to invest in R&D to enhance our existing market-leading products and introduce new products to maintain our competitive advantages and expand our applications and addressable markets.

Now turning to the balance sheet for the first quarter, our cash and cash equivalents were $6.5 million at August 31st, up $1.9 million compared to $4.6 million at the end of the preceding quarter. Accounts receivable at quarter-end were $4.3 million, down from $5.2 million in the preceding quarter-end, due to the impact of lower revenue levels and timing of collections compared to the prior quarter. Inventories at August 31 were $10.1 million, up compared to $8.8 million in the preceding quarter-end. With the strong business momentum and the increased orders, we've been increasing our inventories. We're prepared to fulfill current orders and expected future orders.

Property and equipment were $676,000 compared to $677,000 at the preceding quarter-end. Customer deposits and deferred revenue, short term and long term were $3.4 million, an increase of $3.1 million compared to $288,000 at the preceding quarter-end, due to increased backlog. We expect customer deposits to increase substantially, reflecting the down payments associated with the recently announced bookings.

Borrowing under our line of credit was $0 as of Q1 '21 compared to $1.4 million at Q4 '21. As a Q4 '21, we showed $1.7 million in current portion of long-term debt related to the Paycheck Protection Program or PPP loan. This past June, we received notice from Silicon Valley Bank with the Small Business Administration have forgiven the loan and accrued interest, and we -- now we show zero debt.

As I noted earlier, bookings in the first quarter were $20.7 million, a record for the company in a single quarter. Since the end of the first quarter, we announced an additional $19.4 million in bookings, bringing our total bookings for the fiscal year to over $40 million as of today. Backlog as of August 31st was $16.6 million, up from $1.6 million at the end of the preceding fourth quarter and $1.2 million at the end of the first quarter last year. Effective backlog, which includes backlog at August 31st and all orders announced since the end of the first quarter, is over $36 million.

Now turning our outlook to the fiscal 2022 year. As Gayn noted, we are off to a strong start with our strong bookings and backlog. With our record bookings, the demand for our solutions and the positive response we're getting from multiple new potential customers in the silicon carbide space, we are confident in our growth opportunities and are raising guidance for the revenue for the year. For our fiscal 2022 ended -- year ending May 31, 2022, we are raising our previously provided guidance for full-year total revenue of greater than $28 million by almost 80% to at least $50 million, which is over 3x last fiscal year's revenue. We expect to be profitable for the fiscal year at these revenue levels consistent with our operating model.

Lastly, looking at the Investor Relations calendar, our Annual Shareholders Meeting will be held on Tuesday, October 19th and will be available to join via webcast for all interested parties. We will also be participating in several investor conferences in the next few months. On November 16th, we'll be participating in the Craig-Hallum Alpha Select Conference taking place virtually. And in December, we'll be participating in the CEO Summit taking place in San Francisco on December 8th. And the D.A. Davidson Semicap Laser and Optical Conference taking place virtually on December 15th. We hope to see some of you virtually or in-person at these events.

This concludes our prepared remarks. We are now ready to take your questions. Operator, please go ahead.

(Operator Instructions) We'll take our first question from Christian Schwab with Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Congratulations on a very robust outlook. Gayn, just a point for clarity. I think last time we were excited on silicon carbide. We had the lead customer. We had one person in evaluation. It sounds like we've got another potential customer there or even more than that. Can you give us a clarity of are you working with two others so far? Or any directional help there would be great.

Okay. Yes, let me make a stab at that. Obviously, I know the answer here. It's a very small community. As it turns out, what I will stick to my guns on is we're talking with all the major suppliers. And we're explicitly going to try and muddy the water, I know that doesn't help with shareholders exactly, but due to competitive reasons we're trying not to click off where people are in their benchmark selection and ordering.

But I'm feeling very good about our conversations and I will continue to give you guys updates. It may come more in the form of when the orders are booking, then a lot of heads up exactly when all the orders are coming. I apologize for that. But as we started to put this script together, we started to realize that if we get too specific about it, anyone who may or may not be as far along could glean some insight that we have to be very careful about. Sorry about that.

