ACM Research, Inc. (ACMR) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Good day, and welcome to the ACM Research Annual Meeting of Stockholders. I would now like to turn the conference over to David Wang. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Good morning to those joining us in the United States, and good evening to those in Asia. I am David Wang, the Chairman of the Board, President and CEO of ACM Research. I will also be serving as the Chair of this meeting. On behalf of the Board, it is my privilege to welcome you to ACM's 2020 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, which we are again hosting by live webcast. I would like to introduce Mark McKechnie, the Chief Financial Officer, Executive Vice President, Treasurer and Secretary of ACM Research. Mark will lead the discussion of today's stockholder proposal.

Thank you, David, and welcome all to this year's annual meeting. I will conduct the formal business of the meeting first. After the meeting concludes, David will make a few remarks about our key achievements in 2019 and our progress thus far in 2020. And then David and I would be happy to address any business-related questions. You may submit your business-related questions at any time by typing it into the box at the bottom of your screen. The meeting and the question-and-answer session will be conducted in accordance with the rules of conduct and procedures for the meeting, which you can access under the heading Meeting Materials on the virtual meeting website. I'd like to begin by introducing some of the individuals who have been critical to ACM this past year. First, I'm pleased to introduce the individuals with -- who with David comprise ACM's Board of Directors: Dr. Haiping Dun; Dr. Chenming Hu; Tracy Liu; Yinan Xiang and Zhengfan Yang. Next, I would like to introduce Lisa Feng, Chief Financial Officer of ACM Research Shanghai or ACM Shanghai, a subsidiary of ACM Research. Also joining us today are Mark Johnson, Bella Zaslavsky and Erin M. Bruynell of K&L Gates, our legal counsel. Mark is serving as the reporter for this meeting. I would like to introduce Daniel Ho of BDO China Shu Lun Pan Certified Public Accountants, our independent accountant. Lastly, I'd like to introduce Trish Hodson, who is serving as the Inspector of Elections for this meeting. We will now review the background and formalities relating to the matters to be voted upon at this meeting. On April 23, 2020, we filed a proxy statement and related materials with United States Securities and Exchange Commission related to today's annual meeting. On April 23, we also began mailing notices regarding the availability of those proxy materials to our stockholders of record as of 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on April 8, 2020, for the stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting. I have received an affidavit from Broadridge Financial Solutions, Inc. certifying that beginning on April 23, the records relating to the annual meeting were processed, distributed, mailed and deposited with the United States Post Office and sent to all stockholders of record as of 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on April 8. This affidavit, along with the complete alphabetical listing of stockholders entitled to vote at this meeting, is available for inspection by any stockholder and will be filed with the records of this meeting. Proxy materials identify 2 proposals to be considered at this meeting: one, the election of 6 Director nominees; and two, the ratification of BDO China Shu Lun Pan Certified Public Accountants as our independent auditor for the 2020 fiscal year. If you have already delivered a proxy to ACM, your stock will be voted as you have specified in your proxy. If you're a stockholder and have not already delivered a proxy or would like to change any of the votes reflected on your proxy, you may vote by clicking the vote buttons on your screen. The polls are now open for both matters on which the stockholders will vote at this meeting. The polls will remain open until both of the matters to be voted on have been presented and I have announced the polls have been closed. The inspector of elections has tallied the proxies received. That count shows a majority of the votes attributable to the outstanding shares of Class A and Class B's common stock, voting as a single class, is present in person or by proxy. This constitutes a quorum for the transaction of business at the annual meeting. The inspector of elections will report later in the meeting about the voting power present at this meeting in person or by proxy. Since a quorum is present, we may proceed to present and vote on the matters described in the proxy statement. [Voting]

The first proposal is the election of directors. At ACM, the entire Board of Directors is elected annually. Each Director must be elected by a majority of the votes cast with respect to that Director, which means that for a nominee to be elected, the votes voted -- the shares voted for the nominee must exceed the number withheld from that nominee. The 6 nominees for election at this meeting are: David H. Wang, Haiping Dun, Chenming C. Hu, Tracy Liu, Yinan Xiang and Zhengfan Yang. The second and final matter to be voted on is the ratification of the audit committee's appointment of BDO China Shu Lun Pan Certified Public Accountants as ACM's independent auditor for 2020. This ratification requires approval by affirmative votes constituting majority of the votes present in person or by proxy. This concludes the business items on the agenda for this annual meeting. The polls are now closed. Will the inspector of elections please report on the voting results?

