X-FAB Silicon Foundries SE (XFAB) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the X-FAB Capital Markets Update. My name is Uta, and first of all, I would like to thank you very much for your interest in X-FAB and for your participation. We are here today to give you an update on our business on the status of our capacity expansion program and expectations going forward. And with this being said, I have the pleasure to introduce your speakers today. We have Rudi De Winter, Group CEO. We have Alba Morganti Group CFO, and we have Damien Macq, Group COO. Kindly take note of our disclaimer on forward-looking information. We will start this session today with a presentation followed by a Q&A session. [Operator Instructions] Please also make use of the functionality to vote for questions that will become visible. In this way, we can make sure we answer the questions first that have the highest relevance for you. Finally, kindly take note that this session is being recorded. And with this, I pass on to Rudi De Winter.

Thank you, Uta. A warm welcome to everyone. Let me briefly look back. In 2023, we saw strong demand in all markets and technologies. We had underlying high demand and growth outlook for auto and industrial linked to electrification of everything. We were in allocation in all factories and technologies. The global disruptions due to pandemic, geopolitics, war in Ukraine, security of energy supply in Europe resulted in the desire by our customers to secure growing capacity. There was a general environment of chip shortage and capacity allocations. Therefore, throughout the supply chain from OEMs through Tier 1s to fabless and to us, LTAs were set up. We signed a 3-year LTA with volumes, prices and prepayments to finance the capacity expansions. And we decided to expand our capacities to support long-term structural growth. Where do we stand today? And what has changed? We see inventory corrections after a period of inventory buildup at our customers. Globally, the capacity allocations in the semiconductors is over, uncertainties and geopolitical tensions result in more careful ordering behavior. And as end of '23, a period of destocking started and customers were changing to a shorter-term ordering behavior. Slower growth in EV in Europe and U.S. resulted in overcapacity and deceleration of the silicon carbide and a bullwhip effect. What has not changed? The underlying long-term growth drivers of electrification to fight global warming and the medical care to deal with aging population has not changed. We are benefiting from long-term agreements we have put in place. They consist of 3 components: volumes, price and prepayment. Two of them remain unchanged. We have stable pricing in 2024 and the prepayments remain in place. The volumes, the quantities were adapted to the real need in a joint agreement with our customers. Going forward, we see a balanced price negotiations considering our value creation and our customers' business. During a period of general destocking, the demand for our 180-nanometer business remains strong. On the graph, you see in the dotted line, the yearly prototyping revenue for our 180-nanometer technologies. Note that these are one-offs for new products every year. So this means this adds up to a growing business pipeline for future production deliveries. The full blue line shows the yearly production revenues for our 180-nanometer that shows good growth and is limited in 2024 as the 180-nanometer capacity is fully utilized. Therefore, we are so excited about the 180-nanometer capacity we are adding. Based on the business pipeline, we have a growing forecast from our customers and plan also for full utilization of the expansions that we're making. Damien will talk more about that later. Let's now look at our business and expectations going forward. And I will first focus on the 3 core markets, and let's start with the automotive business first. X-FAB is present in many automotive applications, both in internal combustion and electric vehicles. There are many applications you will find in both EVs and ICE's cars. Starting at the top right and going counterclockwise, both the EVs and the ICE you have applications such as in-vehicle networks, the comfort and convenience applications, the electronic systems related to lighting and 12-volt battery systems, the infotainment, the chassis control and the safety and driver assist systems, these are all common in all cars and use X-FAB chips. Finally, there is the drive train. X-FAB is present both in electric vehicles and internal combustion systems. X-FAB is exposed to the global car sales, while the AU car industry is depressed with a lot of negative news, the global car sales is rather stable. The China market is doing very well with strong growth in the electric vehicles. X-FAB with its portfolio is structurally independent of the drivetrain. Let's look at the figures for automotive. From 2020 to 2024, we demonstrated a strong 24% annual growth rate. For the next 3 years, we plan an annual growth rate of about 12%. This is based on our design in pipeline for high-growth applications such as battery management chips and internal thermal management chips. Besides these 2 applications, there is a broad pipeline of various other products on our 180-nanometer specialty technologies. In 2024, we are still capacity constrained and the expansions coming online in 2025, they will ease the supply tensions. On the short term, we see headwinds on the 350-nanometer technologies, suffering from inventory corrections. However, this is compensated by the growth on the 180-nanometer. We expect 350 nanometers to gradually recover in the second half of 2025. Let's now look at the industrial and the type of applications we're doing there. Underlying trends for industrial growth is the electrification of everything and smart everywhere. The industrial business is covering 3 -- 4 big application groups. On the one hand, smart manufacturing, with, for instance, robotics application and industrial communication protocol chips. And then we have the data centers and AI, where we deliver