X-Fab to drive global fab expansion after bumper year
Cette publication existe aussi en Français
European chip maker X-Fab Silicon Foundries has seen a bumper year with turnover up 23% to $908m and profits nearly doubling to $245m with global capacity expansion plans.
The core business at X-fab of automotive, industrial, and medical was up 31% reaching a share of 91% of total revenues and growing 22% a year over the past five years.
Q1 2024 revenue is expected to come in within a range of US$215-225 million, compared to $208m in Q1 2023 and $236m in Q4 2023. The full-year 2024 revenue is expected to come in between $900m and $970m, reflecting the balance of the businesses, which is still dominated by automotive.
This comes as the company is fully loaded in its capacity and expanding its fabs in Malaysia, France and the US, but does not expect to hit its billion dollar target.
- X-Fab looks to billion dollar year
- X-Fab looks to buy fabs as it sells out for the next three years
- Restructure sees X-Fab buy Chinese MOSFET developer
Fourth quarter utilization rate varied by technology and site. The 200mm CMOS, silicon carbide and MEMS/microsystems capacity continued to be fully loaded, while there was a decline in demand for older 150mm CMOS technologies resulted in lower capacity utilization at the Lubbock, Texas and Erfurt, Germany fabs.
“We finished the year very successfully with above-market growth rates in our core automotive, industrial and medical markets,” said Rudi De Winter, CEO of X-FAB Group.
“Our automotive business grew by 38% year-on-year, while industrial and medical revenues each increased by around 20%. This shows that X‑FAB, with its specialty technologies, is perfectly positioned to continue its growth path in the future. I am pleased with the progress we have made in expanding our capacity to better serve our customers’ demand. 2024 will be a very important year for our capacity expansion programme, which runs through 2025,” he said,
Major expenditures in 2024 will include the capacity expansion project at Sarawak, Malaysia, the continued capacity conversion in France as well as the further expansion of SiC manufacturing line in Lubbock, Texas.
- Capacity remains on allocation after boom year
- Boom year for power
- CMOS integration option added to galvanic isolation
In 2023, X-FAB Texas produced 58% more SiC wafers than in the previous year. At X-FAB Sarawak, building construction to increase the site’s capacity by 10,000 wafer starts per month is expected to be completed after the summer months, and it is planned to start moving in equipment in the fourth quarter of this year.
The company saw all-time high revenues across all technologies with the CMOS revenue up 24% YoY, Microsystems revenue up 43% YoY and SiC revenue up 93% YoY in the fourth quarter and bookings of $224.6m, up 17%. This reflects the fact that the foundry capacity is already sold out.
X-Fab’s is riding key megatrends with the Electrification of Everything to mitigate climate change, or the digitization of healthcare in the context of growing and aging societies.
This is also reflected in the strong demand for the broad range of specialty technologies, including high-voltage CMOS, MEMS/microsystems and silicon carbide. Bookings in the fourth quarter came in at $224.6 million, up 17% year-on-year, full-year order intake was $880.5 million, up 9% compared to 2022 and the backlog amounted to $475.8 million.
The automotive business was up 38% year-on-year, mainly as the result of the ramp up of the automotive business at X-FAB France. The French site continued the conversion of capacity into X-Fab’s 180nm automotive technology, replacing capacity that had been used to produce CCC legacy business. In the fourth quarter, 93% of X‑FAB France’s revenues were based on X-Fab technologies, against 84% in the same quarter last year.
Contribution from silicon carbide (SiC) was a key growth driver for X-FAB’s industrial business in 2023 with applications such as power inverters for wind and solar systems or industrial inverters for uninterrupted power supply systems.
Fourth quarter SiC revenue amounted to $23.5 million, up 93% year-on-year. For the full year of 2023, the SiC business increased 33% to $72.6m with the number of SiC wafers produced in 2023 up 58% year on year.
However the SiC revenue was diluted by the fact that over half of the customers procured the raw wafers themselves and consign them to X-Fab.
Semiconductor technology is key for digital transformation and efficiency improvements in the healthcare sector. X-FAB’s medical business benefited from the increasing use of wearable medical devices as well as the growing demand for testing and point-of-care devices. Among the growth drivers in 2023 were an infrared temperature sensor as well as a DNA sequencing application.
Combining CMOS and MEMS technology as well as its systems integration expertise added value at the wafer level will be a major growth driver for the medical business going forward.
In addition to various medical applications, an application for next generation automotive headlamps also contributed positively to X-FAB’s microsystems business in 2023.
The CCC (Consumer, Communication & Computer) business highlights the softening in the market, recording revenue of $17.2m in Q4, down 21% year-on-year and flat sequentially.
Prototyping revenues in the fourth quarter came in at $27.3m, up 16% year-on-year. In 2023, this was $108.8m, up 19% year-on-year. Prototyping revenues represent new business adding up to the pipeline of new projects and supporting X-FAB’s future growth.
“The consistently strong development of our prototyping revenues reflecting new business wins gives us confidence in X-FAB’s future success and the achievement of our long-term goals,” said de Winter.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
