Wolfspeed, Inc. (WOLF) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary
May 25, 2021
Earnings Call Speaker Segments
Paul Coster
analystGood morning, good afternoon, everyone. My name is Paul Coster. I cover IT hardware and alternative energy for JPMorgan. I'm joined by my teammate Paul Chung, who partners with me on coverage. And today is May 25. It's the JPMorgan 45th TMC conference, I believe. I feel like I've been here for all of them, but half of them. And before we start, I just want to remind the audience that you are welcome to submit questions through the JPMorgan website. Please do so. I will weave them into the discussion. And the discussion is with Gregg Lowe, the President and CEO of Cree; and we'll also have Neill Reynolds, CFO; and Tyler Gronbach, who many of you know as the Head of IR on the call with us. Good morning, everyone.
Gregg Lowe
executiveGood morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us today, and thanks for having us, Paul.
Paul Coster
analystAll right. Thanks, Gregg. So perhaps you can give us a quick overview of this company that's transformed so much in the 3 years since you've been leading here.
Gregg Lowe
executiveWell, it's a pretty huge transformation, Paul. And it's basically 180 degrees opposite of where we were going. We -- over the last 3 years, we have sold the lighting business at Cree. We sold the LED business at Cree most recently, and have become a pure play compound semiconductor company focused on silicon carbide and gallium nitride. That's 100% the focus of the company. We've got a tremendous position in a very rapidly expanding and growing market. We're super excited about it. And there's -- we can talk a little bit about some of the applications, but probably, the one that most is prominent to most investors is the electrification of the powertrain of the vehicle or the move from the internal combustion engine to electric vehicles. And silicon carbide is having a huge opportunity there, and we've got a lot of exciting things going on. So basically, we've completely transformed the company. Completely changed the focus and narrowed the focus to compound semiconductors: silicon carbide, gallium nitride. We're a pure play in that regard. We're in the midst of a pretty rapid expansion both in capacity. And that capacity expansion comes in the form of both materials and in our wafer fabs. But it comes at a time when capacity in semiconductors is a really important topic for all of our customers. I'm sure most investors realize what's going on with silicon and the shortage of silicon in the semiconductor industry. The fact that we are bringing on to -- into production in really 7 months' time the world's largest silicon carbide fab is a really nice ray of hope for customers who are very, very interested in supply chain, assurance of supply chains and assurance of capacity. So pretty big transformation over the last couple of years. It's been super exciting, but we've only sort of just begun in terms of our future here.
Paul Coster
analystWhat I noticed from the video here that you have a logo on your shirt there, and it's not a Cree logo. So when are we going to see the name change and et cetera?
Gregg Lowe
executiveWe have announced that we will be changing our name from Cree to Wolfspeed. And that change is going to happen probably in the fall of this year, kind of think of it as the October time frame. We've already got a lot of actions in place to go make that happen. And I think that's going to be really good from a branding perspective. Customers who understand silicon carbide, understand the Wolfspeed brand, and it's got a very, very strong reputation in the industry. And it will keep us from the confusion of, "Do you still do lights? And do you still do LEDs?" And things like that. All of that Cree branding will be -- will no longer be part of what we're doing, so it will be a Wolfspeed brand. Lot of really good activity going on, on that. So kind of stay tuned. But think of it as kind of the October time frame when that transition will be fully complete.
Paul Coster
analystWell, so it'll be rebranding of the company with your customers in the industry, but it sounds like it's an opportunity to sort of conclude some of the rebranding with investors as well. Are you likely to have an Analyst Day to accompany that or following it?
Gregg Lowe
executiveYes. Yes. We do have that currently in our sights. And again, that would be kind of in that end of September, October time frame. We are planning to do that at our location in New York, the new fab in New York. So it will be also an opportunity for investors to come visit the factory, see what it's like. We -- if you visited that factory just a year ago or so, you'd be standing in mud. Today, you'd be standing on the fourth floor of a building. And actually, Paul, in the next 4 weeks, we'll be installing our first set of tools into that facility. And so it will be, again, the transition from an empty facility to a wafer fab. And then with -- the anticipation is, is that we would begin running production in the first part of calendar '22. And that production then would be for qualification, so we'd go through an internal qualification and then customer qualifications. So that's just 7 months away where we're going to be running qualification material through that fab. Super excited about that. It will be the world's largest silicon carbide fab and the world's only 200-millimeter fab.
Paul Coster
analystSo if you have an Analyst Day around about the fall or early winter, then I assume that there will be something to see. It's going to be preproduction, but there will be actual operations at some...