chips for power management and thermal management to deal with the energy systems and new applications in data centers such as photonics. Renewable energy is the next with battery monitoring systems for both residential and industrial battery backup systems, inverter applications for photovoltaic, gate drivers for power electronics in wind turbines, for instance. And then fourth, we have the smart cities and buildings with chips such as energy storage, distribution systems, communication over the power lines, smart metering or solid-state circuit breakers. Now let's look at the numbers for industrial. We have made on this slide a split to show the portion of the silicon carbide and the industrial CMOS in the Industrial segment. The CMOS is in the dark blue and the silicon carbide is shown in the light blue. The silicon carbide has a growing impact, and therefore, we decided to show both blocks. Let us first look at the industrial CMOS that is a truly diverse business and a fragmented business with many products. Due to the high fragmentation, it is suffering from a collective behavior of inventory corrections in 2024. We continue to leverage our robust CMOS technologies to develop for automotive that are also very well fit for the industrial market. We see a recovery in 2025 for the industrial CMOS, and we plan with a compound annual growth rate of 12% for this portion of the business for the next 3 years to 2027. Then let's now look at the silicon carbide portion. We have seen very good growth in the past 4 years, and we experienced a correction in the second quarter of 2024 in our production demand. The silicon carbide production has seen a drop as of the second quarter 2024 and we reached the bottom in the bookings in the third quarter, and that means for revenue, the bottom will be in the fourth quarter. We expect a gradual recovery in 2025. The new business development activity, however, for the silicon carbide in 2024 is evolving positively. The first 9 months of 2024, we already exceeded the number of new engineering runs compared to the full year of 2023, and this gives us confidence that the business will come back. These engineering runs are increasingly for electric vehicle applications besides the industrial. The silicon carbide business is until now, more than 90% for industrial end applications, and we expect a compound annual growth rate for these industrial silicon carbide applications of about 12% for the next 3 years, complemented with a stronger automotive growth for silicon carbide leading to an overall silicon carbide compound annual growth rate of about 23% for the next 3 years. Let's now talk about the Medical. On this slide, you see the 3 pillars of our Medical business. First, the personal medical devices such as hearing aids, pacemakers, contactless thermometers, glucose meter, these are devices used for the individuals themselves. Next to that, we have medical equipment and particularly high-voltage chips for echography, optical sensors for x-ray applications and CT scanners. We have a unique offer for CT scanners with our 3D wafer scale assembly from the microsystems business resulting in several design wins with large CT scan companies. And third, the lab-on-a-chip for drug testing, for instance or development of drugs or MEMS devices for disposable fast sepsis detection or DNA sequencing to name a few. Now let's look at how that turns into numbers. In 2024, demand for medical products went through an inventory correction, similarly to the general industrial business. The high interest rates resulted in lower investment in medical equipment in hospitals throughout the world. We noticed this in our ultrasound and x-ray medical business. We start seeing pull-ins again. So things are recovering. A major lab-on-a-chip program went to a single-use consumable -- from a single use to a limited multiple use, resulting in short-term corrections. The medical business is benefiting from highly differentiating products that exploit our microsystems expertise for instance, 3D wafer scale applications, noble metals and thermopiles. The medical business and the medical bookings recovered in the second half of 2024 and we plan to grow in 2025. And over the next 3 years, we expect 23% growth for our medical business going forward. Now let's say a few words on the CCC. The CCC business is starting a new era. The legacy RF business has phased out and we replaced it with automotive business, and the remaining CCC business is based on our strengths and reached a stable level. Our strategy is to cross-sell X-FAB technologies in the CCC for niche applications that benefit from our high-voltage and sensor expertise resulting in better margins. And we expect a slight up over the next 3 years from the revenue perspective. Let us now talk about the geographical distribution of our business. On the left side, you see our sales distribution over the 3 regions: Europe, 68%; Asia, 23% and U.S. 9%. What is important to note is that the semiconductor market is a truly global market, meaning that many of our European and U.S. customers have also large portions of sales, for instance, in China. Asia is a fast-growing region for us. On the right side, you see the evolution of Asia automotive sales over the past 4 years. We grew that by a factor of 4, and we expect this to further grow in the next 3 years above average with a compound annual growth rate of around 14%, this is driven by the growth in China. In 2020, only 9% of the Asia automotive sales was for China or with Chinese customers. In 2027, we expect this to grow to 63% of our Asia business will be with Chinese customers. On top of that, there is a significant portion of our European sales that goes to Chinese OEMs. So the China market is much more important than the first impression you get when you look at the overall end market geographically. So while the European car brands are suffering from weaker electric vehicle sales, this is compensated by the China EV growth. This concludes the business overview. And now I would like to pass the word to Damien to explain our manufacturing.

