Hello, and welcome to our last slot before the lunch break, and we do have, to stay in the tune of things, an advertising company with us presenting to you now. It's LPKF Laser & Electronics. The company will be presented by its CEO, Klaus Fiedler, and you might have seen the stock has done tremendously well over the last couple of months. Is now a member of the TecDAX again. I would say let's dive right in and find out what it's all about. Before we start, two housekeeping issues. We will record this presentation, and also there will be an opportunity for Q&A, and if you have questions, please use our chat box on the lower right-hand corner to enter them. Now, Klaus, it's all yours. Thank you very much. Hello, and welcome everybody to a quick overview of LPKF. As mentioned, we are quite a bit in focus on the stock market at the moment. I want to give you a quick overview of the history and current product portfolio, our strategic direction, and what we achieved in making our goals in this direction so far. Let's get started. For those who don't know LPKF yet, here we go. What is LPKF? Company is 50 years old, ab out 700 employees. Very global, meaning our revenue is distributed over the main economic regions. Actually, Europe now below 25%. Asia, North America are our main revenue markets. The company is active in production equipment, focused on specialty laser processes and microsystems technology. What is the actual DNA of the company? As you can see also in our R&D spend, we are a company that in-house develops disruptive new processes and then enters market segments, step by step removes the legacy process, and achieves a dominating position in that field. Let me give you a couple of examples. These are our current core product lines. Pretty broad in the market. We are active in electronics manufacturing, where we have laser processes for stencils, laser processes to cut PCBs with a laser, so no vibration, no dust, higher precision. We still have our founding product line going strong, rapid PCB prototyping, meaning in-house, very fast, you can get your own printed circuit boards. We have a plastic welding division, which was focused on the automotive market. Don't need to tell you how the automotive market is doing. We're refocusing it on medical and consumer applications right now, and we are very active in the thin-film solar business with high-precision, high-throughput equipment for structuring thin-film solar cells. All these application fields, we have dominating market shares, 60%, 70%, sometimes even 80%. Far, so good, but what is the key issue we have here? Basically, the addressable market of all these market fields is somewhere in the middle eight figure. We grabbed a dominating part of it, meaning we have no room to grow here. One thing grows for sure, your fixed costs, so you basically run into a profitability and growth problem here. Our strategic direction has been for many years, and is very clear. Our DNA, our business model works very well. We have world-leading technologies which we develop in-house and patent very well. We need to find application fields that are substantially larger than our current ones, not fall into the trap of many tech companies. You develop a solution, then you ask yourself where the problem is. We got to analyze markets, find one that is 10 times an order of magnitude bigger, then also eradicate our second weakness. We usually offer one process step in all these applications. To become strategically relevant, we got to offer more. We got to offer full solutions, a suite of processes to the market. What market have we identified here? Advanced packaging in the semicon industry. Let me give you a little bit of a background. What's going on in the semicon industry? What's going on in advanced packaging? What is LPKF's strategic goal, and how far did we get along the way? When you look at the semicon industry, basically for decades, it was driven by Moore's Law, meaning the actual silicon chips, the front end, gets faster and faster, better and better every year. More performance for the customer, growing industry. The packaging of that chip, the so-called back end, 50 years ago was basically, yeah, let's put some plastic mold around it and some electrical connectors to the outside to protect the chip. [audio distortion] Hello? Can you guys hear and see me? I can hear you, but I can't see, Klaus. Fiedler, [Non-English Content] Well, you can hear me, while the video hopefully recovers, I would basically say. I would say. Let me see. There you go. You're back. Yeah, I'm visible again. Sorry for the IT interruptions. No problem. We're just making sure people are awake. That's a good thing. Silicon back-end. Nowadays, the way these chips are packaged, it's logic chips, it's memory chips, is a key driver for the actual performance. Moore's Law still contributes, but there's limited room for these transistors to get smaller. It's a handful of atoms nowadays. The back end is where the action is. The back end is where the performance improvements come from and are expected to come from in the future. I want to show you a little slide, not by us. That's from TSMC. They showed it at a conference lately. The blue line is what's happening with the silicon chips. Yes, the performance is also expected to get better. The yellow line, that shows the influence of the advanced packaging on the performance, and that's where the majority of the performance improvements come from now and are expected to come from in the future. That's why advanced packaging, the way the chips are actually packaged into a module, is such a hot topic around the world. If you look into advanced packaging, nowadays, as you can see on the bottom left picture, the chips are either placed next to each other or stacked on top of each other. There's one limiting factor, the actual substrate. Current substrates by their mechanical properties and also by their dielectric