No, I think that's a fair response. If you're talking to the different customers though in all the other major players, is there any reason for us to assume if they chose you that their initial ramp and order patterns would not be or would be potentially possibly or less than your first customer who's now your lead customer? In other words, when they start, will they order similar amount, Gayn?

Yes. Again, I want to be a little careful. What I've said in the past, and I think it's still, is sort of our generic process by what I have seen in my 30-some years doing this. And very often what happens is, a customer will go through an evaluation, maybe order one or two systems, keep in mind that even one of our multi-wafer systems has 18 wafers worth of capacity compared to someone else who could buy maybe one at a time, although you can get partially loaded systems to begin with if you needed. But it would be my expectation that there would be probably one system, it goes through kind of the final qualification and then it probably jumps to multiple systems, perhaps some smaller number before higher volume.

The spend in that right now, that's a little different, is that it's I guess relatively rare. I've seen this a few times in my whole history where you have so many customers at the same inflection point where there is sort of a mad dash to go after all these electric vehicles and put this capacity in place, which creates a different dynamic, which I think it's fair may -- speed up the process and get customers to move quicker once they have convinced themselves that we can do the job and that once they have seen our prices, quite frankly. We are perhaps more likely than I've seen in recent years for somebody to start placing larger system orders.

Now obviously one of the other pieces of this thing is always that how many wafers are they building per week, and there are different capacity levels, but all of them are relatively large. I have shared this in the past. I will go so far as to say this, our lead customer South states that they're probably about fourth largest in the space and not even half as large as the next largest. So each of the larger companies that we're talking to is building considerably more wafer starts per week. And if you were to assume similar test times, you can imagine they would buy as much or more along the way.

Test times are always going to be one of the big debates. Everybody likes to think of how they can keep their test times down based upon different quality levels, et cetera. And it gets a little difficult for us to talk about it. But historically, we've done our market modeling at something maybe near 24 hours per day for a burn-in on a wafer. There will certainly be examples that will be higher or lower. I'll leave it at that. But you can -- if you start going through the math, times the number of wafer starts and you can see that it's a pretty significant opportunity for us. So it's the real deal, Christian. And we're really excited about it. And most of our time, we're focusing on putting the infrastructure and the supply chain and material in place to be able to take advantage of it. Hope that helps.

That's really helpful, Gayn. A popular question that I get asked a lot is on the competitive front. As we move to the adoption of silicon carbide, not only for electric vehicle transmission, but also obviously recharging stations. And if they're not using wafer level burn-in test from Aehr Test, is there any other potential competitor that you bump into when you're talking to these leading OEMs? Or is there an internal technology that they may be debating between yours and theirs? Any clarity for investors I think would be very helpful.

That's a good one. And obviously, you always want to be a little careful getting too carried away, we're talking about all your competitors or competitive advantages, et cetera. But this one's a little easier than normal. For clarity, silicon carbide was shipping products before we shipped our first wafer level burn-in system into that market. So just -- so we're clear this market has been around for years technically, but it really started to take off when Tesla introduced their Model 3 with the silicon carbide traction inverter in it and then quickly shifted all of their products to it because of the notability of it being able to give an extended range or theoretically smaller battery life. That has completely turned the market on edge and created an opportunity along with the acceleration of electric vehicles for -- basically everybody is pushing for silicon carbide because of the advantages and the efficiency performance advantages of going to that. Okay.

At that time, obviously they were doing something. And what I want to make sure is, it's widely known and discussed at all in the industry and across the board that all silicon carbide customers have an infant mortality issue. And what that means is these devices tend to fail in their first so many hours of operation. And if that gets all the way through to the car, this inverter MOSFET sales, you basically get out of your electric car and you walk home. So they have to do this burn-in. But the nice thing about silicon carbide is while it does have a high infant mortality through a relatively straightforward process of burn-in, you can actually weed out those infant mortalities and it's extremely robust.

