[Featured Stock] Wort Benefits from HBM Expansion...World-Class Technology Driving 20 Years of Profitability Up

Watt, a semiconductor process environment control equipment company, is showing strong performance on its first day of listing on the KOSDAQ market.

As of 9:24 AM on the 26th, Watt is trading at 10,710 KRW, up 64.77% from the public offering price of 6,500 KRW.

Founded in 2004, Watt manufactures semiconductor process environment control equipment. It holds the number one market share in the domestic semiconductor environment control market and counts Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Semes among its clients. Its main product is the 'ultra-precision temperature and humidity control equipment (THC)'. In the first half of the year, 63.4% of its sales came from THC. The THC, which Watt successfully domestically produced for the first time in Korea, controls the surrounding temperature and humidity to ensure that the photoresist (PR) is uniformly applied on the surface of semiconductor wafers. Additionally, it has a function to remove particles (dust particles) from the wafers.

Watt has maintained a profit trend for 20 years since its founding. Over the past three years (2019?2022), its sales have grown at an average annual rate of 35.9%. Last year, its annual sales and operating profit were 22.8 billion KRW and 6.7 billion KRW, respectively. The operating profit margin reached 29.4%.

Watt can perform stricter control compared to the standards required by its customers, and it was the first in the industry to commercialize low-cost energy-saving technology, establishing a technical entry barrier through reduced power consumption.

From the 16th to the 17th, Watt conducted a subscription for general investors, attracting approximately 5.79 trillion KRW in deposits.

Seungbae Park, CEO of Watt, explained, "As semiconductor processes become more advanced, the importance of process environment control equipment that affects yield inevitably increases," and added, "Based on 20 years of experience, we plan to supply process environment control equipment to the semiconductor back-end industry by leveraging the technology and sales capabilities we have accumulated so far." He also stated, "We will continue to grow as a company by expanding into overseas markets."

CEO Park emphasized, "If temperature and humidity or harmful gas purification fail, fine circuit patterns can be destroyed, causing losses of hundreds of millions of KRW per hour," and added, "It is always important to properly control the environment in semiconductor manufacturing processes."

Hyundong Sung, a researcher at KB Securities, analyzed, "Demand for THC equipment is increasing in the HBM (High Bandwidth Memory) packaging process of major domestic memory semiconductor companies," and predicted, "Watt will expand into other industries with new semiconductor equipment such as ultra-low temperature chillers, cleaning equipment environment control THC, and chillers and TCUs for EUV lithography equipment."