IQE plc

Phase A — Understand the business

Lens 1 · Company Overview

IQE plc is the world's leading outsourced (merchant) supplier of compound-semiconductor epitaxial wafers — "epiwafers." It does one thing and does it at the front of the value chain: it grows atomically-precise crystalline layers of III-V materials (GaAs, InP, GaN, GaSb) onto substrates using MOCVD (metal-organic chemical vapour deposition) and MBE (molecular beam epitaxy), then ships those epiwafers to chipmakers who fabricate the actual devices. It does not make finished chips — it is the layer below the foundry. Think of it as the "epitaxy foundry" for everyone who can't justify owning their own reactors.

What it sells, by end-market:

• Wireless (RF): GaAs and GaN epiwafers for power amplifiers in mobile handsets, 5G infrastructure, and defence radar. FY2025 revenue £40.1m.
• Photonics: GaAs-based VCSELs (the lasers behind smartphone 3D-sensing / Face ID), and increasingly InP epiwafers for the lasers and modulators inside AI-datacentre optical transceivers (800G / 1.6T), plus infrared imaging and military sensing. FY2025 revenue £57.1m.
• CMOS++: legacy advanced-silicon programme — effectively dead: revenue collapsed from £863k (2024) to £65k (2025) after IQE closed its South Wales silicon site.

Differentiation: IQE describes itself as the only pure-play epiwafer producer with the full III-V material portfolio AND global manufacturing across all three regions (US, EU-UK, Asia). That tri-regional footprint is a real and rare asset in a world re-shoring its chip supply chain — but it is also the source of IQE's cost problem (three sub-scale fabs instead of one big one).

Customers / contract structure: Historically concentrated and "you eat what the smartphone cycle gives you." Anchor relationships: Lumentum (long-term VCSEL/3D-sensing supply, extended) and now MACOM (April 2026 long-term supply agreements for InP + GaN, alongside MACOM taking equity) and Tower Semiconductor (June 2026 multi-year InP supply agreement). Contracts are increasingly minimum-volume commitments rather than pure spot — a structural improvement (see Lens 3). End-buyers historically trace to Apple (via the VCSEL chain — IQE is a long-rumoured/known Apple 3D-sensing supplier) and the major optical-transceiver OEMs (Coherent/Lumentum, Broadcom-adjacent).

Headline shape: A structurally important, technically excellent, chronically unprofitable small-cap (FY2025 revenue ~£97m; adjusted EBITDA just £3.2m) that in 2025 went into a formal strategic review / sale process and in 2026 was rescued by an £81m financing anchored by a strategic customer. The business is real; the equity has been a value-trap for a decade.

Lens 2 · Supply Chain

IQE sits near the top of the AI / mobile-optics supply chain — upstream of the foundries, downstream only of raw substrate and tool makers. Mapping it with named stakeholders:

Upstream (inputs into IQE):

• Substrate suppliers — IQE buys bare wafers (GaAs, InP, GaN-on-Si, sapphire/SiC) and grows epi on them. The critical chokepoint is InP substrate, which is genuinely scarce: AXT Inc. and Sumitomo Electric are the dominant InP/GaAs substrate makers. IntelliEPI's CEO publicly called InP shortage "a bottleneck for the entire AI infrastructure" in Q1 2026. IQE's access to InP substrate is a gating input for its single best growth story.
• Tool/reactor makers — Aixtron (MOCVD), Veeco (MOCVD/MBE), and specialist MBE houses supply the reactors. Capex-heavy and long-lead.
• Precursor gases / metalorganics — trimethylgallium, arsine, phosphine; standard semiconductor chemical supply.

IQE (the transformation step): epitaxy across MOCVD + MBE, three regions — Cardiff (UK, HQ + largest site), Massachusetts (US, ex-MBE Technologies / Greensboro NC area operations), and Taiwan (the operations IQE has been trying to sell)..

