AEM: Why its time has come

"Moving forward, when we look at complex chips and heterogeneous packaging, it gives us a very strong view that we are in the right direction both in terms of revenue growth and our ability to earn profitably for all our stakeholders." -- Chandran Nair, CEO

Chandran Nair: We have enhanced our capabilities tremendously over the last two three years -- both what we have done in-house and through our acquisitions. We continue to have leading edge advanced automation technology that we take to our markets that customers are extremely impressed by and have started talking to us about it.

In addition, you may be aware that late last year we acquired a company with tremendous technology in thermal control that is absolutely essential as the world goes more and more towards complex packages, heterogeneous packaging and so on. We have some tremendous vision technologies that customers are talking to us -- 10 out of the world’s top 20 customers -- have taken us into, apart from our traditional markets, mobility and increasingly also into the memory space.

Loke Wai San: I think the market is coming towards a different way of tests. You know, we hear a lot about a paradigm shift. The traditional ATE (automated test equipment) is becoming increasingly insufficient… Clearly as a small, relatively unknown company engaging with 10 of the top 20 vis-a-vis competitors who are, you know, with market caps greater than 10 to 20 billion, it's I think testament to something we bring to the table that's unique.

Chandran Nair: The fact that 10 out of the top 20 companies are talking to us is a very clear change in customer test needs. A few years ago when the AEM leadership team approach customers talking about system level tests … (the response) was “great concept but no need now”. Starting late last year, well into this year, we have customers talking to us about the exact same concepts we had broached.

The reason for that is the clear change in the product lines that they're looking at, the complexity of products that they're churning out, the heterogeneous packaging, their ability to serve large markets on the edge that require high reliability and, of course, the advances in the node.

Chandran Nair: We are very optimistic about our approach to the test world. We see customers asking us more and more to provide the solution paradigm of how to test versus coming and telling us what model they need. Moving forward, when we look at complex chips and heterogeneous packaging, it gives us a very strong view that we are in the right direction both in terms of revenue growth and our ability to earn profitably for all our stakeholders.

Chandran Nair: To keep things in perspective, the handler technology comes from the AEM side. CEI gives us the ability to increase our manufacturing footprint and the ability to really service our customers with quick turnaround times and so on.

With the high global demand for semiconductor devices and the devices getting more complex, for our customers to be competitive they need quick turnaround on the consumables, the equipment too. In addition, CEI's footprint gives us resiliency if we go into Covid 2.0 3.0 and so on. There will be immediate synergy that we will maximize apart from other things over time as we do more with CEI.

Loke Wai San:  As we reach out to other customers, an important part of the test cell is PCB assembly. It's obviously a high mix and moderate volume load as you move from lab to manufacturing floor. So the ability to add this capability as part of our consumables library is going to be important as we service customers of different sizes and different in-house capabilities.