Gregg Lowe
executiveYes. It probably won't be full operating, but yes, there is certainly will be operations going on pretty -- the fab won't be full because it will be the first couple of lines installed and so forth. But yes, absolutely, that's the anticipation.
Paul Coster
analystI will hurry along here because I'm seeing questions starting to come in. So you've made this bet on silicon. It's not really a bet, I mean, it's an investment at this point with good visibility, but you've committed to silicon carbide and gallium nitride. And I think you've really given us the thesis, but just can you give us what's the point? Why is silicon carbide and gallium nitride so important?
Gregg Lowe
executiveWell, first off, silicon carbide as a substrate is dramatically more efficient than silicon. 10x more efficient from electron mobility perspective. And so what that translates to is that end equipments that utilize silicon carbide are more efficient in the utilization of power. And the higher the voltage goes and the higher the power, you need the better silicon carbide performs versus silicon. And what that specifically translates to in electric vehicles is for a given size of battery or for a given amount of battery that you put into an electric car, your car will have a longer range for the same amount of battery. And that longer range, kind of, I've seen reports anywhere from 5% to 15%. And this is a big deal because range is a huge selling point for electric cars. And new cars that are coming out, sort of 400 is kind of the benchmark bogey that most people are going after. There are cars that have been announced. Lucid publicly announced a new vehicle with a 517-mile range, which is pretty good. And then the other thing that's really interesting is that silicon carbide, as I mentioned, it works better at higher voltages. Higher voltages are better for faster charging. So you get a better range and you get the ability to actually increase that range faster through fast charging, so it's kind of a good combination. But that's the fundamental theory on silicon carbide. We are a leading producer of silicon carbide substrates. We have something on the order of 60% share of those substrates, so we know a lot about that. And we're actually working very, very hard to drive the cost of those silicon carbide substrates down, so that we can see continued adoption of silicon carbide across a broader range of the power semiconductor market.
Paul Coster
analystYou've done quite a bit of work from sizing the market opportunities. And I realize at least one of them is very open ended, so it's more just a moment in time stuff. But what are the opportunities you're looking at over the next few years?
Gregg Lowe
executiveWell, maybe, Tyler, you can give a trivia of kind of a different set of numbers for each of the different areas, but electric vehicles is obviously a huge portion of that. In terms of content, there's -- some are in the order of $300 worth of content in the average electric car, and that's mostly in the powertrain. There's some in the on-board charging and then DC to DC. There is content and off-board charging, so the charging stations that you see around the world. In a high-speed charging station, you can kind of think of it as about $1,000 of content per vehicle. There's industrial opportunities as well, and we've got -- this is where you've got thousands of customers where each individual opportunity is small, but collectively, it's a big opportunity. And then in terms of gallium nitride, you see GaN on silicon carbide as really an opportunity for us in the 5G base station applications where power density and those sorts of things come to play. This has obviously been an area that's had a bunch of turbulation for us because the largest customer was Huawei, and they were banned as a customer. But we're starting to see a pickup in 5G now and the adoption of other companies in that space where we've got a lot of good opportunities. So Tyler, I don't know if you want to give some additional specific numbers around some of those things, but pretty big opportunity for us.
Tyler Gronbach
executiveYes. No, I think, Paul, the way to think about it is it's to take the opportunity pipeline of $10 billion and kind of break that down. Right now, about more than -- a little more than half of that is really focused on automotive, like Gregg said. And then what you see is kind of the remainder of that pipeline segmented across those things for RF and then industrial. And those are into things like solar and aerospace and defense. So we see a lot of robustness. The big opportunity definitely is with automotive. And that's -- when you look at the design wins, so the $2.5 billion of design-ins that we've announced over the last 5 quarters, think about half of that is for automotive devices. And then, like I said, the rest is kind of split across that spectrum. So the good news is we're winning our fair share. That puts us on track for that $1.5 billion in revenue that we've talked about in 2024. And the opportunity still remains in there. We're well above $10 billion, which is current year plus 5. And that's really a good way to think about how -- what we're chasing at the moment.
Paul Coster
analystAll right. Got it. And now and do you have a choice about where you go here? Or do you kind of -- are you following your customers? What's the -- how do you decide where you're going to allocate your resources?