Those infant mortalities were all weeded out with what's referred to as a package part burn-in system. And what that is, is they were put into their modules or their discrete packages, they were burned in and the devices that failed was thrown away. The big difference is what we did when it first introduced with our lead customer was the movement of those devices burn-in from package or module where there may be eight or 10 devices in a single package to the wafer level. And did it not only cost effectively but cheaper than actually doing at packaged part.

In addition to that, you've got the yield improvements and not having to throw away the devices for the cost of the package, but also the devices that would share the same package. If you have eight devices, one fails, you throw away the other seven. So that combination is really what kind of went crazy, and while we don't specifically talk about that lead customer in the same sentence, they are known to have gone out in white papers and talk about the differentiation that they've had with the wafer level burn-in with pictures of our testers in it. They are on the market right now, differentiating themselves against their competitors because they believe that they have a more robust, higher quality process for weeding out infant mortality and shipping a higher quality module as well as discrete than anybody else. And a good part of that they specifically talk about is wafer level burn-in, and that's us.

So other customers have figured this out, but they are still doing packaged part burn-in. So the discussions we're having with them, in many cases, is to move from package to wafer. Now, is there any other way to do wafer level burn-in? The primary way to do it is you could take an ATE system, put it on a wafer prober with a probe card and test the wafer. And it's my belief that there are many companies that could do that. The difference though is an ATE system might be $0.25 million to $0.5 million or even $1 million per wafer. The wafer prober itself is about $350,000 per wafer and the probe cards $50,000, $100,000, let's say.

You go through the math and you might be upwards of $1 million per wafer for the test capacity, but it's in the footprint of about the size of a Prius, a Toyota Prius. So if you need to go and test 500 wafers a day and you're going to need 500 Prius' of footprint in your wafer fab, which is extremely difficult to do and it quite frankly is so expensive. It's even more expensive than the yield loss of just doing a packaged part. Our key differentiation quite frankly is our system is architecturally different and unique. And in the same footprint of that same Toyota Prius, we test 18 wafers at a time. And we do that at a price point that's a fraction of the competition such that it is cheaper than packaged part burn-in and significantly cheaper than any other alternative for wafer level, and that's our key differentiation.

And right now, we've made an enormous investment in this platform over the last decade. And particularly with the last handful of years, we have IP and patents protecting that capability, both in the tester and the proprietary contactor that enables it. And we intend to defend it. But in the meantime, we're running as fast as we can to try and capture as many customers as possible, get ourselves further qualified into the OEMs, that's what all these guys called automobile suppliers. Once you're qualified into the OEMs, it's extremely difficult to shift because people do not like to change their quality processes once it's qualified into an automotive supplier. So that's our strategy. It's now out there and that's our plan. And I think we're in really good position for it. Hope that helps.

Congrats on the strong outlook.

Thanks, Christian.

We'll take our next question from Tom Diffely with D.A. Davidson.

So Gayn, really appreciate the last question you answered, very important to the overall thesis here. But I'm curious in the past when we've had these burn-in testers, one of the big issues has been ultimately that the companies -- customers have been able to significantly reduce their testing, go to some really light sample testing over time. It sounds like silicon carbide at this point needs to be a 100% tested and burned in. Is there anything on the horizon that could change that? Because that is one of the biggest drivers of this market for you right now.

Okay. So as I understand, and we've had some very deep dives even recently again with some PhDs and folks in the reliability of this space, the physics of the way these planar and trench based MOSFETs are designed and built into the silicon carbide substrates are such that they really do have these defects that need to be screened out and there is no belief by any of them that that's going to go away. Interestingly, as people go to Gen 2, Gen 3, Gen 4, which is how what they refer to as shrinks, if you will, it turns out as the devices get smaller, the defect issues actually intensify, whereas historically sometimes if things got smaller, maybe there was less defects because of defect density, that's not the case here.

And so as the generations go on, it becomes maybe more important or certainly more -- it may require more time to do it. I have not heard a single person talk about sampling. I personally reviewed the test data, and I would tell you there is no data to support these things could -- or anywhere near or have any projections to do sampling. The defects are high enough. You would not want to be in a car that has not gone through burn-in on these devices.