Thank you, Rudi. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. Over the next few slides, I will provide you specific updates on where we stand in regard with the execution of our ambitious capacity increase. Before talking about expansion, it is important to reconfirm our relentless commitment to innovation via R&D. We continue to invest in CMOS in our high-performance silicon carbide and to co-create with our customers differentiated microsystems products. In regard with the manufacturing expansion, I will zoom in our main revenue growth opportunity as highlighted in the market overview made by Rudi. I will start to discuss our CMOS 180 and 110-nanometer expansions with the status of our sites in France and Malaysia. This will be followed by some updates on our microsystem expansion and an update of our silicon carbide production capabilities. All CapEx investment for clean room space and equipment are complemented by specific efforts to upgrade the automation level at all our factories in order to reach our capacity and profitability targets. This map shows our global manufacturing footprint, starting west with our silicon carbide foundry in our facility in Texas. In Europe, our large CMOS 180, 110-nanometer site in France, our 350-nanometer CMOS and GaN site of Dresden in Germany, and our microsystem site of Germany as well, Itzehoe and Erfurt. Notice that the site in Erfurt and Lubbock continue to support as well our 6 inch CMOS technologies. Last but not least, on the eastern side, you see our other large CMOS facility in Kuching, Malaysia, producing 350 and 180-nanometer technologies. Rudi mentioned the success of our 180-nanometer design wins and revenue. This positive trend is expected to be pronounced in the next years and will generate significant double-digit growth till at least 2027. We expect 22% CAGR over the next 3 years in these technologies. This justified a significant share of our CapEx funneled towards the 180-nanometer process. Note that this CapEx can equally support the capacity ramp of our new 110-nanometer processing nodes. 85% of the $750 million CapEx is already executed and subsequent production will be fully available for our customers by Q3 2026. All in all, we nearly tripled the capacity available in these nodes versus the level of Q2 -- Q4 2022. The 180-nanometer node contributes already to date up to 40% of our revenue. Let's now look at the few picture illustrating this large investment starting in Kuching. So you see on the front of this picture, the fab expansion as it was at the beginning of 2024. You might recognize a typical wall slab floor aimed to support all tools of the future clean room. And you see where we are as of today. So this is a picture taken a few weeks ago. In total, 6,000 square meter of clean room have been added to the existing factory. This is as large as an extra football field. Other peripheral buildings are including a warehouse as well as an utility building, respectively, on the left and on the right side of the main clean room. The construction is now nearly finalized on the outside, and what next happens now on the inside. The next picture shows a brand new clean room where we are currently installing equipment. Hookup is ongoing. First wafers will run in this area already before the end of this year 2024. This will allow the qualification of the new tools and make them gradually available for production starting already from end of Q1 2025. This is another view of the same clean room in an adjacent zone, hosting the photolithographic equipment. The characteristic amber light of this area doesn't emit ultraviolet and prevent undesired interference with the photolithography process. Equipment move is also taking place here till the end of Q1 2025. Moving now to France. You see here the aerial view of the factory with existing constructions. The building on the right and is currently largely unused. We took the decision to renovate a small portion of it to also advance photolithographic equipment. And here, you see that inside of the renovated area, adding 600 square meter of clean room space where a new deep UV equipment is in full production for our 180 and 110 process since September 2024 quarter. Zooming now to microsystem. Microsystems business is a second significant growth area, justifying capacity expansions in our Erfurt side. This business will directly benefit from CMOS capacity increase as the business model of microsystem is to enhance traditional CMOS processes with additional steps offering more value and differentiation for our customers. It could be, for example, adding noble metal or additional process steps enabling heterogeneous integration with other technologies. The first investment plan there is capped to $59 million, of which 40% have been completed so far. The overall microsystem capacity will increase by more than 60% versus Q2 2024 and will be fully available by Q1 2026. Even if today, the revenue contribution is just above 10%, we do expect this portion of our business to grow faster over the next 3 years with a CAGR of 23%. In the future, additional capacity and capability expansion for microsystem are expected from intense and regular co-creation efforts engaged with customers. This is an aerial view of our site in Erfurt, like in France and like you will see it in Lubbock, most of the efforts and investment happened within the existing facilities. The microsystem fab is here at the center of the picture. And within this space, new clean rooms are being created here as well, and equipment is moving in based on the customer-specific process requirements and their business priorities. The last significant double-digit growing technology is expected to come from our facility in Texas in the Lubbock. So far, we invested up to $100 million in this facility to be ready to answer to the large demand expected for the silicon carbide technology. As presented by Rudi, silicon carbide enables the electrification of everything towards a decarbonized world. A great lead indicator for the appetite of the market for this technology is a steadily increase of customer-specific development on the site, as already mentioned by Rudi. We decided nevertheless, to adjust the investment speed up to the market dynamics. 2024 was a challenging year in that respect, and we are now fully ready to support the upcoming growth over the next few years. We run currently 2,000 wafer starts per month from a bottom demand reached by mid-2024. We have already installed the necessary capacity to offer up to 3x this volume shortly. On the longer term, we are considering more growth opportunity of this site with the support from the U.S. CHIPS Act. Again, this is an outside view of the factory, with in the front area -- the front area is hosting the implant and EPI reactors for our silicon carbide wafers and behind the factories producing the other process steps for both the CMOS and the silicon carbide technology. Looking inside, clean rooms are built and remodeled to host the new implanters and EPI reactor. And we are ready to install the new equipment as required by the business growth and business opportunities. A few more words about the other process in X-FAB. On GaN, we have finalized the deployment of our first base capacity in Dresden. This investment is now completed. On 350-nanometer, we continue to invest in productivity improvement to more automation. Based on the relative demand softness on this process node in 2024 and beginning 2025, we are not considering additional capacity investment for the time being and have also decided to put on hold some options to increase our capacity through process outsourcing. Finally, we are actively managing the evolution of our 6-inch CMOS business. We have initiated in 2024, a last time buy on our 0.6-micron technologies that should secure the full utilization of one of our site in Erfurt before we close it. Other 6-inch technology will continue to be supported in Erfurt and Lubbock. With this active management of our mature technology, we are gradually transforming the Erfurt site in a microsystem factory. On top of CapEx for building clean room space and equipment, a specific focus is on the execution of our automation road map. The objective here is to create more capacity with the existing tool set from an optimal utilization of the assets and a reduction of the process variability. This improved continuously the overall cost structure and the quality of our factories, all benefits for our customers and for our profitability. This slide summarizes the different levels a factory has to consider before being fully automated with the lights-out. The first level covers the overall software agreement decision on the next material move. The software will select the next processing steps in a sequence of 500 for each of the 4,000 lots running simultaneously in the factory. This is the foundation. The second level is about the automated equipment setup and monitoring. This is supported by the automatic detection of the lot identity via RFIC and the automatic configuration of equipment for the next process steps. A third level is about the transport of the material to the next equipment at any place in the factory. Each of the 4,000 lots in the factory will be traveling for tens of kilometers back and forth between equipment in the clean room before being fully processed. The fourth and last level is about the automation -- the automated loading of the lots from the transport system endpoint to the next selected equipment. This requires versatile robots to handle the last meter to and from each specific equipment. Our factories are all engaged on this automation journey, reaching different maturity levels between 30% and 60% depending on the site. The implementation of our automation road map will allow us to reach our profitability goals by 2030 within the existing equipment park. The opportunity for gains are significant there. I will now let Alba driving you through the financial benefits of all these activities.