There are present at this meeting in person or by proxy the holders of shares of Class A and Class B common stock entitled to cast of 35,770,806 votes representing 66.77% of the voting power of stock entitled to vote at this meeting. First, the majority of the votes cast in the election of the directors have been cast for the election of each nominee. Second, a majority of the votes cast on the matter have been cast for the ratification of the appointment of BDO China Shu Lun Pan Certified Public Accountants as ACM's independent auditor for 2020. I will file my formal report with the secretary.

Thank you. Based upon the report of the inspector of elections, I declare that all of the proposals have been approved. As secretary, I will incorporate the formal report of the inspector of elections, including the results of the votes, in the record of this meeting. I will now hand the meeting back to the Chair.

Thank you, Mark, and thank you for taking time for attending our 2020 Annual Meeting. There being no further business to come before the meeting, I hereby adjourn the meeting. Now I would like to take a few minutes to review some of our key achievements in 2019 and to date in 2020. 2019 marked another year of growth and achievement for ACM Research. We made a meaningful progress in our mission to become a major supplier of capital equipment to the semiconductor industry. We've delivered great operational and financial results, and we made a significant progress on several strategic initiatives. First, we delivered strong financial results. We grew our top line by more than 44% to $107.5 million and delivered non-GAAP earnings of $1.17 per share. We generated $9.4 million in operating cash flow, ended the year with more than $100 million of cash on our balance sheet. Second, we showed our production expertise. Throughout the year, our manufacturing team ramped our second factory. With 2 factories running, we shipped $115 million of ACM tools for the year. Our 2 factories provides sufficient floor space to deliver a total combined capacity of $350 million per year in production output. With additional staff, supply chain, management and working capital, that should provide facility space to meet our sales objectives through 2022 prior to the startup our new center in Lingang, Shanghai. This shipment level and capacity plan demonstrates our ability to scale operations, a key factor for winning new business. Third, we expanded our customer base to 5 major IC manufacturers. In September 2019, we delivered our first tool to a new local Chinese DRAM player, CXMT. In addition to this new DRAM customer, ACM is a key supplier to SK Hynix, the #2 global DRAM player; YMTC, an emerging 3D NAND manufacturer with 64 layer in production and recently announced a plan for 128 layer to offer better density and [ excessive ] speeds; Shanghai Huali and Huawei Group, which includes Fab 6 in Shanghai and the Huahong Wuxi Fab 7; and SMSC, a strategically important China foundry, who recently announced expansion of 40 nanofab in Shanghai. We continue to expand our customer base with adding 2 new local customers in Mainland China this year. And we are actively engaging with the first tier of customer in both Taiwan and United States. Fourth, we made a great progress with the new products. In March 2020, we announced the Ultra SFP ap. The name SFP means stress-free polishing, and ap means advanced packaging. This tool combines ACM's proprietary SFP electropolishing and CMP technology into one platform. We believe this is the first of its kind in the world. Ultra SFP ap incorporates a built-in electrolyte recycle and reuse system. It reduces the amount of the [ sulfuric waste ] by 80% versus conventional CMP. We delivered the first tool during the fourth quarter of 2019 to a leading Chinese wafer-level packaging customer. We expect to recognize revenue this year upon customer acceptance. In late April of this year, we introduced Ultra Furnace. Let me explain why we got into this market. This platform is ACM's intro into dry processing applications and opens another large market for ACM beyond wet processing. In our view, innovation in a vertical furnace technology is required for the industry to progress to more advanced manufacturing nodes. And third-party research estimate the total market opportunity of this vertical furnace product is more than USD 1.5 billion. We have been hard at work on that furnace for more than 2 years. It is a joint development project of our world-class technology teams in China and in Korea. The 2 teams developed a new hardware platform that combine our proven and stable software and proprietary control system. The Ultra Furnace delivers reliable control of pressure, gas flow rate and temperature. The Ultra Furnace is optimized to deliver high-performance batch processing of up to 100 12-inch wafers. It initially supports low-pressure chemical vapor deposition process or LPCVD with additional development work. The first tool can be expanded to address oxidation, annealing processes