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

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the X-FAB Second Quarter 2026 Results Conference Call. The speakers will be Damien Macq, CEO; and Alba Morganti, CFO. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Damien Macq, CEO. The floor is yours. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Gaia. Thank you, everyone. Good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. The second quarter of 2026 showed another quarter of disciplined execution in a market environment that remains mixed. The revenue came in at USD 199.8 million, down 7% year-over-year and up 2% sequentially. Excluding revenue recognized over time, revenue was USD 196 million, within the guidance. Bookings reached USD 173.3 million up 2% quarter-on-quarter, while backlog ended at $291.8 million. Importantly, excluding the temporary impact of the Erfurt end-of-life program, our underlying book-to-bill ratio returned above for the first time since Q2 2024, providing an engaging sign that demand conditions are gradually improving. Our core markets of automotive, industrial and medical represented 93% of revenue totaling USD 182.1 million. Automotive revenue was USD 116 million, down 19% year-over-year and 5% sequentially, reflecting continued inventory normalization. However, booking improved significantly and automotive book-to-bill reached its highest level in almost 2 years. Combined with a growing number of design wins, this support our view that the market is gradually recovering. Industrial revenue was USD 45.2 million down 4% year-over-year and 13% quarter-on-quarter, primarily due to temporary order volatility from a major silicon carbide customer. Medical continued to perform strongly, reaching USD 21 million, up 39% year-over-year and 9% sequentially. This is driven by pacemaker and ultrasound applications. In Smart CMOS and SOI, revenue reached USD 156.7 million. During the quarter, we saw a significant increase of a new automotive opportunity, particularly in Europe. And one of our top 10 customers renewed and extended its long-term commitment in pressure sensing. We continue to see healthy demand in battery management system in China, while opportunities like linked to robotics are becoming increasingly visible. We are also seeing growing demand from AI-enabled infrastructure where our technology address power management, sensing, infrastructure control, cooling and connectivity applications. The broader manufacturing landscape is also evolving. AI-related demand is driving the reallocation of capacity at several 8-inch fabs in Asia while supply resilience and geographic diversification have become increasingly important for customers. With the completion of our Malaysia expansion and availability capacity across Europe, the U.S. and Asia, X-FAB is well positioned to benefit from these trends. In Microsystem and Photonics, revenue amounted to USD 28.7 million up 14% year-over-year. We secured a new high-volume microfluidics application for blood analysis, we continue to see healthy MEMS demand and expanded opportunity for our aluminum nitride platform. Photonics remain a particularly exciting area. We are making progress in copackage optics, data communication, augmented reality, virtual reality and quantum computing-related applications. Through our collaboration with Ligantech, we have established advanced business interaction with emerging photonics and quantum computing leaders in Europe and the United States. We continue to expect photonics volume production to start in 2028. A major milestone during the quarter was the award of EUR 127.4 million under the European Chip Act to support the expansion of microsystems and photonics manufacturing in airport. Together with the launch of -- together with the launch of -- Micro, this investment reinforce our specialization strategy and positions Erfurt as a key growth engine for MEMS, microfluidics and photonics. Turning to wideband GAAP. Revenue was USD 10.6 billion, up 34% year-over-year, while quarterly demand remained somewhat volatile, we secured 3 new silicon carbide design wins, expanded our opportunity pipeline and continue to advance customer programs towards future production. Execution of our gallium nitride road map remains on track, and customer interest continues to increase. Looking ahead, one of the most exciting opportunity for X-FAB is the rapid growth of AI-driven data center infrastructure. We see opportunities across all 3 business units including power conversion, sensing photonic connectivity, silicon carbide and gallium nitride technologies. Based on today's pipeline and customers' engagement, we estimate a long-term revenue potential of approximately USD 300 million annually for data center applications. Finally, the Erfurt end-of-life program remains fully on track and we continue to expect substantial completion during the first half of 2027. Together with FAB for Micro, this transformation support our specialization strategy and creates the foundation for future growth. At the same time, we continue to execute our cost control and productivity initiatives with discipline across the group. And now I will hand over to Alba for financial updates.