properties. How the y interact with these gigahertz frequencies in such a module are basically at the limit. No improvements possible anymore. For the longest time, it's known. If you could only replace the current materials with glass, you would get an immediate boost in your performance. Glass has great mechanical properties. It's rigid, it's smooth, you have much more room to pack things closer together. Also glass has excellent dielectric properties, meaning same chips, same module design. You just take glass instead of a current material, you can get a substantial improvement in performance and a lower energy consumption. You all know energy consumption is a major pain point. All these AI data centers basically have their own power plant next to it nowadays because the energy consumption is so high. For this reason, if you follow the press, if you follow the major trends in the semiconductor industry, all across the players, this is not a niche topic. This is something all the big OEMs are strongly working on. Glass core substrates, glass in advanced packaging is a major topic at the moment. Everybody's pushing to get glass as a material into the packages. Why hasn't that happened 10 years ago? The physics are clear that the performance improvement is there, is very well known. To get glass into high volume production in semicon packaging, you would need to get hundreds of thousands, millions of small structures, holes into this glass, so-called TGVs, was simply not possible with existing processing solutions available on the market. Top right picture shows you if you take a legacy technology and try to structure glass, precise millions of holes, you get imprecisions and you get microcracks. That's just not, "Oh, that's kind of bad." That's really a showstopper. You cannot process the glass. You get no yield. It breaks. That's where LPKF comes into play. We are a technology powerhouse and have always been. We work for the largest customer in the world, so far in markets that have a limited addressable market. We developed in-house, about 10 years ago, a completely new approach to structuring glass. We call the process LIDE. I want to give you a very quick overview in the next slide, first, have a look at the result. Bottom right picture. For those who are versed in the semicon industry, this looks like MEMS. This is micrometer precision, no cracks at all. Finally, there's a solution to use glass in high volume for applications like advanced packaging that need very high requirements. What is this LIDE process? Totally different approach. You're actually not drilling a hole at all into the glass. You use a single weak laser pulse, put it through the glass in a machine that has very high mechanical precision. Afterwards, you see basically nothing. The glass looks like before. You put it into an etching bath, around this small laser modification, you get a very precise structure without any heat intake, without any damages. Holes is the simplest application. The process also works in 3D, you can do cuts, you can do little structures for chiplets, you can do cutouts. This is what we developed 10 years ago as LPKF, I thank my predecessors as CEO put a very strong IP protection around. What we did is one of our core values at LPKF is pioneering. What we do is always first mover in the market. We are never followers. This also means that we are sometimes in the market before it has actually taken off and grows, pioneering is what we are about. We released these LIDE machines to the market more than five years ago. We have a solid middle two-figure amount of machines in the field already working, producing, giving us feedback. We first started, put the machines in the field, started working with various customers, also in various application areas, basically to gain trust and experience that these machines are high volume ready. There's one downside to the semicon market. Our clear strategic goal is become a strategically relevant player in the semicon back-end. Everything around glass, that's LPKF. The semicon market, for very good reasons, is very conservative. People usually buy their production equipment from well-established players because such a high amount of CapEx is distributed. We had to work ourselves into this market and gain trust, and that was not two quarters. That was many years. We did a full ecosystem map, who are the players active for glass and semicon packaging, worked with them through the R&D phase, through the prototyping phase, through the qualification phase, and we are not the chosen player by definition. We are sitting somewhere in northern Germany. The main action is in Asia and in the U.S., and we are basically in the market against local competition, which of course, has a networking advantage. Long story short, for many years we went down that path with a clear strategic goal. What we have achieved so far is that out of the players that have made an equipment decision and basically said which equipment do I buy to qualify my process, more than 80% have selected LPKF. Simply for the reason LIDE is a very unique process and strongly patented, so it's not easy to circumvent. For the second reason, we started 10 years ago. We have just a time advantage and experience advantage against other players, and could convince the vast majority of the semicon players we can be trusted, we have the best solution, we are your partner for actually ramping up. Of course, there's competition, and it's good that there's competition. This market that is coming up with glass for semicon packaging is very big. We are currently updating our market model. We will release it shortly, but I can tell you a year ago we thought it's EUR 500 million TAM. It's significantly larger than EUR 500 million. Of course, competitors want a piece of the pie, and that's good. It cannot be a single-source market. In our current position, we see ourselves very well adjusted to