and future atomic layer deposition process. We delivered our first Ultra Furnace demo tool to a key customer in the first quarter and expect a qualification by the end of this year. In early May 2020, we announced the latest addition to ACM's cleaning product line, 3 new semi-critical wet cleaning tool for front-end and back side wafer process. This includes Ultra C b for backside clean, Ultra C wb for automated wet bench and Ultra C s for scrubber. This expands our opportunity to even more cleaning steps at our major customers and we estimate will add approximately $800 million to ACM's total available market opportunity. While these are semi-critical earning steps, these tools feature the same high quality that our customer expects from ACM. We are off to a great start with these tools. We have already delivered a number of this tool as demo tools to current customers with some already recognized for revenue and some still in qualification. We are also making great progress with Tahoe. As many of you know, we think our Tahoe product will be a big winner. Tahoe is a unique tool that delivers the same or better performance for certain cleaning steps, but it comes with a significant environment benefit as it uses a fraction of the sulfuric acid. On our Q1 earnings call, we announced customer acceptance of our first tool from our lead Tahoe customer, with orders for repeat shipment to deliver later this year. We are also receiving positive feedback from several other customers for Tahoe and expect to deliver a number of the Tahoe demo tools during the year. With a growing product line, demonstrated scale and a strong balance sheet, we are confident in the opportunity to add new major customers. We believe every major semiconductor manufacturer can benefit from our technology. We began to broaden our sales team last year with addition of new sales manager in the U.S. and Singapore. In early 2020, we announced the appointment of Jim Straus, as the Vice President of Sales for North America. Jim brings to ACM nearly 30 years of sales and business development experience in semiconductor capital equipment. He has a track record of success to sell into top 5 global IC manufacturers. We are excited to have Jim onboard. He will lead our effort, expanding adoption of our core technology and major IC manufacturers in North America. Moving on, I will now discuss some of the more strategic efforts we are making to build the foundation to achieve ACM's longer-term objectives. First, our land agreement. In May 2020, we finalized our agreement to proceed with our long-term facility plan. This includes the acquisition of land rights in Lingang region, 30 miles from the headquarter of ACM Shanghai, to serve as a future site of our fully owned R&D and production facility. We expect to start construction later this year, with the goal to begin initial production in later 2022. The Lingang project reflects our long-term commitment to the fast-growing China market, will serve to support growth of our operation in Korea and the Taiwan region and it will enable us to further scale production for expanding product line of semiconductor capital equipment. Second, we are making steady progress on the Shanghai stock market listing. Just yesterday, our application for the Shanghai stock market IPO was accepted by Shanghai Stock Exchange or SSE. We remain hopeful for a timely review by the Shanghai Stock Exchange and registration by the China Securities Regulatory Commission, CSRC. If all goes well, we expect to price the transaction by year-end. We are confident that STAR Market IPO will raise ACM profile in Asia and improved ACM's standing with local customers and our supply chain. The STAR IPO would also inject sizable capital into our China and global operations at what we believe will be favorable valuation. Our dual listing structure in NASDAQ market and STAR Market will help take ACM to next level, enable us to accelerate our long-term business plan at a critical stage in our development with a mission to become a leading global supplier of semiconductor capital equipment. Before I turn to the Q&A session, I would like to thank the entire ACM team for their hard work, passion and dedication. We are executing our strategy. We are investing in R&D to enable current products and to develop new products. We are building the global sales and marketing resources to penetrate new customers in new regimes. And we are scaling production capacity to support our long-term growth plan. Despite the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are off to a good start in 2020. And we remain optimistic about our opportunity in Mainland China, Korea and the Taiwan region. Mark and I will now take any business related questions that you may have.

Okay. Great. So there appears to be no questions at this time. So thank you to everyone for your participation and support. We will now drop off the call. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. See you next year.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.