Gregg Lowe
executiveWell, obviously, from the device perspective, it starts with we've got a huge opportunity in the automotive space. That's in the midst of a big transition. And then in terms of the broader industrial space, Paul, I think you bring up a really important point because we've got a very, very limited sales footprint. We can cover the automotive guys because it's a relatively finite set of customers in some respects. But in the industrial side of things, you're talking about thousands of customers, and we just don't have that sales footprint to cover them. So what we've done is we've partnered with Arrow Electronics, they're one of the -- they are the world's largest or one of the world's largest distribution partners. They've got a huge technical sales force that we've been able to leverage and work with. We have an exclusive arrangement with them where they are our exclusive global distributor for the Wolfspeed products. We've actually done several new product launches with them exclusively: a 650-volt program, 1,200-volt program, and it's just been phenomenal. And I don't know the exact numbers, but they have probably 2 orders of magnitude more feet on the street than we do. And just -- I can't tell you the -- when they're identifying programs for us, they're identifying programs in countries where we don't even have employees. So it's a phenomenal relationship. Both Neill and I are heading out to Denver in the next couple of weeks to go do a sort of a regular visit with them. They're doing a fantastic job for us. But that's -- you hit a really important point, which is how do you allocate resources. And in this particular case, we really made a very clear conscious decision to say, "We just can't get there from here, so let's go partner with somebody." And they've been really a fantastic partner in helping us sort of evangelize the silicon carbide industry.
Paul Coster
analystI'll weave together a question I've got with that of one of our clients here, and it's to do with the sense of this visibility into growth. It's really palpable, but seems a little bit difficult to pin down exactly. You've got $1 billion in long-term contracts for materials, I believe. You've got at least $750 million, $700 million in design-in wins. You've got a device pipeline opportunity that you peg at around about $10 billion. When you put it all together, what does it mean in terms of the revenues? The visibility and the timing and magnitude of the ramp that you should see?
Gregg Lowe
executiveYes. No, it's a great question, Paul. And so we have a lot of things going on for sure. And we've got a target of $1.5 billion of revenue for Wolfspeed, in the '24 -- in 2024. And of that $1.5 billion, we're anticipating $900 million of that being device revenue, so power semiconductor chips, RF, et cetera. And then $600 million being in the material side of things. So what that translates to is a steeper growth rate of the device business. Both device and materials will be growing over that time period, but the device business will be growing much more rapidly. And so it will be an evolution and a change from a pure materials company to more of a mix in the interim to more of a device manufacturer over a longer period of time.
Paul Coster
analystAnd I mean, in terms of the ramp, is it a sort of parabolic curve? Is it a straight line? How do you...
Gregg Lowe
executiveIt's definitely not a straight line. And so we're in the early phase of pretty interesting adoption. And so what you're going to see is, right now, we've got actually about $2.5 billion worth of design-ins that we've announced over the last 4 or 5 quarters or so. Some of those are in the early phase of initial preproduction ramp, if you will. We've got a customer in town here in Durham today that we're talking about that initial preproduction ramp. I'll be visiting with them in about a half hour or so. And so we've got customers in preproduction ramp, and then their customers will be launching and ramping in '22, '23 and '24. And so you'll see a car line come online, and that will jump our revenue. And then you'll see another car line, and that one will go on in production. And you see another one and another one. So you're going to see a series of stair stuff. It won't be a straight line in between now and then. And I think Neill talked about it in our last Investor Day saying between now and '22, we're really in the capacity expansion phase. '22 to '24, you see some initial ramp happening, bringing us to that $1.5 billion. And then really, beyond that, it's a pretty substantial amount of ramp happening beyond that, too. We'll be talking about that at the next Investor Day. I don't know, Neill, if you want to be a little -- any more clarity on that?
Neill Reynolds
executiveNo. I think that's exactly it, Gregg. I think there's going to be ebbs and flows in the business. We have a lot of production capacity we're moving around right now in anticipation of a lot of this revenue growth. So kind of see it '21, '22, kind of maybe more modest growth. Then as we get to '23, '24, you should start being -- seeing it pick up a bit just as Gregg had kind of mentioned. But in our view, that's really only getting the business, and maybe even the industry to a certain extent to scale, because there's far more growth and opportunity out beyond this '24, '25 time frame than there is before. So it's really getting everything up to scale, whether that be from a customer standpoint and what they're delivering or what we're doing internally from a capacity expansion standpoint both in the fabs and from a materials perspective, which is also why we think that the 200-millimeter program for us plays such an important role in creating this kind of bigger aperture for the business as you get out beyond '24. Because look, right now, we're talking about 5%, 7%, 10% by '24, '25 in terms of EV adoption rate. Most customers we're talking about to right now think that could be 30%, 40% by 2030. So the size of the industry and the growth out beyond '24 is probably the more important factor. I think what we've got to do between now and then is get our business ready for that ramp. And I really think that's what's going on in most of the industry.