take a big chunk. Our goal is 70% of this market just by offering the best solution to the market based on a decade of experience, and also by defending our IP. Usually, our IP is respected. Our competitors have a high level of integrity. There are individual cases. We have one in China right now where people just try to copy us. There we immediately take a legal way. 10 years of experience cost a lot of money. We can't let somebody just copy our technology. Well, that's the first step, and in my personal view, the high interest our share has gotten in the past months is that the industry is now ready to distribute the first ramp-up deals. There are more than enough articles out there with people saying, "Oh, LPKF has a great position." So many investors, also those who are deeply rooted in the semicon industry, said, "Oh, these guys have a high chance of making it into the equipment stack." Once you are in, you are qualified, so you have a very good opportunity to grow with the demand. And that, of course, created a lot of interest into our stock. That's only the first step. If we get in with LIDE into the true volume production deals now, which I'm highly confident about. Yes, we are in, but again, with one process step. We over the years have built up good relations to our customers. We know the full process flow. We also know where there are pain points in the process flow. We immediately said we got a release where it fits our strategy, meaning highly differentiated, unique process solutions that are also very well protected by IP. Where do we see additional pain points and needs in the market? We found two process steps. One is ablation of the routing layer on the glass. The second one is bonding glass to glass and glass to silicon. These find high interest. This is a snapshot from our webpage. We are offering them right now. Strategic reason is immediately grabs the current opportunity, that the door is open with our entry ticket light. Show to the market we are there to stay. We are strategically relevant for everything around glass in semiconductor packaging. For the sake of time, I won't bore you with technical details. One thing I want to mention. We are now in the phase where the first ramp-up deals for glass in advanced packaging are distributed. I will, of course, inform you as investors when we say this hurdle is taken. I thank the investors for the trust who already preempted that decision in the share price. We are broadening our process portfolio, have done so, offering it now to really gain a foothold and stay in that market as a relevant player. What's next? For us as LPKF, once glass is established in a high-performance computing package, the logical next step is currently these chips are still communicating with electrical signals. Everything that goes over a distance of more than half a meter nowadays is optical data communication. More efficient, less energy-consuming. The same will happen inside this package. These chips will communicate via optical signals. You have glass anyway, which is an excellent light guide in the package. The whole, let's say, architecture design is called Co-Packaged Optics. LPKF is actively positioning itself to, when Co-Packaged Optics is mature enough for the market, expand also in process step around optical communication. In the last slide, I want to show you how do we see this timing-wise. Now our glass structuring and the two additional process steps that we are offering, the ramp-up deals are distributed right now. We expect a ramp-up happening over 2027 and 2028. Yes, I know there are voices in the market. They are real, that the ramp-up could go a lot faster. Our conservative plan shows two years of ramp-up. True high-volume production is running. The two additional process steps we are offering are happening roughly at the same time. Tensor Glass Bonding, maybe with a certain time delay. It's for thicker substrates, which are a bit later in the roadmaps. For Co-Packaged Optics, we really want to turn it around. First, fully understand the market, work on a full one-year market assessment. We have access now to a lot of players in that field. We want to use it. Where are the true needs? We do the same thing. Be the pioneer, position yourself, first with R&D solutions, with prototyping solutions. Be ready and be the first when Co-Packaged Optics takes off. That's what we are doing right now. We have, of course, in-house activities and some partnering activities around Co-Packaged Optics, but an independent market offering will happen when we have the market assessment done. Once we have achieved that, we have solved our strategic dilemma. We have a significantly larger, more than 10 times larger market, where we can leverage our technology strengths, and we have a market where we can really have strategic relevance to our customer by offering a broad portfolio of solutions. With that, I want to hand over to the Q&A, for which we still have seven minutes. Thank you all. Thank you, Klaus for the deep insights. We do have a few questions. I think looking at the time, it'll work out just fine. Let me start out with the first question that came up, which is very detailed, and I hope that I'm pronouncing all the technical terms right. TSMC has partnered with Innolux and Ibiden for glass substrates. Innolux seems to have partnered with Contra and ITRI for TGV-related work. An additional question, it seems that Intel has pivoted to outsourcing glass substrates, partially to JNTC, who have their own TGV business. Does LPKF have exposure to either of these supply chains? Now you are bringing me to a certain dilemma. I can never, ever mention customer names. I have strong NDAs, so I have to be a bit superficial in my answer. When we look at this production ecosystem that has now been shaping up, what groups can we see? We can see groups that are classic IC substrate build-up companies who are currently active in that