Downstream (IQE → device → system):

• Device fabs / foundries: WIN Semiconductors (the ~65%-share GaAs RF foundry — both a customer-adjacent processor and the gorilla of the layer below), Tower Semiconductor (silicon-photonics fab — now an IQE InP customer via the June 2026 deal), MACOM (buys InP/GaN epi, processes into RF + optical components).
• Component OEMs: Lumentum, Coherent, Broadcom (optical + 3D-sensing), turning epi → lasers/PAs/transceivers.
• System buyers / end demand: Apple (3D sensing in iPhone — the swing factor in IQE's photonics history), the hyperscalers (Nvidia/AMD AI clusters needing 800G/1.6T optics), defence primes (US mil/defence infrared + radar), handset OEMs (Samsung, Chinese Android).

Chokepoints & single-source dependencies:

1. InP substrate scarcity (upstream) — the binding constraint on IQE's AI-optical upside. IQE's value rises because InP is scarce, but IQE itself is exposed to that same scarcity on the buy side.
2. Customer concentration (downstream) — historically Apple-chain photonics + a handful of RF customers. The 2026 MACOM/Tower deals deepen concentration even as they de-risk it commercially.
3. Reactor capacity (internal) — epitaxy capacity is the asset. Under-investment (FY2025 capex only £5.1m) means IQE can be supply-constrained exactly when AI-optical demand inflects — a self-inflicted chokepoint born of a starved balance sheet.

This lens is the whole thesis: IQE's strategic value is being a tri-regional, full-portfolio epi node in a re-shoring, InP-starved AI-optics chain. Its strategic weakness is that it has been too poor to buy the reactors that value requires.

Lens 3 · Competitive Advantages (moats)

The moat is real but narrow, and it has been eroding at the edges:

• Process / know-how moat (strong). Epitaxy is a black art — yield, uniformity, and defect density on III-V crystal growth are hard-won and embodied in tacit process knowledge and trained engineers. IQE has decades of it across the full III-V portfolio. This is the durable core. New entrants can't buy a reactor and match IQE's VCSEL or InP yields in a year.
• Portfolio breadth + tri-regional footprint (genuinely differentiated). IQE is the only merchant player offering GaAs + InP + GaN + GaSb across MOCVD and MBE, in US + Europe + Asia. In a re-shoring world ("I need a non-China, non-single-region epi source"), that footprint is a strategic asset MACOM literally paid equity to lock up.
• IP estate (now cleaner). IQE holds porous-silicon patents — and in June 2026 settled its 2022 lawsuit against Tower Semiconductor, granting IQE a broad worldwide royalty-free license, removing a legal overhang.
• Switching costs (moderate). Qualifying an epiwafer supplier into a device fab's process is slow and expensive; once IQE is designed-in (Lumentum VCSELs, MACOM InP), it is sticky. The new minimum-volume long-term supply agreements convert that stickiness into contracted revenue — a structural upgrade from the old spot-exposed model.

Bargaining power — who needs whom? Historically IQE was the weaker party: a sub-scale supplier to giant customers (Apple-chain) who could dual-source or in-source. The 2026 reversal is subtle and important — MACOM and Tower needed to secure non-Asian InP epi capacity badly enough to invest/contract, which shifts power toward IQE for InP specifically. But on GaAs RF wireless, IQE remains the weak party against WIN Semiconductors (~65% foundry share) and a commoditising handset market.

Where the moat is weakest: Wireless/GaAs is increasingly commodity, Asian-clustered (Asia-Pacific = ~60% of the GaAs wafer market ), and price-competitive. IQE's edge there is shrinking; its edge in InP photonics + GaN power + defence is where the durable moat lives.

Lens 4 · Segments

No segments.csv in the research layer (web-only). Reconstructed from disclosures:

The story the segments tell: IQE is mid-pivot from a cyclical RF/3D-sensing wafer maker into an AI-optical InP play. Wireless (the old core, ~57% of 2024 revenue) is shrinking and commoditising; Photonics (now the larger segment at 59% of FY2025) is the growth vector and the reason for the MACOM/Tower deals. The 2026 guidance (>20% revenue growth ) is a bet that Photonics+defence acceleration outruns any further Wireless erosion.