Now the second thing is test times. And I will tell you there are a lot of folks out there that have full time paid trying to figure out unique tricks and things and how do I stress devices and twist and turns and temperatures to try and reduce test time. And I -- it's fully our expectation that customers will reduce their test times over time, particularly of mature designs. But perhaps as is historically the case with all burn-in over the last 40 years, new devices will start off with longer test times. And as they mature, they will get lower. The big difference is they're never going to go to zero. In fact, they're never going to go to really short test times. And so, it's our expectation that this will be a nice strong market for many, many years.

Well, okay, great. That's good to hear. And then maybe, Ken, if I could ask a modeling question. Do you have a target model out there today? Or can you give us a sense for what the current breakeven level is and what maybe some incremental margins might be above and beyond that level?

Yes. Absolutely, Tom. So just to kind of reiterate what we talked at the last call, when we originally gave guidance of $28 million in revenue and said, "Hey, we'd be profitable." You can imply that that's our breakeven and it's consistent with what we've talked previously. And also from a model standpoint, I think we talked about previously, is with every incremental dollar of revenue, about $0.50 on the dollar falls to the bottom line. So a simple model can basically say, "Hey, if you take our forecasted $50 million in revenues, compare that to the $28 million that we originally guided to, there is an incremental $22 million in revenue." And say $0.50 on the dollar, that goes to the bottom line, it's reasonable to forecast a -- it's coming in at profitability and net income about $11 million.

And from gross margin standpoint, we also talked at our $28 million breakeven gross margin we were forecasting about 45% and because of our relatively fixed overhead as revenues increase, that expected gross margin will increase up to basically 50% gross margin on incremental for gross margin.

Okay, great. And just one housekeeping. On a tax basis, do you have significant NOLs at this point to work off?

Unfortunately, yes. We have very significant NOLs that we have available to us. We report those in our 10-Ks over the year if you want to go look at some of the details. And in terms of expiration dates on those, those will be available to us for quite some time.

For those that were online that didn't catch the lookup table on that, NOLs are net operating losses. We have for several years been running at a loss, much of that related to the investments we're making in this new system. What that does from a tax basis is that allows us to use that against future profits. So that profits that would come in for example and has $11 million would have the effect of being tax free in the United States. So that's what that means. Other than that, you're very clear, Ken. You don't wiggle room around on our operating margin. And I completely agree with you. Thanks, Tom. Any other questions?

No, I appreciate your time. Thank you.

No problem.

We'll take our next question from Mike Dooling with Jacaranda Partners.

Jacaranda Partners, Southern California. We specialize in large macro demand trends, both venture as well as equities. So a question on the -- this massive increase in revenue. Do you have some target gross margin assumptions that you look for say in fiscal '22 or '23?

Hey, Mike, welcome to -- or was it Jack or is it Mike with Jack?

No, it's Mike. I'm in Southern California. Jacaranda is a tree, but it has a Spanish name. So, you can just say Jacaranda.

Welcome to our call here. I know that you just got this as Ken was talking about kind of the simple model scale, you could start looking at say 50% to the bottom line. We have talked in the past that of our material margins, et cetera, but we generally take -- run our material margin somewhere around maybe 65%, including the manufacturing overhead and direct labor, warranty charges, et cetera, that gets us somewhere near 50%. I think it's a very healthy way to run this and it's respectful if you will, even with our customers and their ramps. And I think we have communicated that even quite frankly to some customers as we've done some deep dives on our financials, looking at how the customers doing dives on our capacity and capability of doing it. And I think that's a good model going forward.

Now having said that, our fixed overhead is pretty small, and so the company will theoretically has exponentially growth, you continue to get closer and closer to actually 50% of the bottom line. But for now, I think that's a good model as you look out at $50 million, $60 million, $80 million, $100 million or so to just think of that $22 million breakeven and 50% to the bottom line thereafter.

Right. And then on lead customers, besides EVs, I mean, is there some testing that goes on in non-EV autos because obviously there's tons of semis and non-EV autos? And what other addressable markets you have, data centers, as an example? So just a little comment on your target markets outside of EVs and the EV structure.