market who say, "Oh, glass is coming. I need to get prepared, and I got to get the right processes in place." These are our customers. You have a second group which says, "Disruption in a huge market, semiconductor back-end, that's my chance to get in." These companies usually have a certain track record in glass precision manufacturing, often from the display sector. They just offer glass with metalized TGV that is then passed on in the supply chain to the IC substrate build-up companies who pass it on to the OSAT who works for the OEM. I cannot mention any details, even though I know them, about what you just mentioned. I am very confident that we are well-positioned in all relevant supply chains, because when you follow where the actual structured glass is coming from and which equipment is used, it's not always the direct partner you see in an announcement. It may be a subcon who actually does it, and then ships it into the production chain. Thank you. Let me start with another question, which is also aiming at the same issues, well, slightly different. What customer commitments or LOIs exist for LIDE Systems in glass core substrates lines, Intel TSMC timelines, and when do you expect first high volume series production orders? I see at the moment three, four, maybe five players in the large ecosystem, who are now having the process at a maturity level that they can place first ramp-up orders. I expect these orders for this year, and they are a very important strategic milestone for LPKF, because, yeah, we are great in technology. Nobody is surprised that people work with us when it comes to technology development. The decision to use us for the volume production equipment, that proof point I still got to deliver. These ramp-up deals will happen this year. A ramp-up deal is usually, yeah, a mid-single figure amount of machines, and a machine is in the ballpark of EUR 1 m illion. It's business, but it's definitely not the high volume business. Our expectation is that the players work with the ramp-up capacity, get the yields to target level, could take a year or something, and then place the true high volume orders, which are always a very solid, even high double-digit number of machines. I know, and I am also reading the semicon articles, that some players want to pull in these ramp-ups and want to ramp up earlier. I take it, would be great for us. We are definitely ready from the operation side here. First ramp-up deals for true qualified production flows, orders this year, ramp-up happening next year. That is our current view of the market. Thank you. Follow-up question on LIDE. How does LIDE penetration compare for electrical vias versus integrated optical waveguides in CPO/glass, and what margins are targeted at scale by 2028? Basically, LIDE is a structuring process. LIDE is there to get either TGV or three-dimensional structures or cutouts into the glass. It finds its application in glass core, and also for glass interposers replacing silicon interposers. Co-Packaged Optics is a completely different process landscape, where people see the opportunity to use the glass that you actually have in a substrate also as a waveguide. This I clearly see still in an R&D phase. This is not some thing where tangible qualified designs have played out yet. There are certain first moves in Co-Packaged Optics with using waveguides on the surface of a substrate, but really leveraging the glass, as I showed in this roadmap, we see that more for the end of the 2020s, that something like that reaches market maturity. It would still need LIDE, because you need the TGV, but it would need additional process steps as well. That is exactly what we are currently working with and assessing with our customers. Thank you. Just looking at the time, we'll come to the last question, which is regarding the other business areas. We've talked a lot about LIDE and the prospects that come with this, but you also, of course, have other business units as well. Can you give us a little few sentences as to how they are performing and what you expect next? What we expect. Well, actually, you were cut off by 50% of the time during your question, I think I got it. We have a core business. We have product lines that in the market niches they address, have very strong positions. We do not have the plan as LPKF to become a pure player in advanced packaging now. We definitely want this broad foundation of being in several markets and offering our solutions there. Of course, we need to make sure that every single product line is profitable. Yeah, if the market environment is adverse to us, you all know, starting from COVID, then you have the customs problematics, you have the Ukraine war, which definitely didn't help. Yes, the market environment is tough. We got to adapt, we got to structure every product line that it can, in the market it's addressing very successfully, create profit. That's what we are doing at LPKF. We are changing our structure to be much more, let's say, agile and resilient against fluctuations in market demand. We clearly have the ambition, we will keep a portfolio of core product lines, because also our core product lines have some areas with great opportunities. I just want to mention solar. If perovskite technology reaches high-volume maturity, I expect many years of great demand from solar. Definitely, even though advanced packaging is our strategic growth field, the core product lines, in a shape that is ready for the future, will be part of LPKF. Thank you so much, Klaus. That brings us to the conclusion, and I hope that I'm audible right now. That brings us to the conclusion of your presentation and the Q&A. Thanks everybody for joining and for your questions. We will take a short lunch break, and we will see each other again at 1:00 P.M. with Softing AG, I just posted the link to that presentation in the chat box. Thank you, and thank you for everybody listening. Bye-bye. Bye.