Paul Coster
analystWe're in this sort of strange place at the moment with Wolfspeed. It feels like a very much like a hurry up and wait story. You've got this tremendous opportunity ahead, but it's ahead. It's never quite here. And yet we're also in a world, and I'm weaving in a customer question here, where everyone needs silicon solutions real fast, and they're not available, and you're not quite in that place at the moment. So are you, nonetheless, seeing some elements of customers kind of ordering ahead now in anticipation of shortages in silicon carbide just as they're seeing them in regular silicon products?
Gregg Lowe
executiveNo. We don't see it exactly that way because the customers that are hurting for silicon solutions, I mean, they got line down. They got tons of problems. And I've talked to a lot of them. And quite frankly, Paul, the issue is there's not a nice light at the end of the tunnel because there's not a lot of capacity coming online, and that's definitely different from our perspective. We can point to a new building that has dramatically more capacity than we have today. And that's a really big benefit for us today. I would love to tell you, Paul, that 2 years ago, when we announced the creation of this and the investment in this fab that we predicted that there would be a shortage of semiconductor chips and that having capacity would be a big deal. We weren't that smart. It just kind of fell into our lap. But here it is today, where all of our customers that we're talking about designing in for '23, '24 and '25 are all lined down on their existing thing today. And one of the big questions is, "What are you doing from a capacity?" And I show them a picture of this new fab and the dramatic size increase, et cetera, and it's more than a big check mark. It's a really big deal. And so this has become a really nice feather in our cap. Like I said, we look really smart. It's total luck, I think, that the industry is having this issue at the same time that we're ramping the capacity. But we're using it to our advantage and telling customers that we're investing. We're investing in a wafer fab. And the beauty of this thing is that this isn't some fab that's going to go online some long distance from the future right now. We're going to be installing equipment into this wafer fab in the next 4 weeks, first tools in the next 4 weeks. And then beginning production for qualification in the beginning of '22, that's 7 months from now. So this isn't maybe perhaps, in the future, we might expand. This is real stuff. And so it's making -- it's having a very nice influence on our customers' design-in behavior, I would say.
Paul Coster
analystSo it's going to be steady as we are. It's going to be large scale. It's going to be somewhat automated, if not fully automated to the extent practical, your -- you'll have a vertically integrated solution set. It's going to be a real differentiator for a long time because even if someone wanted to catch up with you, how long would it take them to catch up?
Gregg Lowe
executiveIt would take some time. And Paul, just to add, just 2 comments there, it will be fully automated. And just to kind of put things in perspective, we just checked some data here earlier today. In terms of human touches to wafers in our fabs today, it's well in excess of 10,000 touches per day in our current facilities. That will go to 0 in our new factory. And human intervention at a manufacturing process equals bad things. And so going to automation is really going to be really positive. And then finally, recall that this will be the world's first 200-millimeter factory. And so having that 200-millimeter factory is going to be a really nice advantage. Part of the deal that we got with the state of New York was a prototype line up in SUNY Albany, and that was a silicon carbide wafer fab prototype line. We converted that line to 200-millimeter a while ago. And so we've been running 200-millimeter on that prototype line, and we're really happy with what's happening from a yield perspective out of that prototype line on 200-millimeter wafer. So 200-millimeter wafers over 150-millimeter wafers, roughly 70% more chips per wafer. And then we're having a yield which is north of what we're currently yielding in our existing fabs, so it equates to a nice cost advantage that we'll get out of New York.
Paul Coster
analystSo I mean what that translates to is you're able to make commitments today for delivery of certain large-scale unit volumes, high yields, we hope, at the right price point for your large auto OEMs to feel confident that they can now foresee it, right?
Gregg Lowe
executiveThat is correct.
Paul Coster
analystBecause they want you to be on their critical path, right?
Gregg Lowe
executiveIf we weren't in the process of building this fab right now, we'd have a lot tougher argument with our customers in terms of count on us for the future. They see this fab, they see what we're doing with the fab, they see the progress that we're making. We show them the results out of the prototype line, and it gives them a great degree of comfort that there's a really nice -- from a silicon carbide perspective, there's a really nice light at the end of the tunnel. And quite frankly, from a silicon perspective, they're just -- they're struggling with it. I've talked to customers who have hundreds of different chips that are causing line down problems and you're not hearing about the same kind of investment in silicon.