Sure, Mike. And I think maybe we can take similar time to spend with you and I might encourage you to look at some of the past calls, we tend to deep dive on a per call basis into different markets. So our key large markets -- I mean in general, automotive has been a rising tide, if you will, that's raising all ships as people have increased the content in it. And it's obviously more into -- I think, that semiconductors need to be pretty reliable within an automotive and that is true. And we have seen that in our packaged part burn-in systems and we have some other wafer level related opportunities that are related to microcontrollers and flash memories and other things, in particular those that might end up in automotive.

So there is a broader stroke. The kind of the big waves, if you will, and that's a term that we've been using and something I inherited from my previous company that we are part of and that is the big one would be not just is this electric vehicle, which has lots of electronic components, but the power control systems inside of it related to silicon carbide. Obviously the conversion, which is both the on-board and off-board and high voltage, what they call Level 3 chargers are a huge opportunity that's driving a lot.

Interestingly, solar and other applications are also driving silicon carbide. And I've been meeting with some executives, have actually met with the executives of a couple of companies just recently and the conversation is about just how ubiquitous silicon carbide seems to be going as it attacks the traditional markets of super junction FETs and IGBTs. So I could nerd out with you and talk a little bit more, but there is a number of applications, and, of course, we did talk about silicon photonics in the data center and then 2D, 3D mobile sensors, as other things that are driving our business, particularly this year. I hope that helps.

Yes. Well, with the robust anticipated revenue gains and profitability and a pretty healthy balance sheet, it's just -- I'm just curious why you filed for -- I think it's up to $25 million offering. I mean I assume your free cash flow will be strong, but is it just working capital for this huge increase in revenue or why do you need money?

All right. Well, Mike, I'll tell you what, let me deal that. I actually -- I apologize because I took the time to write it down a little bit. It's not to say it was rehearsed, but I've been encouraged to be very careful about how I talk about these things. But nevertheless, I mean there's many questions that have surfaced around why we're raising capital at this time. And I think the answer is really a combination of three things. With our confidence in winning multiple customers and particularly in silicon carbide, but also global test and burn-in deal in other markets, we're actively purchasing semiconductors and other long-lead components that normally are pretty short lead times. And we're doing that to assure we have significant capacity and upside to meet the customer forecast in the opportunities.

We actually started doing this beginning of the year and have continually increased the spending based upon increased confidence. So we're doing that outside of backlog, right? So as an example, because of the spending we had earlier this year, before we had orders from this lead customer, but again we understood what our forecast where, it's allowed us to not only meet their significant increase in orders but also meet or exceed the requested ship dates. Our spread over the next nine months is their requested ship dates. And that quite frankly right before they ordered it, they were -- they had been spread out over 12 months, then they dropped in I think three more systems and then they pulled them in three months. And we were able to acknowledge all those ship dates.

So not only can we do that over the next nine months, but we actually still have material and capacity to meet other customer needs and opportunities, and that's critical because new customers that we've been talking to have already specifically asked us about our lead times and our capacity and our confidence in being able to meet their capacity needs during next calendar year and beyond.

So, our strategy and portfolio of the FOX-P family is important. We talk about our family, it's a big deal, it's a platform. And what it does, it allows us to purchase material and subsystems in the inventory and then configure these to order to allow us the flexibility and using the inventory to meet multiple customer configurations and not have the risk of single inventory that specific to one customer market. Our FOX-XP systems that we are shipping for 3D, sensors and mobile phones and silicon photonics devices for data centers and silicon photonics devices are all mix and match. So it allows us to mix and match electronics to configure the system using basically common things like to thermal chamber and these blades which is the basic tester per wafer that includes all the thermal trucks and conduction cooling mechanism for the electronics, there is a controller and sensors and other infrastructure. And then we take what we call a channel module electronics that we can purchase in stock and simply configure this to a customer order.

The key thing right now is keeping ahead of the game with purchasing and buffing the semiconductors, and so far it's working out really well.

The supply chain chaos that we keep reading about in semis, you were kind of ahead of the game, I guess, and built up your inventory. So you're not as impacted as auto manufacturers are and LNG...