Geography: Not cleanly disclosed in segment form; manufacturing is UK (largest) / US / Taiwan, with end-demand skewed US (defence + hyperscale) and Asia (handset). The pending Taiwan operations sale would shrink the Asian footprint and the revenue base — a deliberate "shrink-to-core" move.

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Phase B — Measure performance

Lens 5 · Earnings Result (FY2025, reported 28 May 2026)

The defining print of the recovery narrative — weak on the surface, inflecting underneath [all figures web: semiconductor-today 2026-05-29; Investegate/RNS FY2025; AJ Bell]:

• Revenue £97.3m, −17.6% YoY (FY2024 £118.0m). Landed in the middle of the £90–100m guided range — no further negative surprise, which for IQE counts as a win.
• Adjusted EBITDA £3.2m (3% margin) vs FY2024 £8.1m (7% margin) — margin halved on lower volume / negative operating leverage. EBITDA still positive, which kept the going-concern wolf from the door.
• Operating cash flow £8.1m, up sharply from £1.3m — working-capital release (inventory normalising) flattered cash even as P&L weakened. A genuine positive.
• Cash £15.7m (up from £4.7m); adjusted net debt £31.5m (up from £18.8m) — net debt rose despite higher cash, because gross borrowing (RCF + March-2025 convertibles) grew. This is the balance-sheet stress that forced the strategic review.
• Capex just £5.1m — starvation-level for an epitaxy business; mostly GaN/power + micro-LED seed investment. Under-investment is the chronic disease.
• H1 2025 was ugly: revenue £45.3m (H1 2024 £66.0m), pretax loss £26.5m (vs £13.9m prior), Wireless −52%. H2 then beat (Jan 2026 trading update flagged strong defence/AI/datacentre/handset demand) — the H1-disaster / H2-recovery shape is the key tell.

Guidance / outlook: FY2026 revenue to exceed +20% YoY (→ ~£117m+ ); adjusted EBITDA targeted high-single-digit to low-double-digit £m. Tone shifted decisively positive vs the going-concern language of mid-2025.

Market reaction: The stock has been violently re-rating on the recovery + deal flow — +22.6% on 15 June 2026 (the Tower deal day) to ~56.7p. Over 2025 it had been a wipeout (down ~85–89% at the October-2025 lows per MarketBeat alerts), so this is a dead-cat-or-real-turn debate playing out in real time.

Unusual vs own history: Positive operating cash flow with a deepening pretax loss (working-capital driven), and net debt rising while cash rises (gross-debt driven) — both flag a company being run for survival/liquidity, not earnings.

Lens 6 · Earnings Calls (sentiment trend)

No transcripts in the research layer; reconstructing management tone from disclosures across the cycle:

• 2023 (inventory glut): defensive, damage-control — "de-stocking," "acceleration of de-stocking trends," guidance cuts, headcount −10%, site closures (Singapore 2022, Pennsylvania 2023). Tone: survival.
• H1 2024: cautious-optimistic — "inventory normalising," "Q1 in line," recovery hoped-for. Tone: stabilising.
• Late 2024: regime break — CEO Americo Lemos departs with immediate effect (Oct 2024), CFO Jutta Meier steps in as interim, stock plunges. Tone: crisis / leadership vacuum.
• Mid-2025: strategic review widened to a potential sale of the whole company; Taiwan sale negotiations; "additional early-stage expressions of interest." Tone: for-sale, distressed.
• 2026: transformation language — "transformational £81m," "tier-1 hyperscale and AI infrastructure," "scalable high-volume manufacturing," Jutta Meier confirmed permanent CEO, MACOM/Tower deals. Tone: re-platformed, growth.

