IQE plc (IQE) Q4 2024 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

Good morning and welcome to IQE's full year results presentation and I hand over to Executive Chairman Mark Cubitt and CEO Jutta Meyer. Please go ahead. Hi everyone. Welcome to the IQE FY24 results webcast. I'm Mark Cubitt, the Executive Chairman of IQE and I joined the Board in October 2024. For those of you who don't know me, I was the CFO of Maine-listed Wilson Microelectronics for eight years until it was sold to Cirrus Logic in August 2014. I've worked with Beaks Financial Cloud pre-listing and became the non-executive chairman of an IPO on AIM in 2017 and served in that position until December 2024 and remain as a non-exec director of Beaks. I'm also the non-exec chairman of Aimlisted Concurrent Technologies and have been for the last five years. I joined Concurrent in 2020 as the youngest director with the other directors having served for 30 plus years. I'm now Concurrent's oldest and longest serving director. Moving on to the strategic review. As we announced in November 2024, we are carrying out a strategic review of all the operations of IQE and appointed Lazard to work with the Board in this process. The focus of this review is to expand the previously announced proposal to IPO the Taiwan operations to include a full sale of the Taiwan operations. Both options continue to be considered. We are currently evaluating a range of proposals and you will understand we can't disclose details of these negotiations, but we will update the market at the appropriate time. To be clear, the objective of the strategic review is to make IQE debt-free with cash to invest in the refocused business. This will remove the burden of the current debt that is both expensive and acting as a drag on the business and share price. I'd now like to introduce you to Jutta. A number of ...