Thank you, Damien. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. And let's now move after all we looked at the different parts of our business and the status of our CapEx program that you could see in those great presentations, we will now go to the other very important part, which is our financial model. So let's see what this means from a financial perspective. The current plan has been built in order to bring X-FAB to the next stage of its evolution and become a USD 1.5 billion sales group. We've successfully refocused our core business into our 3 key end markets that today represent more than 90% of our total revenues. We completed -- we completely phased out the CCC legacy business in Corbeil and freed up the top line to grow strongly. With this transformation and with this new business setup, our business is much more healthy. And based on this, we expect our profitability to grow further. In this slide, you can see the key drivers to further improve our profitability on the way forward. The top line growth, as seen in Rudi's and Damien's presentation has already been commented on. So we will focus on the remaining ones. We increased the share of our highly valued added business as well as our wafer output based on all the productivity improvements we realized. The turnaround of Corbeil as well as all the economies of scale that we have been able to realize thanks to a higher throughput are key factors contributing to a better profitability. And now let's see how our CapEx program will support our future growth. Our CapEx program that runs from 2023 until 2025, has a total value of $1.1 billion, representing expansion and maintenance CapEx. This number has been updated from $1.2 billion announced in the previous Capital Market Day. This reflects the fact that we reduced part of the silicon carbide expansion programs in light of the current weaknesses of the silicon carbide market. The peak is in 2024, and it's related to the delivery of the equipments of the new clean room in Kuching, you could see in Damien's pictures and which are ongoing right now. We expect all expansion projects to be completed by mid of next year so that we will return to a positive operational cash flow in the second part of 2025. On the way forward, we intend to come back to a normalized level of investments with a CapEx ratio of 15%, also supported by deleveraging of the Chip Act fundings. Here, you can see that the majority of the CapEx we spent is related to the expansion of our popular 180 and 110-nanometer CMOS lines, where the demand remains strong. The financing of the CapEx is fully secured through our current credit lines. The LTA's prepayments received from customers, and the vast majority comes from the cash that we generate. All these being set, let's now have a look at our financial targets going forward. As you can see, we reiterate our ambition to grow to an annual revenue of USD 1.5 billion and expect to achieve this target by 2030 with an EBITDA margin in the range of 35%. This implies to go back to a CapEx ratio of 15% of annual sales. And after having shifted our initial targets, what is now the update for 2026. Actually, we aim to achieve a revenue of at least $1 billion with an EBITDA margin in the range of 30% and a free cash flow of around USD 155 million. With the completion of the CapEx plan we shared, we are well positioned to achieve our growth targets and should end up with a healthy free cash flow of around USD 300 million in 2030. And with this, I will pass the word back to Rudi.