What they stopped saying: "de-stocking," "inventory glut," "strategic review / sale of the company." What they started saying: "AI infrastructure," "hyperscale," "InP," "long-term supply agreements," "strategic partner." The phrase-shift is the cleanest evidence the narrative has genuinely turned — though narrative turns at IQE have proven false before (the 2024 "recovery" reversed into the 2025 collapse).

Lens 7 · Comps

Read: At ~0.9x sales IQE looks optically cheap for an "AI-optical" name — but that multiple is correct for a sub-scale, loss-making, capex-starved foundry with a decade of value destruction. A re-rate requires the earnings to show up, not just the revenue. Note: I could not source clean EV/Sales, EV/EBIT, P/E, dividend yield, or 5-yr ROE for the peer set — IQE pays no dividend, has negative/erratic ROE, and the peers are themselves mostly unprofitable. Writing n/a rather than fabricating. The honest comp statement: there is no good comp; IQE is a special-situation recovery option, not a multiple-relative trade.

Lens 8 · Stock-Price Catalysts (last ~5 years, moves >5%)

IQE is a high-beta, headline-whipped AIM small-cap. The pattern of what moves it:

• 2021: VCSEL/3D-sensing demand + supply-chain tightness → multi-year highs (~50p+).
• Nov 2021 / 2022: Apple profit-warning read-through ("VCSEL suppliers hit by Apple profit warning" ) + the inventory cycle rolling over → sustained de-rate.
• 2022–2023: inventory-glut profit warnings, site closures, guidance cuts → −66% in 2023 alone (50.2p → ~17p).
• Oct 2024: CEO Lemos abrupt exit → sharp plunge.
• 2025: strategic review → potential sale of company + going-concern stress + dilutive March-2025 convertibles → down to ~6–7p, −85% to −89% at Oct-2025 lows.
• Apr–May 2026: MACOM £45m strategic investment + £81m total raise → violent recovery bounce.
• 15 Jun 2026: Tower Semiconductor InP supply deal + IP settlement → +22.6% in a day.

What the tape reveals: The market reacts to (1) Apple/handset demand signals, (2) the inventory cycle, (3) balance-sheet / dilution / going-concern events, and now (4) AI-optical deal flow (MACOM, Tower). It is not an earnings-multiple stock — it is a demand-cycle + balance-sheet + strategic-event stock. Caveat: the 2025 share consolidation/raise re-based the price; pre-2026 pence levels are not directly comparable to today's ~47–57p — see Lens 7 conflict note.

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Phase C — Judge people & books

Lens 9 · Management

• CEO: Jutta Meier — joined IQE Jan 2024 from Intel as CFO; became interim CEO Oct 2024 on Lemos's abrupt exit; confirmed permanent CEO May 2025, holding the dual CEO+CFO role during the review. Track record: too early to judge as CEO — but she navigated the company through a going-concern crisis to an £81m rescue and two strategic-customer anchor deals (MACOM, Tower) inside ~18 months. That is a credible distressed-turnaround execution even if the destination is uncertain. Intel pedigree = operational/financial discipline, not visionary growth. The CEO+CFO dual-hat is a red flag for governance (concentration of control during a crisis), defensible only as a transitional posture.
• Executive Chair: Mark Cubitt — joined as Chair-elect, became Executive Chair to backstop Meier through the review; Phil Smith (chair since 2019) stepped back to NED. An executive chair alongside a dual-role CEO/CFO is a heavy concentration of authority — appropriate for a crisis, must unwind for the equity to be institutionally ownable.
• New board (2026): MACOM representatives Robert Dennehy and David O'Carroll join post-investment. This is the single most important governance fact: IQE's largest strategic shareholder (~11.5%) and a major customer now sits on the board. Aligns IQE's roadmap with MACOM's InP/GaN demand — good for execution focus, but it subordinates minority shareholders' interests to a strategic's and effectively makes MACOM a kingmaker in any future sale.
• Capital-allocation history (the indictment): A decade of value destruction. Repeated dilutive raises, three sub-scale fabs never consolidated, chronic under-investment in the one asset that matters (reactors), site closures (Singapore, Pennsylvania, South Wales) that read as retreat not strategy. ROE/ROIC structurally negative-to-poor. The prior regime over-promised on 3D-sensing/Apple and never converted scale into profit.
• Founder vs professional manager: Fully professional-manager (founder-era long gone). Current team is a restructuring/turnaround crew, not founders compounding a vision. Implication: this is a fix-and-sell or fix-and-re-rate situation, not a long-compounding owner-operator story.

