ASE Technology Holding (ASX) Q1 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

For the period ending March 31, 2022

April 28, 2022 3:00 a.m. ET

Prepared Remarks

Questions and Answers

Call Participants

Prepared Remarks:

Operator

Kenneth Hsiang

I'm Kenneth Hsiang, the Head of Investor Relations for ASE Technology Holdings. Welcome to our first quarter 2022 earnings release. Thank you for attending our conference call today. Please refer to our Safe Harbor notice on Page 2. All participants consent to having their voices and questions broadcast via participation in this event. If participants do not consent, please disconnect at this time.

I would like to remind everyone that the presentation that follows may contain forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements are subject to a high degree of risk, and our actual results may differ materially. For the purposes of this presentation, our dollar figures are generally stated in New Taiwan Dollars, unless otherwise indicated. As a Taiwan-based company, our financials are presented in accordance with Taiwan IFRS. Results presented using Taiwan IFRS may differ materially from results using other accounting standards, including those presented by our subsidiary using Chinese GAAP. Intercompany transactions between our ATM and EMS businesses have been eliminated during consolidation.

For today's call, I'm joined by Joseph Tung, our CFO. During the call, I will be going over our financial results and outlook. Joseph will be available to answer questions during the Q&A session that follows.

As a reminder, we disposed of ASE Inc.'s China sites at the end of 2021. For our financial results presented here, in addition to our legal entity results, we will also be including additional slides on a pro forma basis or as if the disposition of ASE Inc.'s China sites had already occurred. We believe the pro forma results give additional more meaningful information, which would assist in providing comparability of our financial results.

During the first quarter, our ATM business continued to be heavily loaded. Revenues came in slightly ahead of our expectations. During the quarter, there were some customers who were reducing their forecasts, but those customers were outpaced by other customers increasing their forecasts. From a sector perspective, certain sectors do appear to be faring better such as high-performance computing, networking and automotive. And despite the slight volatility, net-net, there was no significant variation from our previous outlook.

Our EMS business also had revenues that came in ahead of our expectations. During the quarter, stronger-than-anticipated demand was driven by our SiP and traditional EMS services. Logistical issues from component and chip shortages appeared to ease prior to getting worse from China's COVID mitigation practices. All in all, our EMS business fared well despite the manufacturing environment becoming more challenging.