iST March 2020 Revenue Report

iST (TWSE:3289) today (April 10, 2020) announced its net revenues on a consolidated basis, the revenues of March 2020 were approximately NTD$ 267 million, which increased 4.74% of MoM. Compared to the revenues of March 2019, NTD$192 million, sharply increased 39.41%.

iST pointed that its revenues has been up for the last three months, which has increased 45.33%, 76.19% and 39.41% YoY respectively in January, February and March. Its cumulative revenues for first quarter has reached to approximately NTD$ 743 million, and has been up to 52.16% YoY, which shows a very strong growth in iST’s revenues.

iST said, as orders from advanced manufacturing process, advanced packaging and 5G verification and analysis keep pouring in, which has become the three major growth momentums driving iST’s revenues.

In term of the advanced manufacturing process, the estimate of global fabs’ equipment capital expenditures has been revised downward this year due to the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19), however, the equipment capital expenditure of Taiwan’s fabs still among the world’s highest according to a recent report by the Semiconductor Equipment and Materials International (SEMI).

Especially under the long-term trends in new applications of High Performance Computing (HPC), 5G, AIoT, many IC enterprises wish to create smaller semiconductor devices with more efficient, lower power consumption to meet the needs of the current smart products, which accelerates the pace of development in advanced manufacturing process from 10nm, 7nm to 5nm, and even 3nm in the future. Every process adjustment requires re-analysis of materials, and the new process quality verification will be the largest engine for the growth of iST.

As advanced processes continue to downsize, the higher the cost of building capacity and the technical difficulty, the fewer customers they can afford, and the semiconductor industry wonders if Moore’s law is going to be a thing of the past. Therefore, in the More-than-Moore era, enterprises are moving towards advanced packaging to improve process costs and physical limitations.

However, advanced packaging is facing some reliability problems resulting from its heterogeneous integration structure, and need to carry out early verification and analysis to confirm the quality of research and development, which in turn brings the strong growing momentum for iST.

In term of 5G, the demands of end products may be going down due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, but iST expects these demands are only deferred, not eliminated. Moreover, with the resumption of work in the Mainland China and China’s full efforts to build 5G infrastructure, Taiwan’s IC designers are also accelerating their research and development to keep up with this wave. As long as there is research and development requirement, verification is needed to ensure the quality, thus, the visibility on current orders is expected through the end of second quarter.

About Integrated Service Technology

Founded in 1994, iST began its business from IC circuit debugging and modification and gradually expanded its scope of operations, including Failure Analysis, Reliability Verification, Material Analysis, Automotive Electronic Verification Platforms and Signal Integrity Testing Services. iST has offered full-scope verification and analysis services to the IC engineering industry, its customers cover the whole spectrum of the electronics industry from IC design to end products.

In response to iST’s mission of providing integrated solutions to customers, iST not only focuses on its core laboratory services but also enters the mass production services of wafer backend process. http://www.istgroup.com