This is interesting. Thank you for posting all these news and thoughts and data about AEHR. I’m starting to look at the company myself.
The market opportunity looks compelling, and it looks like they have a competitive product advantage “to address the very large silicon carbide opportunity that is being driven by the increased adoption of electric vehicles.” (from their last annual report)
My very basic questions, though, are the following:
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they’ve been in business for 40 years, yet they made $63m in LTM revenue (and maybe $70m+ for the current fiscal year). Is this because they sort of “reinvented themselves” into this new silicon carbide market opportunity by building a new generation of equipment (and consumables that go with it)? If so, what were they doing before this opportunity came along? If not, what have they done all these years?
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(related to question #1) they say they have an installed base of 2500+ machines all over the world. So maybe this sort of answers my previous question, in the sense that they’ve been selling these types of machines for a while. But if this is the case, why do they say they have such a high customer concentration (85%+ of revenue from top 5 customers)? Is it because one customers buys hundreds of these machines?
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their numbers are all over the place, I’m frankly unable to see a trend of any sort. Is this because the chip industry is inherently cyclical? If so, what makes us think they’re going to grow at hyper rates (and at the regular pace that we on this board have been used to) going forward?
Again, I realize these are basic (maybe even silly) questions, but I’m not afraid to ask them when I’m trying to learn about something.
Thank you so much in advance for any clarification/explanation.
Silvio