Thank you, Alba. With this, we have given a lot of insight in our business and the growth going forward. And let me summarize the key takeaways for this afternoon. Our medium and long-term fundamentals remain intact. We have underlying strong long-term growth drivers, which is electrification of everything to counter global warming and the smart medical applications to better manage the aging populations. We are excited about our essential CapEx expansions to serve the increasing pipeline of 180-nanometer. And we forecast double-digit growth rates in all our core markets and technologies in the next 3 years. The expansions are on track and most of the CapEx spend will be by end -- by the first half of '25, so the overall conclusion of all the CapEx expansions is mainly happening till the first half of 2025. What this means that we will return to positive cash flow as of the second half of 2025. So with this, I would like to conclude the overall presentation and pass the word back to Uta to moderate the Q&A.

Thank you very much, Rudi. And we are now ready to answer your questions. [Operator Instructions] And let me start with the first question. Do you have any plans for a stock buyback given that the stock appears to be extremely undervalued?

Yes, so with this -- I cannot answer on this question right now. This is obviously a topic for the Board of Directors. And -- but in general, we have -- our priority is to finish the expansions and to convert and go back to a positive cash flow as of second half of this next year.

Okay. The next question is on CapEx expected for '25 and '26, we already commented a bit on this. And there's also the question, how much is expansion versus maintenance?

Yes. Thank you. I would like maybe to pass that question to Damien for the operations.

