iST Q1 2020 Consolidated Results

iST (TWSE:3289) today (April, 2020) announced its self-clearing financial statement of Q1 2020 on a consolidated basis.

1. Revenues for Q1 2020 totaled approximately NT$ 743 million, an increase of 3.70% QoQ basis.

2. Gross profit in Q1 2020 was about NT$ 221 million, an increase of 111.40% QoQ.

3. Net operating profit in Q1 2020 was about NT$ 82 million, which has turned a loss into a profit compared with the previous quarter.

4. Net profit before tax in Q1 2020 was about NT$ 82 million, which also has turned a loss into a profit compared with the previous quarter.

5. Net profit attributable to parent company after tax for Q1 2020 was approximately NT$ 70 million.

6. EPS for Q1 was approximately NT$0.75.

iST said, gross margin 29.73% of Q1 2020 was significantly higher than 14.58% in Q4 2019 and the annual gross margin of 15.97 % in 2019, which has reached a record high for nine consecutive seasons.

iST further said, its net profit attributable to parent company after tax for Q1 2020 was approximately NT$ 70 million, which is close to the annual amount of NT$ 77 million in 2019. This means that the quarterly profit of iST in 2020 is already close to the annual one of 2019. iST’s strong growth momentum and the bright operating performance has resulted from the verification demands of advanced manufacturing process, advanced packaging and research and development of 5G chips.

Look into the future, as the COVID-19 pandemic continues, many semiconductor makers have asked employees to work in split shifts or locations. Some customers responsible for outsourcing analysis have transferred their working places to iST, that is, more engineering verification and analysis orders have also been sent to iST’s laboratory, which has led to the continuous increase of iST’s orders.

In addition, despite of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is no obvious downward revision of the equipment capital expenditure of Taiwan’s fabs was observed. Advanced manufacturing process, such as 5nm and 3nm and other preliminary research and development is still in full swing. The situation of working and teaching from home, also drives strong verification demand for advanced packaging such as 5G and HPC (High Performance Computing), which pushes analysis orders continuing to pour in.

Especially in 5G, the time to market of smart phones may be deferred due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but iST observed the demands for preliminary engineering and design of experiment of 5G chips are not eliminated. Moreover, with China’s full efforts to 5G new infrastructure projects, Taiwan’s IC designers are also accelerating their research and development to keep up with this wave. iST is optimistic about its performance at second quarter by the visibility on current orders for the advanced manufacturing process, advanced packaging and verification demand of 5G chips.

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 and so on. 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 rising Cloud Intelligence, Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV), iST not only focuses on its core services but is also expanding its service offerings based on international trends, such as automotive electronic verification platforms, signal integrity testing services and wafer backend process integrated services.
http://www.istgroup.com