And thank Kevin we did. I mean given the visibility and my conversations with our customers right now, it's important. By the way, I'm actually going to continue on, because it's not just that, there's two other items that we're doing and Ken alluded to that. I mean we're investing in research and development how we maintain our competitive advantage and differentiation, but also to expand the addressable market with new enhancements in these (inaudible), right?

We're also doing some cost down assurance of supply projects to ensure we maintain a competitiveness as well to ensure that we can meet the needs in some of the programs in development. I think I need to make sure that the investor knows that when you're investing in Aehr, you're assured that you're -- we're working on some great products and enhancements in R&D, and obviously we can talk for competitive reasons about an IP and that things that we're working on, But part of the funds will be applied to the programs and material need to build and these initial prototypes, office systems, and beta customer units and we'll be talking more about that over the next three quarters.

And then the third one, and this is a real one. Although we continue to and get down payments on all large system and contact orders that includes these orders that we just received and that provides us with a buffer to meet large customer orders. It's fair that customers and shareholders would love to see Aehr have a stronger balance sheet. And it helps to provide them with insurance that we're in this for the long haul. And I don't have the wherewithal, but the means to meet significant ramps and customer demand. This is particularly true with the silicon carbide space as I personally met with top executives at several silicon carbide companies just recently to discuss their forecast and how we can meet their capacity needs, and this has come up. I met them face to face like two of them and they both expressed their added comfort in response to our public announcement and our ability to raise a little capital to provide a buffer to meet the market potential of silicon carbide test and burn-in. And that's very real. So we need to...

I assume that with the announcement of the quarter, the restrictions on discussing the offering are lifted. And so will we be hearing a few more details in the next couple of days?

The basic process around the ATM as it gives you an opportunity to offer stock at appropriate times, it's certainly our intent not to put any pressure and to be, I guess, thoughtful and exactly how we would do it. Mechanically, we would report out quarterly basis if and when we did any raises through an ATM at that time. And we'll be consistent with all of the rules and guidelines that the SEC has put in place, and that's really all I can talk about. I apologize...

This quarter that we're talking about, this was not a factor. But the next quarter, it would be. So we know at the end of this current quarter, if you sold 400,000 shares or whatever.

Yes. We would report out quarterly. So each of the next several quarters or years until such time as it has been completed, we would give announcements, if and when we sold them.

Why do you want to do that instead of just have an offering and clean it up, get it done?

There's been a lot of discussion around that and certainly this is -- we think this is an effective way and very inexpensive way for us to do it without having to take a haircut and provide those discounts to shareholders that want to come on board. So with a lot of discussion, we determined that this is probably the best process for us.

Okay. Thank you for your time. I'm a new shareholder. So appreciate connecting with you.

Excellent. Thank you, Mike.

We'll take our next question from Matt Winthrop with Aegis Capital.

I'll keep it brief. I love following a guy who sort of beat you up, but congratulations my friend. I've been -- I'm a retail guy, I'm not an analyst, but I know a lot about the business. I've been with this release three years plus more in the past, but god bless you. You're doing great. Fantastic. Your IR guy is great. Just keep your nose down, keep doing what you're doing man. We will see $20 and $300 million in sales.

Thank you, Matt. Appreciate the confidence and I'm happy to work hard for you guys. Okay.

(Operator Instructions) We'll go next to Larry Chlebina with Chlebina Capital.

I'll be quick. Gayn, your release states that this fiscal year you expect meaningful sales in 2D and 3D sensor applications. Is that going to be similar to that $4.3 million project that you had last year? Is that kind of what we're talking about? Or is it something different? Is it a follow-on to that project? Could you put a little more color on that?

Yes. Let me give a little color. I mean, we historically have gotten follow-on business annually. That's a reasonable amount in both follow-on projects that happen every year and new ones. And quite frankly, last year, those programs did not go to production and we didn't see a lot. We saw the early ramp of what was it like a $4 million deal, and then it didn't complete yet. It is our expectation that, that will move into production. There will be more capacity this year. And we also have another program that we're working on.