Thank you, Damien. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We will now continue with the financial update. From a financial point of view, Q2 was a quarter of disciplined execution in a still challenging market environment, which weighed on revenue development and capacity utilization. Nevertheless, we delivered revenue within our guided range. Our EBITDA was of $33.6 million with an EBITDA margin of 16.8%. If we exclude the impact of revenue recognized over time, the EBITDA margin would have reached 17.6% within the guided range of 17% to 20%. Our second quarter profitability mainly reflected the softness in the automotive end market, which limited our capacity utilization. As already mentioned by Damien, our cost savings program is progressing as planned with expected positive effects towards the end of the year. . We also continue to manage our cash carefully with cash and cash equivalents of $163.6 million at the end of the quarter. In the second quarter, we recorded a noncash tax impact of $11 million related to the derecognition of deferred tax assets in Malaysia, which affected our net result but had no impact on our cash. Overall, our financial priorities remain unchanged. Preserving liquidity, improving operational efficiency and supporting the group's long-term growth opportunity in automotive recovery, data centers, microsystems, photonics and wideband gap technologies. Looking ahead, I can only repeat what Damien said. We remain focused on cost efficiency, cash discipline and on growth opportunity that support our long-term strategy. Our business continued to be naturally hedged and our profitability remains unaffected by exchange rate fluctuations. At a constant U.S. dollar euro exchange rate of 113, as experienced in the previous year's quarter, the EBITDA margin would have been 0.1 percentage points higher. Our capital expenditures in the second quarter amounted to $24.2 million, bringing first half '26 CapEx to $50.2 million. Cash and cash equivalents totaled $163.6 million at the end of the quarter, while our net debt amounted to $312.3 million, which is an increase of $20.9 million from the previous quarter. And to conclude this financial section, I would like to share our next guidance. For Q3 2026, our revenue is expected to come in within the range of $195 million to $205 million, with an EBITDA margin in the range of 17% to 20%. This guidance is based on an average exchange rate of USD 114 to euro and does not take into account the impact of IFRS 15. I would like to conclude this financial section by saying that we remain confident in the medium-term outlook and our strong operating leverages, diversified technology portfolio and long-term customer relationship position us very well to benefit from a recovery in the demand. And now I would like to give the Board back to Damien.

Thank you, Alba. As we step back from quarterly fluctuations, 4 messages stand out. The first one is our demand is stabilizing. We reached the bottom with underlying book-to-bill returning above 1.0 for the first time since Q2 2024. The second is data center opportunities are accelerating across CMOS photonics, silicon carbide and gallium nitride. Third, our specialization strategy continues to gain momentum, supported by FAB for Micro, Erfurt transformation and our growing photonic position. And fourth, execution remains strong, demonstrated by the new silicon carbide design wins, our progress in gallium nitride and the successful cost control initiative. And last but not least, the EUR 127.4 million Chips Act funding award that we confirmed. Taken together, this development reinforce our confidence that its fab is increasingly well positioned for the next growth cycle and for sustainable long-term value creation. Thank you, and we are now happy to take any of your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We have no questions at the moment. [Operator Instructions] The first question is coming from Luke [indiscernible] Luke, we cannot hear you, you can maybe try again later. In the meantime, we will take the question from Narahari Narsapur.

Thank you so much for wonderful call -- wonderful updates. My question is, I think we are still not using 100% capacity of the fab. When do you expect to go, I think the full capacity is like [ 1.3 billion ]. When do you expect this to go up. And second question is, recently because of some social media posts fixed stock has seen a lot of iterating units. How does the management see this and can the company benefit from this somehow?