Lens 10 · Forensic Red Flags

No SEC exposure (no CIK; regulatory-findings.md returned 0 EDGAR/AAER records). No 10-K Item 3 to quote — IQE files UK annual reports, not SEC. Forensic read is therefore from disclosures + structure:

• Going-concern / liquidity risk (the dominant flag, now mitigated): mid-2025 the company put itself up for sale and warned on cash; adjusted net debt rose to £31.5m against a tiny EBITDA base. The £81m May-2026 raise (net £27.9m inflow after debt repayment) mitigated but did not eliminate the structural cash thinness — capex needs will pressure it again.
• Dilution / instrument stack: March-2025 convertible loan notes, then the 2026 stack — 151.5m new shares at 19.8p to MACOM, £15m zero-coupon convertibles (60-month term), warrants over 75.8m shares, plus a £13m placing/retail offer and £23m redemption/reinvestment. Heavy, layered dilution with embedded optionality favouring the strategic investor. Minority shareholders have been repeatedly diluted; the warrant/convertible structure means more potential dilution ahead.
• Adjusted-vs-statutory gap: IQE leans on "adjusted EBITDA" (£3.2m) while the statutory P&L is loss-making (H1 pretax loss £26.5m). Always weigh the statutory loss over the adjusted gloss — the adjustments (restructuring, impairments, site closures) have been recurring, which means they are arguably operating costs, not one-offs.
• Working-capital-flattered cash flow: FY2025 operating cash flow (£8.1m) was boosted by inventory release as the glut unwound — a non-repeatable tailwind. As revenue grows >20% in 2026, working capital will likely consume cash again. Watch for OCF reversing.
• Goodwill/intangibles & impairment cadence: repeated site closures and a dead CMOS++ segment imply impairment risk / a history of write-downs on prior capex — capital that was spent and destroyed.

Regulatory findings (required sub-section):

• SEC (EDGAR LR + AAER): No CIK — no EDGAR search possible. Zero SEC findings by construction.
• Non-SEC web search ("IQE plc" (FTC OR DOJ OR FDA OR settlement OR fine OR penalty) enforcement): no material regulatory enforcement actions surfaced. The only "legal" matter of note was the civil IP dispute with Tower Semiconductor (2022 porous-silicon suit), now amicably settled June 2026 with IQE receiving a royalty-free license — a commercial dispute, not regulatory wrongdoing.
• UK annual-report legal proceedings: not retrieved in full (web-only), but no material litigation flagged in coverage beyond the settled Tower matter.
• Conclusion: No material regulatory or enforcement findings — verified via the empty EDGAR LR/AAER pull and web search as of 2026-06-20. The only litigation (Tower IP) is resolved. The real risk here is financial/dilution, not regulatory/fraud.

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Phase D — Project & stress-test

Lens 11 · Forward Projection

No EPS model is sourceable to research-layer financials (web-only, and IQE is loss-making with a moving share count post-raise), so this is `` with arithmetic, framed as revenue/EBITDA paths, not a false-precision EPS line. IQE's fiscal year = calendar year.

Base inputs:

• FY2025 revenue £97.3m; adj. EBITDA £3.2m (3%).
• FY2026 guide: revenue >+20% YoY; adj. EBITDA high-single to low-double-digit £m.
• ~978m shares o/s pre-warrant/convert dilution.