So I have -- for those folks that have followed the story for a while, they know that there have been times that I sit on the edge of my seat and talk about just how awesome it's going to be, and just the of sea of testers that the 2D, 3D sensor might potentially buy and quite frankly, it hasn't worked out that way. While it's been good high-margin quality business and that customer is very dependent upon us and we love them a lot, the dollars have been fairly, I guess, reasonable, and nothing crazy.

I still believe there is upside to this customer. We do know that one of the projects we're working on has the likelihood and it's still being told to be actually done for 100% burn-in. It may not be a really, really high volume, but because it's a 100% burn-in, we will make it higher. We also note that if some of the programs that we were on that were sampling had been 100% burn-in, they would be massive. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to stick to my knitting. And when you get those orders, I will let you know. But I'm kind of forecasting how great it might be because it hasn't really burned-in to that much, but we do believe that it will be material to our -- even for our current forecast and we do expect it. So, I hope that helps. I know it's pretty elusive. But we've not lost any of those deals and they actually just shipped it out in time and we're expecting them at least this year to come in.

The CP business for the data center, that project, is that still out there? Any updates on that?

Yes. That's a good one, Larry. You got to go back on ways on that. That customer is still using that one tool consistently. They've actually been doing some things on the side a little bit. And they, about once a year for last what two or three years, we get a program pushed out another year. But I will tell you there is an entire team of people that are still working on that particular product that they would be using that and we believe significantly more systems has continued to move laterally and did not get released to production yet.

I heard from their public statements, and again no one knows who it is and no one's guessed yet, is that they just simply are full with everything else going on through COVID and chose to push out that big program. So it's still there. And we're -- we just -- we'll probably get a heads up of six to nine months when they turn that thing back on, and then I'll probably start to talk more about it. But they're still dependent upon it and use it every day, and bizarrely, that was kind of funny. We have not had a system have one issue. And bizarrely, our testers do break, and we normally have an ability for the tester to self-diagnose and you can fix it really quickly. But this happens to be a customer that's pretty well locked down in COVID.

And so it's been sort of a challenge. So we've been doing some interesting things with them with applications, along with other customers, where with certain customers we're now using these Microsoft HoloLenses, which allows you to virtually be there. Customer can actually put them on. And if we're unable to get on-site immediately, they can simply point to something that we can help them diagnose the problem faster than we can get on a plane.

So there's been some things we've actually enhanced through to this craziness of COVID, but I'll tell you what, it's still -- from a sales process, it's nowhere near as fun as being in front of them. I just got back from almost a two-week trip in front of multiple large silicon carbide customers, in particular, along with some other wafer-level applications. And I'll tell you what, I miss it. It was fantastic, probably one of the best trips I've been on in -- well, perhaps ever.

And so I'm -- it's glad to be back on the road again. And okay, planes aren't full and hotels have lots of room for you. So I was able to travel comfortably.

That's good news. On this recent $19.4 million deal, my interpretation was for a bear XPs that were going to be delivered over the course of the next nine months. This is the hope that those would be delivered within this fiscal year because it's going to be pretty close. And then the second question is, as that gets closer, I'm assuming your WaferPaks that would be associated with that, would then ship with them and then -- so that order with the WaferPaks would actually be closer to, what, $30 million-plus. Is that kind of the way to think about that?

No, that's exactly right, actually. Yes, all of it, right, except for one thing, that actually currently are not forecasting all of them inside our fiscal year, even though we could. We've got a little of them strangling out into next fiscal year based upon their requirements. So that also is (inaudible) too, because we have additional capacity for other customers. But yes, they have not ordered the WaferPaks for those systems yet.

Yes, I got it. So then the final question, it looks like with your raise and the cash flow generated from this -- all this business that's piling up, you're going to end the fiscal year close -- in excess of $40 million in cash. Ken, is that your expectation in that ballpark? Close to it, give or take?

So yes, if we act upon all of the -- and draw down the ATM for its entire $25 million with our existing cash balance, it will be very close to that amount.

