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Carey Dorman

Thanks, Ben. Good morning, everyone. On slide 3, you can see a summary of our first quarter financial results. Organic sales and constant currency adjusted EBITDA both grew 5% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA of $128 million was above our guidance target for the quarter.
Electronics' organic growth of 10% was broad-based across historically higher margin, higher valued categories in circuitry and semiconductor, as well as relatively lower margin assembly materials for consumer electronics.
This translated into constant currency adjusted EA growth of 9% in electronics. ESI's adjusted EBITDA margin decline roughly 30 basis points year over year in constant currency terms. These margins were negatively impacted by higher pass through metal prices, which drove a 70 basis point headwind relative to the same quarter last year.
Excluding the impact of roughly $100 million to pass through metal sales and assembly solutions, our adjusted EBITDA margin would have been 26%, corresponding to a 50 basis point improvement versus last year.
While FX rates have improved for us recently, currency negatively impacted total company net sales in the first quarter by roughly 3%, and with a roughly $5 million a year over year headwind to adjusted EBITDA.
We expect this to reverse in Q2 and become a tailwind based on current exchange rates. On slide 4, we share additional detail on the drivers of organic net sales growth in our 2 segments. In electronics, we saw double digit growth with strong performance across all three business units. In assembly, stronger consumer electronics demand in Asia and the Americas, more than offset continued industrial weakness, primarily in Western Europe.
Advanced specialty spa volumes for various computing applications grew meaningfully, and we saw strong growth of technically challenging engineered assembly solutions used in server and data center applications.
Circuitry solutions sales improved 8% organically, with growth continuing to come from data center applications, memory disk markets, and specialty finishes for circuit boards in the Asian EV market. Our business mix continues to shift towards B2B markets as applications for servers, data centers, and high performance computing grow rapidly. This transition should dampen both quarterly seasonality and general cyclicality over time.
Semiconductor Solutions' organic net sales grew 17% from continued robust demand in wafer level packaging for semi-fab and OSA customers in Asia. Our vehicle copper damaging product line grew north of 20% this quarter.
The customer proximity we gained in 2023 by terminating our distribution agreement and going direct to our customers, continues to yield great results.
We expect to commercialize two new leading edge products that further support advanced packaging applications later this year. Our power electronics products also continue to grow well in the first quarter. We've made substantial progress broadening the Argomaxined silver technology customer base to electric vehicle manufacturers in Asia and in Europe.
These new customer wind signal growing commercial traction and validates our leading technology position in a rapidly growing end market. Industrial and specialty organic net sales decline in 2% year over year. The 1% decline in the core industrial business was largely volume-driven and concentrated in Europe.
We have not yet seen a pick up. Recent policy changes in Europe towards infrastructure and defense investment may drive an increase in industrial activity that should benefit our business. Offshore year over year sales decline in the quarter was a result of timing for a few large orders that fell into the latter part of the year. We continue to expect healthy growth for that business this year on the back of pricing and new wins.
Slide 5 addresses cash flow and the balance sheet. We generated $30 million of adjusted free cash flow in Q1. The adjustment takes into consideration the sale of our graphics business and certain non-recurring expenses and tax items. The first quarter is always our slowest from a cash flow standpoint, given the semiannual interest payment on our bonds and annual incentive payments. We invested $12 million into the working capital, which primarily reflects a seasonal inventory bill and higher accounts receivable due to increased.
Caps in the quarter was $11 million somewhat below our guided run rate. We still plan to invest roughly $65 million over the course of the year to support strategic growth initiatives. Now turning to the balance sheet, Our net leverage ratio at the end of the quarter was 2.1 times, which is the lowest level in our history of ESI. Our capital structure remains fully fixed at an effective rate of 4%, and we have no debt maturities until 2028.
And with that, I will turn the call back to Ben. Ben.

Benjamin Gliklich

Thank you, Carey.Our business fared well through the first quarter despite the specter of trade actions impacting business and consumer sentiment. But we're a short cycle business, and any economic assumption for the balance of the year comes with macro uncertainties.
Given our global footprint, the recently announced trade actions have added complexity to our business ecosystem. In this uncertain moment, there are immutable aspects of our business that merit. Reiterating. We operate locally in most of our markets with sourcing, manufacturing, and technical support resources close to our customers. A diversified and regionalized manufacturing footprint allows us to be nimble to accommodate dynamic trade flows. Our products represent a tiny fraction of the cost of high-value goods, but are integral to their performance.
Thanks to those attributes, we believe we can mitigate most of the direct impact from ongoing and potential future tariffs on our cost structure. Additionally, we're in the midst of initiatives to further localized sourcing and remain in regular communication with suppliers and customers around ways to mitigate cost issues that arise as a result of the ongoing tariff situation.
There may also prove to be opportunities where competition may not have the same luxuries of flexibility and geographic breadth that we enjoy.
In the absence of additional clarity around tariff implementation and its impact on demand, without any emergent signs of a slowdown in our core markets and with some cushion provided by the weaker US dollar and outperformance in Q1, we're maintaining our initial full year guidance of adjusted EBITDA between $520 and $540 million as our current best estimate of earnings potential this year.
For the second quarter of 2025, we expect a similar demand picture to Q1 and therefore expect adjust the EBITDA in the range of $120 million to $125 million which is roughly flat sequentially when removing the $4 million dollar contribution from our graphics business in Q1.
This assumes that tariffs do not have a sequential demand impact. Which is the best assumption that we can make today, especially based on April trading, which has been solid thus far. As we've demonstrated repeatedly in recent periods of uncertainty, whether during prior tariff escalations in 2019, COVID in 2020, or the inflationary impacts that followed, we're prepared to react quickly to shifts in demand and cost.
We have a highly variable OpEx structure and local teams that can rapidly respond to customer needs. We are prepared to navigate the dynamic environment that has emerged.
It was a good start to 2025. Commercially, we built a high quality, high probability pipeline of large leading edge electronics opportunities and margin enhancing industrial projects. We think these are unlikely to be derailed by current circumstances.
Operationally, we're increasing manufacturing capacity for future growth areas such as nano copper and power electronics, streamlining our legacy manufacturing footprint, and we're building research and applications development and high leverage geography.
We continue to execute other functional process improvement programs to add efficiency across the organization. Our company is executing well, with long-term growth prospects as good if not better, than in the past. That is a tribute to our teams who are responsible for another good quarter of both results and progress.
So let me close by thanking all of our stakeholders for their continued support of development solutions and in particular our talented and dedicated people around the world working productively and collaboratively and quite creatively, I would add, to support our customers and drive long-term value for our shareholders.
With that operator, please open the line for questions.