Okay. Thank you, Narahari, for the question. So on your first question, when do we see a full utilization at this stage, end of Q2, the utilization was at the 60% level. So we anticipate a gradual increase of this capacity utilization. The model that we are developing for the company goes for a steady capacity increase, and we want to reach levels in the region, 85% to 90%, 85% will be a good capacity level. The question is about when I think it's all about the market conditions and how fast is the market evolves. We have seen in the past some substantial evolutions. You know that we are on a relatively long supply chain, particularly, for example, in automotive, we have a set of tiers and -- between ourselves and the OEM. And this can create swings in the demand. My anticipation at this stage and from all the KPI that we have, we see that the demand is recovering. Now how fast this recovery takes place, it's difficult to predict. If you look at our model and based on the growth that you see on our markets, we believe that we have enough capacity for the next 2 to 3 years. and we continuously monitor how the demand is evolving. And based on that, we see how we need to take into consideration possible next capacity increase. But I would say, for the next 2 to 3 years, the capacity that we have in hand is sufficient. Regarding the question about social media, yes, we were -- I must say this, this is a sudden interest of -- that the post created was a big surprise to us. Reading the post, there was a lot of information that was in fact not totally new. The post created some combination and some yes, it was a compilation of a lot of news that were already on the market. And this has created maybe a significant interest in our company. We see that, to some extent, positively because we are working on the different areas that were covered by the post regarding photonic regarding wide-band gap also the interest for some of our high voltage and CMOS technologies that could also be relevant for a growing application like in data center. That's why here, we provided a bit of an update. And if you look at the PowerPoint material that is provided for this call, there is a bit of more data on this. the feedback that we provided to the post was from our side, no specific new news and I think it's up to the market to make their own conclusion on how to utilize a different information. You could say that some of the information was maybe created some shortcut between certain actions that we are taking, for example, in the context of the photonics fab and certain large companies. but nothing was fundamentally wrong in the statement that we have posted altogether in one shot in one single post. So that's my comment about this specific post on -- does that answer your question?

He disconnected. But he can enter the queue again if he has some more questions.

So maybe we can try with Luke now.

Yes. The next one is coming from Luke Deserta. Yes. In the meantime, we have another question is coming from Trion Reid from Berenberg.

It's Trion here from Berenberg. I just had a couple of questions. The first was just on the data center opportunity that you highlighted. You talked about $300 million long-term opportunity. Obvious question would be, could you give us a bit more detail on the timing. Is there any particular area you said a few of any particular area which is going to be a bigger contributor and how much revenue do you have today? So what does that $300 million compared to today? And then the second question was just on the robotics opportunities that you mentioned are becoming a bit more real. Just be interesting to get a view on that? Is that essentially via Melexis or is it other customers? And if you could help us to quantify the opportunity that would be, that would be great.

Okay. So today, our estimate on the data center is that we have a relatively modest revenue, mostly coming from what we do silicon carbide also an area that we have in photonics and some business that we run on CMOS estimate is in the range of $20 million to $30 million. It's a relatively large range. But if you look at it compared to the global revenue of its fab, it stays relatively modest. The $300 million is based on the number of opportunities that we tag and that we flagged that are directly connected with data center evolution. How fast and how quick could we get to this $300 million. That's a good question, and I will not be able to answer today. It is significantly linked to also the success of some of the customers we are interacting with in this domain. And also, we know that the data center deployment is particularly the new architecture of data center is driven by multiple dynamics that we do not control directly from an perspective. So that's the reason why we stay relatively prudent about providing more accurate view within our different business units and in terms of timing. But as soon as we get some substantial and significant news on this, we will definitely be able to provide you more insight on this. So that's the answer on the data center. On robotics, it's not only Melexis. So we see multiple customers in automotive, but also in the industrial area reporting the interest in robotics for the device that we are producing. So we produce sensors, we produce a position sensor, we produce also our customer produce with our technologies, activators and so we have also customers on the industrial sector, we are also reporting a nice growth in robotics. And it's a global growth. So it's also happening in China, but it's also a global growth that we've seen in robotics. So it's difficult to size this at this point trend. But likewise, as soon as we get a bit of more visibility, we will share that with you. It's only -- we thought it was worth mentioning that we see some of these traditional automotive players. I think Melexis gave also some insight on what they see in robotics, but we see also the same feedback from industrial customers. Hope that answers your question.

[Operator Instructions] We have the next question coming from Arnaud.

Get on to the other question?

[Operator Instructions]