Dave Reeder
Analyst · Randy Abrams of Credit Suisse
Equipment, the [WFE] vendors continue to be challenged. And so I think maybe it was two quarters ago or maybe a quarter and half ago, we talked about equipment being somewhere between, call it, two to four weeks [late]. I think if you look at equipment day, you're probably seeing more like four to six weeks late, and it may even be as much as kind of six to eight weeks late on equipment deliveries. And so equipment continues to be very, very tight. They are short components [with] many others in the market, which is somewhat ironic given that we need more equipment to be able to produce more chips that are in shortage situations. But that environment remains pretty challenging. We appropriately kind of hedged our commitments. And so from that perspective, we still feel very good about the commitments that we've made but we are experiencing delays in receiving that equipment. In terms of the impact, originally, we were hoping to spend CapEx this year of somewhere in, call it, the $4.25 billion range. We're now indicating that we're going to spend under $4 billion and probably a little closer to $3.5 billion than $4 billion. And so that's the impact of the pushouts that we're currently seeing, particularly given that we had a very strong fourth quarter from a CapEx perspective. So any slip out from fourth quarter would flow directly into 2023. I think push in 2023, [continues], so I think 2023, when we were originally saying something around $3 billion-ish, I think we have slippage from '22 into '23 and then correspondingly have slippage from '23 into '24. So I think it's a bit of a snowplow effect with regards to WFE and CapEx spend. With respect to the expansion in Dresden and Malta, the German team continues to do very well and bring in new equipment as it arrives, getting on floor, getting it installed, getting it qualified and getting it produced in units. So hats off to that team in Dresden, Germany, under the management for leadership at they're just doing a great job. And the work that they're doing there is flowing through to our P&L results and our fixed cost absorption. In fact, I'd say that's a true statement for all of our manufacturing team. With regards to expansion in Malta, we are slowly increasing that [alpha] in Malta. We are waiting on equipment, we actually didn’t expect that equipment to arrive and so call it the second half of 2023. Obviously, if the delays continue then maybe instead of second half of ‘23 that get pushed more towards the latter half of ‘23 or perhaps even into 2024. But we have ordered that equipment, we are waiting for it to arrive and when it does, he Malta team will work diligently to get it on the floor and do some units.