Paul Coster
analystSo I think it was end of '19 or thereabouts, you set in motion this $1 billion of investment. Maybe I've got the timing wrong a bit, but I've got the number right. Neill, where are we now? And how much more cash CapEx are we going to see before this is concluded?
Neill Reynolds
executiveWell, I think, Paul, as we laid out the business plan, clearly, 2021 -- 2021, even '22, were kind of heavy investment years in order to scale the business and create the right type of manufacturing footprint, the right type of R&D footprint or sales footprint to ensure that we can capture this opportunity. So I think we said, this year, we're going to expand our CapEx of $550 million, which is really related to a faster buildout of the fab, which is a good thing versus what we initially communicated, as well as the launch of the 200-millimeter program to go fully 200-millimeter out of the gate in Mohawk Valley. So I'd say a lot of that, for us, a lot of this in terms of all these investment is really timing to a certain extent because it just depends on the plan as you get out to 2024 and beyond. So right now, I think this will be still be the peak year in terms of investment. And then next year, we'll see that drop off. That is we still have to finish building up the fab, a lot of tool sets that need to come in. Secondly, we're building out the 200-millimeter platform in that capacity as well. And then once you get out beyond '22, '23. And in addition, you start to see some of the benefits we have from our partnership with the state of New York. So about $0.5 billion of incentives that will come in, in cash as well, so that will help offset as you kind of work on that kind of '22, '23 time frame. Then after that, I think you're more almost a steady state because, as I said before, the growth rates are still pretty substantial. But I think the business gets to scale. And what I mean by that is you start to think about growth rates and margins and an OpEx level that gets you to roughly a 25% EBIT level and pretty significant free cash flow as you get out beyond that period, so we're still in that investment phase right now. And I think we're in pretty good shape. And when you look at the balance sheet, we've got well over $1 billion in liquidity to kind of support this. So -- which, by the way, is also another important part of this equation. Not only do we want to point customers to the fact that we've got this capacity availability down the road or we're very well funded to supporting them. And that can be for not just what's in front of us right now, but in the anticipation that if they wanted to be more aggressive, we can support that as well. So I think we're very well positioned to kind of manage through this. Now in the meantime, it's a -- there's a lot to work through. There's bumps in the road. There's ups and downs as you kind of work through getting the company to scale. But right now, if you look at the horizon, I think we're on track to what we had anticipated.
Paul Coster
analystThere's a tendency amongst investors to oversimplify the Cree story. So on the one hand, you've got, "Wow, that's massive growth opportunity. You must be supply constrained." And on the other hand, in the near term, your gross margins have been a little disappointing, and so it's a disconnect. Why is it? And I think it's something to do with the mix of products and the mix of locations and so on. Can you help us understand this disconnect?
Gregg Lowe
executiveYes. We've got a -- I'll let Neill go through in detail, but obviously, we're growing our device business, and we're growing that in the existing fab infrastructure that we have. The fabs that we have in North Carolina are subscale. They're nonautomated. I talked about greater than 10,000 wafer touches per day in these facilities. The yield entitlement that you would expect out of this factory is sizably lower than you would expect out of a normal, highly automated factory. We're ramping automotive products, which have higher levels of quality expectations. So you've got things you need to work through there. So I think it's really -- when you talk about the mix, it's a growth of a -- of the product line in an existing wafer fab infrastructure that is subscale and not ideal from a cost perspective. You add all that to that the complications associated with COVID and all these stuff that we've had to deal with, it complicates things as well. But the fundamental issue is that we've got subscale fabs that are nonautomated and have an entitlement yield that's just going to get us so far. As we ramp the new facility, forget about the advantage of 200-millimeter for a second, just from a yield, a automation perspective, ability to get things through that factory, we're going to see a nice increase or decrease in terms of cost increase in terms of productivity just in that factory. And then you add to that 200-millimeter, it's going to be pretty nice. Neill, I don't know if you want to add any additional color there.