So Gayn, now with that flush balance sheet, we've talked in the past, you had goals of developing an automated XP that would be applicable towards a memory project, a memory fab. Is that your expectation that you will pursue that and launch that product? And then the follow-on, is that -- would that be applicable to silicon carbide as they scale up? And particularly a potential customer that is in the process of building what's being hailed as the biggest silicon carbide fab in the world, it'd be interesting if you could offer an automated system, whether that would be an advantage to a customer like that.

The advantage or disadvantage of being on cell phones as you can't see my big smile on my face right now. But listen, I think you're hot on the trail there, Larry. And as I have said in the past, I always have to tone you down a little bit about knowing too much about my darn road map. But I have specifically talked about things that we're doing for enhancements for automation. And I will let you know that dollars that are being as part of this raise and as part of our cash flow that we'll do it, will be being spent towards those -- that project in general. That project does, in fact, is applicable to silicon carbide as well as could be applicable to flash memory and a couple of other applications we're talking to customers about.

Good. And so on a memory fab, and I know that you have mentioned this in the past that you had opportunities but weren't in a position to pursue it. But one of your -- somebody else did, and it didn't work out so well. But anyway, that potential on a fab, roughly how many units -- automated units with XP units would be needed for a typical memory fab. It's quite substantial, is it?

If customers, for example, in the DRAM space were to shift from packaged part to wafer level, and assuming their test times did not change, they would stay the same and moved it to that. A typical DRAM fab could take somewhere between 60 and 100 FOX-XP systems with 18 wafers at a time. So the capacity is enormous. The flash memory is slightly bigger. There are fewer of those fabs. But what I always do as a caveat while we are putting investments in it, I would ask customers or shareholders, please do not buy because you think we're going to have significant or material revenue in that space in the near term. But I will let you know, we are working on that.

All right. Well, a good job. It's been a long time coming, and congratulations.

Thanks, Larry. I appreciate all your support over the years.

We'll go next to Jon Gruber with Gruber & McBaine.

Congrats. I just had a golf lesson by the way, but I listened to your whole thing. My question is, when are we going to get an announcement on the base business, an order from Intel, TI, silicon optics? You only been announcing silicon optics -- I mean, excuse me, silicon carbide, when do we get some of the base business guys to step up? When you think that -- when are we going to get some orders on the base business?

We can never make you happy, Jon. Boy, I'll tell you. Yes, I've got some of that going on too. I tried to allude to some of the base business with respect to our silicon carbide customers. I mean, we had a little in the last month, although it's nice to get something into a new region like China. We do believe that there will be more and across a couple of different customers at least. There's also opportunities to win more customers in that space. And we certainly expect to see more 2D, 3D sensors as we were just describing. And there's some other base business that honestly was very quiet during the downturn that we experienced, I mean, during COVID. And so they'll be coming, Jon.

I also think that the reality is there's some customers right now beating on us pretty significantly related to capacity and benchmarks related to silicon carbide. And so I also want to make sure that we're appropriately focused on the right opportunities. But stay tuned, Jon.

Okay. Since it's -- you report your quarter and your 10-Qs out -- I mean, your quarterly's out soon, will the amount you raised in the ATM be in that Q? Because you said you would announce it end of every quarter, and we're here in the quarter. Have you announced the quarter today?

Without -- I think without directly answering that, I believe the SEC requirements is, if we had raised any of it through the ATM at that time, it would be -- have to be announced at that time. That's correct.

Yes. It's a material item. We would do it as a subsequent event in our 10-Q.

Yes. Okay. Okay. So did you do some, I hope?

I haven't answered that question yet, Jon.

You've been a sneaky guy. And I like those Larry questions. You got $40 million order and boy, a lot of big orders coming, wow. Thank you very much. Keep up the good work.

Thank you. I appreciate it.

And I show there's no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the conference back to management for any additional or closing remarks.

All right. Well, I really appreciate everybody's time. It's a nice long conference call here, and we're really excited about your attendance. We actually, I think, might have had a record number of folks attending our call this time, and that's encouraging, too. Really appreciate everybody. We'll be out here working hard for all the investors and we look forward to talking to you again at the next call. Have a nice day. Bye-bye.

Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference. We appreciate your participation. You may now disconnect.