Yes. So in terms of expansion, typically, the bulk of the expansion is for '24, '25. And as Rudi mentioned, will be finalized by first half of 2025. And for the maintenance, we typically count 7% of the revenue going to maintenance. So the bulk of the expansion, the bulk of the CapEx goes into expansion.

Okay. Next question. You have lowered your forecast multiple times the last year. How sure are you that the 2026 and 2030 targets will be met and will not be lowered again?

Well, again, we have shared today a lot of details on the components of our business. And -- so the fact that many of those numbers are very detailed means that this is coming from a bottom-up detailed analysis of our business and forecasts from our customers that we then multiply it by a judgment factor to get a good feeling of what realistic -- now what realistically this business can be in the years going forward. Also taking into account the operational performance because there can be the demand is one thing, operational performance of the factories is another thing. And altogether, we come to these numbers. Now of course, this is dependent on overall market situation. So this is the best judgment that we can make from today's perspective with all the knowledge we have in our business and the execution of the expansions that we expect going forward.

What about the headwind competition in SiC as there are several companies expanding in SiC as well?

Well, that's a good question. What we see very encouraging is that we have continued an increasing amount of development activities with our fabless customers for the various types of end market applications for silicon carbide. And for sure, there will be competition. On the other hand, what I also already mentioned in the third quarter results call that we are launching new technologies with significant better performance. On top of that, we have the substrate prices that are also evolving and going downwards. So overall, the competitiveness of our silicon carbide will also significantly improve. And we believe that we are very on par with the best state of the art in the market. And so we think we will be a good player going forward. In the end, the silicon carbide market is very big and is only growing further.

The next question is relating to the budget to the extension -- for the expansion of our sites. So it was back then when we published it, it was at the time of capacity shortages. And the cost for the expansion at that time was likely higher than if contracted today, and the question here is how much lower would the expansion CapEx have been if contracted today?

I'll pass that question to Damien.

Yes, I think that's an interesting question. The point is that if we would have done this expansion today, we would be even in a more difficult situation. I think we presented the situation of our supply and demand and the fact that the 180-nanometer is highly successful. And we -- basically, all the capacity that we are building is immediately used. So if we would have wait and create that expansion today, probably this business would have been gone for us. For the rest, what we see in terms of equipment and price negotiation with equipment suppliers, we see some level of softness but the price are not dropping significantly. So I think the question is a bit rhetorical for us. The urgency was to address the customer needs with the necessary additional volume that they wanted to have and that we are serving today.

Okay. Next question, are there any plans on investigating 200-millimeter silicon carbide wafers?

Yes. So what I can say to that is that all the expansions and the investments we did on the silicon carbide and also the facility, the existing CMOS facility is, to a large extent, with the equipments that are 200-millimeter capable. So we take here a wait-and-see stand to look for the right moment to switch to 200-millimeter. From today's perspective, it's economically not attractive to go to 200-millimeter because the substrates and so forth, they are not available in sufficient quantities and still too expensive. So we believe we can still for a long while, be very competitive with the 150-millimeter.

Next question is, why are you comfortable with the 35% EBITDA margin target at $1.5 billion revenue before it was a 30% to 35% range?

Yes. So this is several components to that. First of all, the initial $1.5 billion contained a lot of silicon carbide that also included substrates at higher prices than we are today. So we see with the increased time towards 2030, that there is a more favorable product mix as opposed to what was initially thought for 2026. That's one thing. And the other thing is that also what Damien explained, there is a lot of automation that we are working on that will still take its time, but we know we will step-by-step -- it will help and improve the productivity.

Next question based on the fact that the Chinese auto market is becoming more important. So the first part of that question is what would be your current indirect sales in percentage of -- in percentage of total auto sales towards China today and in 2030. And the second part, won't you be obliged one day to manufacture locally in China to keep your Chinese customers.

Now first of all, on the overall -- or the direct plus indirect sales in China, it's -- we do not have exact numbers on that because our customers don't necessarily tell what -- where all the products go. But our feeling is that from the European sales that almost 1/3 is also related to or exported from our European customers and ends up in the Chinese automotive market. And the second part of that question, would we produce locally? So from today's perspective, there is not an immediate plan. Our focus is to serve the Chinese fabless companies well from our respective global sites. And create value for our fabless customers in China. Remember, the biggest value in a product is not the silicon inside, but it's the testing, the packaging and the margins and the design value add that our customers bring. So in this way, I think we're well placed to serve the Chinese market and we'll see what the future will bring.