Neill Reynolds
executiveYes. I think, big picture, I think that's exactly it. I mean, you get questions on what's the short-term margin outlook, et cetera. But really stepping back, Paul, there's one thing, I think, that we really got to improve, and that's our fab cost footprint. And stepping back, what are we doing about it? We're building $1 billion factory, state-of-the-art in New York, and that's our plan to go kind of fix that. In the meantime, we've just got to work through this, I'll call it kind of transitory period where we've got a bridge to Mohawk Valley. And as we work through that kind of suboptimal cost footprint, there are going to be periods where there's -- it's obviously a higher cost. We run devices through that. We don't run materials through there. So if that surges ahead a bit in terms of revenue, you're going to get a negative mix. If the other side of our materials product line starts to pick up a bit, we've had very good success there on cost, you'll see it kind of ebb back the other way. So it's more of a -- it's kind of the footprint that we're working through. And the other thing I would say about our margins, if you take a step back again, there's a couple of different pieces here. One is on the material side. We do long-term agreements. So our pricing, we've got pretty good visibility to out over multiple years, they are long-term agreements. The cost execution on the material side has been very good. We've got a very good road map there. We've got a lot of confidence in it. So I think materials business looks, I'd say, very solid from that standpoint, and it is today. On the device side, we also do longer-term arrangements. We're looking at, let's say, EV automotive deals that are going to ramp 2, 3, 4-plus -- or 3, 4-plus years from now. And we know what the pricing is for those things. So of those 4 components, there's 1 that isn't fixed, and that's the fab cost, and we'll work through that in the meantime. But over time, as more and more revenue starts to come out of Mohawk Valley as you get out to '23, '24, you'll start to see the margins get fixed in a more substantial and permanent way as you get out to that time frame. In the meantime, you're just going to see this kind of period where we're going to ebb and flow depending on mix or cycle times, whatever the challenges are in the factory, but it really is a we got a Durham factory that's suboptimal on cost. When we get to Mohawk Valley, we'll transition through that. In the meantime, we'll just continue to grind it out.
Paul Coster
analystThat was tremendously helpful. I just want to loop 2 investor questions in together. And it's to do with the competitive landscape, Gregg. It's really -- this was -- there are risks with some of your major customers' insourcing since they have silicon carbide manufacturing nascent capabilities, I think with STM for instance. And then, on the other hand, what is it that would prevent others from entering into this market?
Gregg Lowe
executiveWell, all of our long-term agreement customers have some activity associated with insourcing. And quite frankly, if I was in their shoes, I'd be doing exactly the same thing. So I think their thinking is very solid from that perspective. Some of them have acquired companies, some of them have acquired silicon carbide crystal growth capability and so forth. What I can tell you is this technology is really not for the faint of heart. It's not easy to do. And so having a team and having an effort working on something is one thing, getting it to scale and getting it to cost and doing all that is a lot trickier. And they're doing that in the context of us being -- we're about 60% share right now, and we're something north of 4x bigger than the nearest competitor, which is not one of those internal companies, so their scale is substantially smaller than ours. So we're using that scale advantage we have right now to drive our productivity up, our cost down, which then have those customers then doing expansion and extension agreements with us in terms of supply agreements which then give us more scale, which gives us an ability to drive cost down, and we're creating sort of this virtuous cycle from that perspective. So I think their strategies make sense. I think it's harder than most people think. And I think they'll be challenged on that. And then in terms of new entrants into the market, there's -- any time you have a business and an industry that's going to see the kind of growth that we're anticipating with silicon carbide, it's going to attract money. It's going to attract investment. It's going to attract people getting into it. But there's still a ton of barriers to entry. The technology is not well understood in the industry, so you can't just hire hundreds of people because they don't exist out there in the kind of scale that you would with silicon. The silicon carbide crystal growth machines are all proprietary. Rome has their own technology. We have our own technology. Norstel and the ST guys have their own technology. So these are all machines you have to build yourself and figure out how to make them work. To grow silicon carbide, it grows at very high temperatures. It can grow into 1 of 100 different crystal structures and really only one of them is good. So you have this quality aspect and how do you grow it and so forth. So there's a lot of different barriers to entry. And I think, from our perspective, what it translates to me is a really simple thing, run as hard as you can right now while you have a scale advantage and drive cost down as hard as you can right now while you have a scale advantage because that cost reduction will give you more customers. Those more customers give you greater scale. And you can just keep driving that. And that's basically what we've done. So there's nobody letting go of the ball towards the end of the game or anything. It's driving as hard as we can and not acting like we have 60% share. We're acting like everybody is coming after us every single day. That's the attitude we have. And if we can continue to have that kind of focus and drive, it will be better for us.
Paul Coster
analystGregg, thank you very much. Neill, thank you very much. Tyler, thank you very much. And thanks, everyone else for participating in the call with the Cree leadership team today. Thank you.
Gregg Lowe
executiveThank you. Thanks, Paul. Thanks, everybody, for your interest. Appreciate it.
Tyler Gronbach
executiveAppreciate it.
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