Advantest Corporation (6857) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

[Interpreted] Thank you very much for joining Advantest Corporation's financial briefing despite your busy schedule. I would like to introduce today's speakers. From the left side of the slide on the screen, Mr. Douglas Lefever, Representative Director, Senior Executive Officer and Group CEO; Mr. Koichi Tsukui, Representative Director, Senior Executive Officer and President, Group COO; Mr. Sanjeev Mohan, Senior Executive Officer and CCRO; and Ms. Hisako Takada, Senior Executive Officer and CFO. I am [ Senba ] from the IR department serving as the moderator of today's session. In today's financial briefing, Douglas will first provide a summary. After that, we will entertain questions from the audience. We plan to close this session at 6:00 p.m. Japan Time. Today's session will be delivered with Japanese/English consecutive interpretation. The briefing slides for today along with the Japanese and English scripts providing detailed explanations are available on TDnet and our corporate website. Before we begin, we would like to remind you that today's briefing contains forward-looking statements, all of which are subject to risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ from those forward-looking statements. Please note that today's financial briefing is being recorded for the purpose of accurate recordkeeping and distribution on our corporate website. Now let me give you some instructions on the Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Now Douglas will present the summary. Doug, please go ahead.

Okay. Thank you. Hello, everyone. This is Doug. Thank you for joining our financial briefing. Today, I will focus on key highlights and updates on our business performance and strategy. For details, please refer to the presentation materials and script, which are disclosed on our website today. Let me begin with a summary of our financial results. We are pleased to report that our consolidated fiscal 2025 results delivered new records in sales, operating profit and net income. The growing demand for AI-related semiconductors continues to drive expansion in the semiconductor tester market. With the tester market expanding for the second consecutive year in 2025, we are able to achieve market share gains. We attribute this performance to our ability to meet growing demand from key customers, successfully capturing new customer demand and utilizing strategic production capacity expansion implemented in anticipation of sustained high demand. In fiscal 2026, supported by AI-related investment, we expect our results to post further record highs. There are 3 key highlights defining our business today. First, sustained leadership in the SoC tester market; second, technological leadership in next-generation semiconductor testing; and third, robust progress in capacity expansion. First, let us address our leading position in the SoC tester market. The total semiconductor tester market size in 2025 was approximately USD 9 billion. This exceeds the previous market size peak recorded in 2024. We estimate that the global SoC tester market expanded to approximately USD 6.9 billion in 2025, marking about 68% year-on-year growth. With increasing test demand driven by AI-related high-performance semiconductors, the market expanded significantly, and our market share is estimated to have risen to 66%, an increase of around 10 percentage points from the prior year. In the AI accelerator market, we have expanded our customer base and captured a majority share of the market globally. Meanwhile, in the memory tester market, although our market share declined by approximately 2 percentage points, it remained at around 60%. We will continue to enhance and advance our product development by proactively addressing evolving customer needs. Next, let me move on to the tester market trend for 2026. First, I'd like to talk about our view of the business environment. Alongside uncertainties in the macroeconomic environment, including growing geopolitical risk, the semiconductor industry faces industry-specific risk factors such as supply constraints. However, driven by the rapidly and dynamically evolving AI market, AI-related applications continue to be a key growth driver for the semiconductor market, and robust growth is expected to persist. Based on these factors and reflecting stronger-than-expected demand at the beginning of the year as well as a favorable full year outlook, we revised the SoC market size forecast to USD 8.7 billion to USD 9.5 billion. We raised the lower end by $200 million from the January forecast. We are keeping our memory tester market size forecast unchanged at USD 2.2 billion to USD 2.7 billion, as projected in January. Now let's look at our fiscal 2026 forecast. Based on the business environment surrounding Advantest and demand trends, we expect both sales and profits to reach record highs in fiscal 2026, as shown on this slide. In terms of profits, the consolidated gross profit margin is expected to be around 63% for the full year. And the operating profit margin is expected to remain at a comparable level year-over-year, reflecting continued proactive investments in R&D and other mid to long-term growth initiatives. Now let me return to the highlights. The second highlight is that on the technology front, we also see ourselves as holding a superior position. Supported by our global customer base, measurement technologies developed and enhanced in close collaboration with customers, and partnerships with a broad range of industry partners, we have the capability to introduce high-value test solutions for next-generation semiconductors in a timely manner. And this is not limited to SoC testers. Development of solutions for next-generation DRAM is also progressing according to plan. Furthermore, in silicon photonics, we are strengthening engagement with key customers and received the industry's first large ATE order for high-volume production. Moreover, through initiatives such as the opening of the Advantest Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, announced earlier this month, and our participation in Applied Materials' EPIC platform, the company will strengthen collaboration between front-end and back-end testing through cross-industry partnerships, thereby accelerating the creation of advanced test solutions for next-generation semiconductors. Finally, I'd like to discuss the third highlight, our steady progress in expanding production capacity. Our production capacity expansion efforts have been progressing ahead of our original plan. As we expand our engagement with a growing number of customers, while its complexity is rising across the semiconductor value chain, our ability to reliably supply and deliver at scale is ever more critical. Increasing semiconductor complexity requires us to offer an expanded lineup of tester modules and richer system configurations. This allows us to better support upgrades across customers' installed base. In addition, we are also expanding our production capacity for new systems with built-in buffers to meet customer demand. By accelerating our capacity expansion plan of SoC test systems to around 10,000 systems per year ahead of our original projection, we are positioning ourselves to support future growth in close coordination with customers and supply chain. In a fluid business environment, demand can fluctuate. We will be diligent in assessing near-term customer demand as well as supply chain availability and endeavor to exercise acceleration or restraint as appropriate. Just as a note, our annual production capacity targets, of course, do not directly equate to our sales. We will continue to drive strategic supply chain transformation for potential future growth. We believe our scale is a competitive advantage for Advantest. This concludes my prepared remarks. Thank you. [Portions of this transcript that are marked [Interpreted] were spoken by an interpreter present on the live call.]