Full Year 2024 VAT Group AG Earnings Call Transcript

The following is excerpted from the question-and-answer section of the transcript.

Question: Michael Foeth - Bank Vontobel AG - Analyst : Michael Foeth, Vontobel. Just 3 points. The first one is your qualitative guidance for 2025. Could you put that into perspective with the original target that you had of CHF1.5 billion in revenues? Obviously, that was at a higher exchange rate. But still, is that fundamentally still within that scenario? The second point is what risks do you see of further significant export restrictions to China that could affect your customers and with that, demand for your products? And maybe also put that into perspective with the investments that were announced in the U.S. by TSMC. And then finally, the CapEx intensity seems to be quite a bit higher also in 2025 than your target range. Is that now -- for the fourth year, it's now significantly above. Is that range still realistic or will we drop substantially below that range in the future? REFINITIV STREETEVENTS | www.refinitiv.com | Contact Us consent of Refinitiv. 'Refinitiv' and the Refinitiv logo are registered trademarks of Refinitiv and its affiliated companies. MARCH 04, 2025 / 10:00AM, VACN.S - Full Year 2024 VAT Group AG Earnings Call

Question: Didier Scemama - BofA Global Research - Analyst : A couple of questions. First of all, on the near-term order intake, if you could give us a bit of your color on how you see orders shaping up in the first half and including in there, whether the ERP issues are now behind us. And then the follow-up question would be on the seasonality you see, whether you think like normal seasonality H2 versus H1 is appropriate at this stage for calendar '25.

Question: Didier Scemama - BofA Global Research - Analyst : Okay. And if I may, just on 2027, I understand that the market environment is different. And obviously, WFE is lower than you would have thought at the time. Do you have any thoughts on how 2027 guidance is now for you? Is that achievable? Or is that something that you think is pushed out to 2030?

Question: Meihan Yang - Goldman Sachs - Analyst : This is Meihan on for Daniela from Goldman Sachs. Two questions from me. The first one is on the price increase that you did at the prior 2 years. Was it related to tariffs? And are you planning to do any price increase for this year? And I'll ask my second one.

Question: Meihan Yang - Goldman Sachs - Analyst : Understood. And my second question is on adjacencies. What's the contribution in 2024? And any product wins would be helpful here as well as your growth expectation for adjacencies into '25.

Question: Timm Schulze-Melander - Redburn Atlantic - Analyst : I have one for Fabian and one for Urs, please. Fabian, now that we have the ERP system implementation behind us, could you maybe just give us an update about how you're thinking about the way VAT reports and maybe the adoption or the evolution towards a more sort of standardized P&L structure and reporting structure relative to peers in the group? So that's question one. And then for Urs, you mentioned a few times Romania and the facility that you're building there. Maybe you could just give us a few more details about how that fits technologically. What does Romania contribute to the group, both technologically, maybe revenue-wise, I know you've given some disclosures today, and whether that is already baked into the CapEx numbers that you've already spoken about on the call so far?

Question: George Brown - Deutsche Bank AG London - Analyst : I only have one actually. So just on NAND, some of your biggest customers have already started to see signs of life in NAND in Q4. But this seems to be more driven by technology upgrades rather than capacity expansion. I assume capacity expansion is better for you guys. But can you comment on whether you're also going to benefit from this technology upgrade cycle in NAND? And if so, why is this more sort of second half weighted for you guys?