IQE plc (IQE) Q4 2023 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to IQE's full year results presentation. I now have a call over to Chief Executive Officer at Medical Lemos and Chief Financial Officer, Jutta Meyer. Please go ahead. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I am delighted to be here with our new CFO, Jutta Meyer, who joined us earlier this year. Before we get into today's result, I wanted to touch base on the earthquake that hit Taiwan on April 3rd. As you know, we have operations in Taiwan, and I'm really pleased to say that all our colleagues and their families are safe and our operations are unaffected. But nonetheless, our thoughts are with the people of Taiwan during this difficult time. Now, let's turn our attention to our 2023 result. We would all agree that 2023 was an incredibly challenging year for everyone, as headlines indicate, with difficult macroeconomic backdrop, including high cost of living crisis and persistent high inflation pretty much across the globe. In terms of geopolitics, we also saw countries flex their muscle to control supply chain and sometimes core materials. Export restrictions put on compound materials in China related to gallium, germanium, and graphite. This indeed added further tension in the global ecosystem supply chain that was already under pressure from the pandemic. The semiconductor industry as a whole was not immune to the downturn either. We did see high level of inventory across the industry, which led to a deeper but cyclical downturn that had been anticipated by many in the industry. As a result, we at IQI felt the knock-on impact from our customers who continue to grapple with these numerous challenges. Despite all these challenging conditions, though, I'm really pleased to say that we have delivered resilient performance in line with expectations,...