EPS: n/a — not modellable to a credible figure given (a) loss-making base, (b) shifting share count from warrants/convertibles, (c) no sourced consensus EPS. Stating n/a rather than fabricating an EPS line. The honest forward metric for IQE is EBITDA margin × utilisation × InP-substrate access, gated by capex funding.

Brier forecast: Per --watchlist rules, no forecast.ts create in the breadth loop. For the record, the single most scoreable binary: "IQE FY2026 revenue ≥ £117m (i.e. guidance of >+20% met), resolves 2027-03-31" — I'd put p ≈ 0.55. Logged here narratively, not to the tracker.

Lens 12 · Bull vs Bear

Bull case. IQE is a scarce, strategically irreplaceable node in the AI-optical supply chain that the market left for dead and is now being re-underwritten by its own customers. The thesis: (1) the open epiwafer market grows ~19% CAGR to ~$2.5bn by 2029 and InP is the bottleneck for 800G/1.6T AI optics — IQE is one of very few merchant players with high-volume InP epitaxy and a non-China footprint; (2) MACOM (11.5% + board + LTSAs) and Tower (multi-year InP minimum-volume deal) have de-risked demand and put real volume commitments behind the InP story; (3) the £81m raise removed the going-concern overhang and gives capacity to invest; (4) defence/mil-sensing is a sticky, funded second leg that re-accelerated in H2 2025; (5) at ~0.9x sales with a fixed cost base, operating leverage is violent on the way up — a return to even 2022-scale revenue at a better mix could swing EBITDA margin to double digits. Contrarian read: the market is still pricing IQE as a failed handset-cycle wafer maker; it is quietly becoming a contracted AI-optical InP supplier with its largest customer underwriting it.

Bear case. Three things could permanently impair the equity (not just the quarter): (1) Chronic sub-scale economics — three regional fabs, a decade of negative ROIC, and capex starvation mean IQE may never earn its cost of capital; "AI optics" could grow the top line while the business still doesn't make money, exactly as 3D-sensing did. (2) Dilution is structural, not episodic — convertibles + warrants + a history of rescue raises mean equity holders get diluted on every cycle; the strategic (MACOM) holds the optionality and the kingmaker board seats, so minorities are price-takers in any eventual sale. (3) InP substrate scarcity cuts both ways — IQE needs to buy InP substrate (AXT/Sumitomo) to sell InP epi; if it can't secure substrate or fund reactors, the AI-optical upside is capped at the source. Pre-mortem (18 months out, thesis broke): FY2026 missed the self-set >20% guide as Wireless kept bleeding and AI-optical ramp slipped on InP-substrate constraints; the working-capital cash tailwind reversed; another raise was needed; MACOM used its board position to take the company private cheap, capping minority upside. Are multiples too high? No — ~0.9x sales is low, appropriately, for the risk; the question isn't the multiple, it's whether any earnings ever materialise. What the market refuses to see (either direction): bulls ignore that "strategically important" and "good equity" are different things (IQE has been the former, never the latter); bears ignore that for the first time in a decade IQE has contracted demand + a recapitalised balance sheet + a focused (shrink-to-InP/defence) strategy.

Lens 13 · Devil's Advocate (short-seller)

Dismantling the bull case as a skeptical short:

