Jeffrey S. Andreson
Thank you, Claire, and welcome, everyone, to our Q2 earnings call. Thanks for joining us today. This afternoon, along with our second quarter earnings release, we announced our CEO succession plans which I will further discuss towards the end of our prepared remarks. Second quarter revenues of $240 million came in at the upper end of our expectations, reflecting a modest acceleration of customer demand into the first half of the year. With the Q2 revenue upside, driven primarily by our lower-margin gas panel integration business, Q2 gross margin of 12.5% was at the lower end of our expectations for the quarter. That being said, through most of the second quarter, we were on track to achieve the midpoint of gross margin guidance, and if not for the hiring challenges we experienced starting halfway through the quarter, which limited our output of machine components, today we would have been announcing Q2 gross margins of over 13%. We continue to face hiring and retention challenges, which has continued to impact our output volumes in the third quarter to date. And ramping internal supply is a key enabler of the strong gross margin flow-through. Therefore, as we focus on securing the necessary headcount in our U.S. machining operation, we are proactively reducing costs elsewhere in the organization. As we reflect on the customer demand environment, industry and peer reports continue to indicate that 2025 will be a modest growth year for wafer fab equipment or WFE, and with our first half revenues up 20% year-over-year, we continue to expect our revenue growth this year will outperform overall WFE growth for 2025. So while revenue growth outperformance versus the industry is an expected highlight of our financial performance this year, the most critical operational priority for Ichor in 2025 is bringing our internal component supply fully up to speed in order to meet strong customer demand and increasing momentum qualifying our proprietary component products. This is what we absolutely must accomplish in order to see the benefits of the new product wins through the P&L via strong flow-through and gross margin expansion. Our new product strategy is taking hold and gaining traction with continued new customer qualifications, as we successfully ramp our internal supply, we are confident that our strategies will materialize in stronger gross margins as we progress forward. In order to track our progress, here are some key benchmarks to look for from us over the next few quarters. The first is building momentum in our top line. Year-to-date, further expansion of our revenue scale beyond the current $240 million run rate has been stalled by a slowing EUV build, reduced investments by a major U.S. semiconductor manufacturer, and the continued lack of demand for additional capacity in some of our nontraditional markets, such as silicon carbide. In order to see our structural improvements to gross margin materialize, we need the additional tailwind of revenue momentum above the $250 million run rate, which is what we had planned for in the second half of 2025 as we entered the year. The next sign of progress will be continued qualifications of our new products by the end device manufacturers. And finally, progress will continue as we provide updates that we have scaled our internal supply to sufficient levels and that our output is aligned with our customer needs and cost targets. Turning to our momentum qualifying additional proprietary components with our key customers. In Q2, we made meaningful progress across multiple fronts, qualification, commercialization and market expansion. Most notably, we achieved a major milestone with the successful qualification of our flow control product at a key end user. This marks our first end-user qualification for this product line, which serves as a strong validation of its performance in high demand production environments. We believe this success lays the foundation for broader adoption and additional end customer qualifications. We also reached an important inflection point with our valve product line. During the quarter, we secured a third customer qualification, and we're actively working toward a fourth. That said, we are intentionally pacing the fourth qualification to align with our internal capacity ramp. This ensures that we can support volume demands without compromising quality or delivery commitments. Importantly, we began shipping valves and production volumes this quarter, a key milestone in scaling commercial success and realizing the margin benefits of internal sourcing. In parallel, we are making steady, technical and operational progress on two new proprietary component products, which are designed to expand our addressable markets for both flow control and valves. These next-generation offerings will allow us to serve a broader range of applications and customer needs, further increasing our value across the semiconductor supply chain. As we move into the second half of the year, we remain focused on expanding manufacturing capacity and aligning production to meet our targeted product margins. For Q3 specifically, with our current visibility, our revenue guidance remains in the same range as we provided for Q2, a quarter ago. The customer demand environment has remained relatively steady since May, and our full year outlook is largely unchanged. The key differences between how we are looking at 2025 now compared to a quarter ago are: first, the Q2 revenue pull in now indicates 2025 is likely to be a slightly front half weighted year. While the second half customer demand environment hasn't changed materially. I would also add that the accelerations of demand leading to a stronger second quarter have now slowed a bit in advance of an expected slower quarter in December for etch and deposition. Additionally, we are marginally less confident about a few areas of potential upside materializing within this calendar year. Next and more meaningful to our outlook, we are taking a more conservative view to our expected hiring ramp and guiding gross margin. And for the third quarter, we are providing a similar range of expectations as we did for Q2. While we remain wholly confident that our strategy will materialize in steady progress towards our longer-term gross margin targets, we need to have improved visibility toward a more meaningful and sustainable top line sequential growth in addition to achieving our product cost targets before we will significantly raise the bar on our expectations for gross margin expansion. While we currently expect to deliver sequential improvements to our gross margin for the fourth quarter, even on similar revenue levels, at this time, we will refrain from guiding significantly stronger gross margins until we deliver the expected gross margin performance for Q3. With that, I'll turn it over to Greg to recap our Q2 results and provide further details around our financial outlook. Greg?