Okay. Next question is on Chip Act fundings. In 2023, we reported EUR 80 million of IPCEI funding. And the question is what range of subsidies do we roughly expect as total benefits and on which time line?

Well, we can only report on what we know there and what we're sure of. So the EUR 80 million of the running IPCEI projects is something that is confirmed and being executed. We have further -- we will further exploit the Chip Act possibilities on all areas in the world. So primarily for X-FAB this means Europe and in the U.S. However, this is too early to report on.

The next question, to what degree are your sales projections hedged against further inroads of Chinese car makers versus European car makers, do you have a similar degree of depth of usage by Chinese carmakers?

It is our feeling that, yes, the depth and the use of X-FAB silicon into the Chinese cars is decent and to a similar extent as you would expect it from European, maybe Japanese or U.S. business. I think that's actually our -- the depth of use in the Chinese brands is maybe even better than the Japanese brands, but it's a truly global market, and we see good use, both direct and indirect of X-FAB's silicon in Chinese brands.

The next one is on gallium nitride. When will the revenue coming from gallium nitride be significant enough to report on separately?

Yes. So the -- we're working. We have several development programs with more and more customers. I would expect this maybe somewhere in '27, '28 time frame.

Okay. Now we have the next question on our largest customer, Melexis. Can you please comment on your biggest customer, Melexis diversifying its supply. What impact do you expect on X-FAB from their strategy?

Well, the -- first of all, this is not a surprise. This is well aligned between X-FAB and Melexis and in all the forecasts, we mentioned today, these items are into the models and into the forecast and the targets.

Okay. Next one, regarding the LTAs, the long-term agreements with customers. Volume with LTA customers has changed this year due to lower demand. When customers have done prepayments, will these be satisfied against deliveries for the full amount on terms as specified in the LTA even if volumes during the LTA term would not be sufficient or potentially at lower margins?

Well, this is a case-by-case negotiation with our customers, and yes, so the prepayments indeed are held back to see how we can best -- come to a best win-win solution with our customers.

Okay. And another question on LTAs. A bit more info until when do they run and what will be happening afterwards?

The -- so the majority of the LTAs were for the period '23, '24, '25. We have this year some -- also some extensions on the silicon carbide -- on the LTAs on the CMOS side. On the silicon carbide side, we have several LTAs that run beyond 2025.

Next question, are there any plans for a capital increase by issuing new shares?

No.

Okay. We have now a question on X-FAB France. X-FAB France reached an EBITDA breakeven point in Q3 2024. And the question is, how long will it take for this fab to reach the average EBITDA margin of the company?

In order to reach the average the -- that will be reached when the fab is fully loaded. And so we expect that to be in the time frame somewhere '27, '28.

Next question is on our lab-on-a-chip business. You mentioned that this suffered a bit as some customers designed multiple use chips compared to single-use chips. What is the risk that this continues and has a negative impact on your volumes in this activity?

So the -- what I was referring to is -- so indeed, you have in a medical diagnostic sphere, products or diagnostic devices that are very often disposable. And depending on the design of the equipment and the physics used for the diagnosis, it is possible to rework it, but although many are simply impossible. So this is a case by case. We had here an exceptional situation where customer went from single use to dual use for its device. But I do not expect that to happen broadly for all kind of diagnostic devices.

Next one, the development of electric vehicles and of electronics for smart buildings is accelerating globally, with significant growth observed in Asia, China. This trend suggests a potential shift in demand towards the Asia market, potentially impacting the European one. Do you perceive increased risks to your business?

What we see this as an opportunity that more that we participate in this market. Remember, we are today very dominant or a big portion of our business is in Europe. And while we obviously will continue to serve that well. But it's better to be diversified globally. Also, this makes us fit to compete also globally. And so I see this rather as an opportunity and a strength and we'll manage the risks.

Thank you very much. We are now at the end of the questions that have been submitted. If there's anything left, you may submit it now. Maybe we wait a few moments. Okay. So I guess with this, we are at the end of our Capital Markets update. I would like to thank you very much for your participation, and I wish you a nice rest of your day. Thank you very much, and goodbye.

Good bye.

Thank you. Goodbye.