• What structurally breaks the model: IQE sells a commoditising input (epiwafers) into markets where its customers can in-source or dual-source (Apple did, WIN dominates RF, MACOM could eventually pull epi in-house — note MACOM is now both customer and 11.5% owner, which is a tell that it wants control of the supply, not a healthy arm's-length market). The merchant-epi model has structurally thin margins because the value accrues to the device fab and the substrate maker, not the epi layer in the middle.
• Revenue concentration: Photonics now depends heavily on a narrow set of optical OEMs + the MACOM/Tower relationships. If MACOM's own end-demand disappoints, or it re-sources, a huge chunk of the "growth" story evaporates. The Apple-chain VCSEL business already proved how violently a single end-customer's cycle whips IQE (−66% in 2023).
• Weaker-than-thought moat: epitaxy know-how is real, but WIN Semiconductors, Chinese epi houses (state-backed, Asia = 60% of GaAs), and the substrate makers are all encroaching. The "only full-portfolio tri-regional player" framing is partly a function of IQE being too sub-scale to focus — breadth as a symptom of indiscipline, not a moat.
• Worst capital-allocation history: a decade of dilutive raises and site closures; the 2026 deal structure (zero-coupon converts + warrants to a strategic at 19.8p) is shareholder-unfriendly — it hands cheap optionality and board control to MACOM. Related-party risk: a customer on the board negotiating its own supply price is a structural conflict.
• Assumptions that must hold for today's ~47–57p: (a) FY2026 +20% revenue and margin expansion, (b) InP-substrate access secured, (c) no further dilutive raise, (d) defence funding sustained, (e) MACOM acts as partner not predator. That's five things, several outside IQE's control.
• If growth disappoints 20–30%: at ~0.9x sales the multiple won't cushion much; a revenue miss + a needed raise = the stock round-trips toward the 2025 lows. The asymmetry for a short is the dilution/going-concern recurrence, not the demand story.
• Single scenario that permanently impairs: MACOM takes IQE private at a modest premium using its board seats + shareholding, crystallising the value of the strategic asset for itself and leaving minority holders with a capped, sub-intrinsic exit. Plausibility: moderate-to-high — the company already ran a sale process, and a strategic with 11.5% + two board seats + LTSAs is the natural acquirer.

Lens 14 · Management Questions (ordered by information value)

1. InP substrate: Do you have contracted, multi-year InP substrate supply (from AXT/Sumitomo or others) sufficient to meet the MACOM + Tower volume commitments — or is your AI-optical growth gated by an input you don't control?
2. Capex vs capacity: FY2025 capex was only £5.1m. What is the reactor-capacity investment required to hit the bull-case AI-optical volumes, and how is it funded without another dilutive raise?
3. MACOM governance: With MACOM holding ~11.5% and two board seats and being a major customer, how do you ensure InP/GaN supply pricing to MACOM is arm's-length and not value-transfer from minority shareholders?
4. Path to GAAP profit: Adjusted EBITDA is positive but statutory is loss-making with recurring "adjustments." What revenue level and mix takes IQE to sustained statutory operating profit and positive ROIC, and when?
5. Take-private risk: Given you ran a full sale process in 2025, is the board's current intent to operate independently and re-rate, or to deliver a sale? What protects minority holders' upside if MACOM bids?
6. Working capital: FY2025 operating cash flow was flattered by inventory release. As revenue grows >20%, how much cash will working capital consume, and does that re-open a funding gap?
7. Three-fab footprint: Is the tri-regional structure (UK/US/Taiwan) an asset to keep or a cost to rationalise? Post-Taiwan-sale, what is the target manufacturing footprint?
8. Taiwan sale: Status, expected proceeds, and use of funds — and how does losing Taiwan affect Asian customer access and the revenue base?
9. Wireless decline: Is GaAs/GaN Wireless a managed-decline cash cow, a turnaround, or a divestiture candidate? What's the floor on that segment?
10. Defence durability: How much of the Photonics H2-2025 re-acceleration was funded defence programmes vs structural AI-datacentre demand, and how repeatable is the defence piece?
11. Customer concentration: What % of FY2026E Photonics revenue is the top 3 customers (MACOM, Tower, Lumentum), and what is the single-customer concentration risk?
12. Competitive threat: How do you defend InP epi share against Asian state-backed entrants and against customers in-sourcing epitaxy?
13. Dual CEO/CFO role: When does the CEO/CFO role split, and what is the plan to normalise the executive-chair governance structure?
14. GaN power / micro-LED: These got the only growth capex in 2025. What's the realistic revenue timeline and TAM, and are they distractions from the InP main event?
15. 2026 guidance composition: The >20% growth guide — how much is contracted (MACOM/Tower minimum volumes) vs demand-dependent, and what's the downside case if Wireless undershoots again?

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