Question and Answer Session

Operator

Thank you. (Operator Instructions)
Josh Spector with UBS.

Unidentified Participant

Hey. Guys. This is James Cannon not for Josh. Congrats on a solid quarter. I just wanted to poke on. I just wanted to poke on the guidance range and particularly since you're not including any significant impact from tariffs, as we think about the low end of the range, can you just remind us what some of the macro indicators that are underlying that assumption are?

Benjamin Gliklich

Sure. Maybe just the big picture thoughts on the guidance range as just articulated in in in our prepared remarks. . We finished Q1 had a plan. We see a modest. Impact from tariffs from a cost perspective, we're largely able to mitigate most of the impact from tariffs to cost. We've got an FX tailwind.
And our April trading, right, demand remains strong. So we haven't seen any signal of demand destruction year-to-date from tariffs. And so it's on that basis that we're maintaining our full year guide. There's nothing that's indicated demand destruction, and so the demand assumptions we had entering the year are the best we have. There's a bit of, I'd call it more uncertainty around that range, but We haven't seen anything of anything, April's ahead of plan.
So how do you get to the high end and the low end? It's really electronic strength and industrial weakness. Those are the two key variables, the electronics business is outperforming our baseline expectations and during the year, the industrial market is modestly weaker, I would say, and if that persists, depends which one sort of overtakes the other to get to the the various bookends of that range, and obviously it doesn't include any demand destruction from tariffs. Given the uncertainty around what tariffs will be implemented and when and what that will do to the consumer.

Unidentified Participant

Got it, thanks and just a a separate note, I just wanted to poke on you called out data center strength in both assembly and circuitry. I was wondering if you could frame.
Like just size Of the exposure.

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, so. As we think about our data center exposure in the circuitry business, we're selling circuit board process chemistry that go into the large server boards, and that's a business that wasn't that big for us just a couple of years ago, but it's been growing really rapidly, double digits year on year now for several years, and on the assembly business, we talked about.
High performance specialty alloys, solder paste, and then engineered products that are used in server board assembly as well. Altogether, this is, north of $100 million in both of those businesses. If you add in our memory disk business and circuitry, you're bumping up against $200 million of exposure in that market.

Operator

Bavesh Bodaya with BMO Capital Markets.

Bhavesh Lodaya

Hi, good morning, Ben. Ben, on one more follow up on the guidance, assuming we do see a slower and market demand in the second half, and given how important the third quarter is for ESI, can you talk about some of the potential actions that you envision you can take to defend your end?

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, so, element has the benefit of a highly variable cost structure. It's something we've highlighted in the past and been able to demonstrate in the past.
We can almost automatically take dramatic costs out of the business from incentive compensation, quickly tighten our belt around travel and other discretionary expense line items without damaging the long-term growth trajectory of the business, and we flex that down if you go back to. Q2 of 2020 where, we took SGNA down 15%-20% in a quarter. And so if we need to do that, we know how to do that, we can do that without difficulty.
That's not contemplated in our guide right now. We're running with, let's call it full OpEx out of Q1 and into Q2, and so those levers remain at our disposal.

Bhavesh Lodaya

Got it. And so a follow up, maybe a question for Martin. Martin, you've been a large shareholder and obviously a big part of Element Solutions story so far. As we look ahead from here, where do you see yourself as part of the elements, the story, and in terms of ownership and involvement in study study directions going ahead from.

Unidentified Corporate Representative

I didn't hear the question clearly.

Benjamin Gliklich

Where do you see your involvement and put that in the context of recent.

Unidentified Corporate Representative

So I think you're probably asking me why for the first time in 12 years, I sold some shares, and that's simply for liquidity reasons. And as a matter of principle, I wouldn't want to sell shares at a time when the business was.
Obviously not inhibited in any way from my transacting or in a very healthy state. And of course, as you can see, the business is in a very healthy state. It really doesn't change anything to do with my long term vision for the company, my long term involvement with the company. That was simply for liquidity purposes. .
We, it's taken, it's a long journey for me, as from founding platform to today. And I feel that, if you like persevering and working to put this business in the right position, has been a journey that's, appropriately Being rewarded in the equity markets, not obviously with all this current disruption, but overall.
So I don't think anything change and taken a long time to really understand this business. And by the time I get to the point where you really understand it, no point in stopping now. So there we go.

Bhavesh Lodaya

Appreciate the talk.
Thank you.

Operator

Mike Harrison with Seaport Research Partners.

Mike Harrison

Hi, good morning. Noted within the semiconductor business, strong growth in wafer level packaging, and you mentioned high bandwidth memory as a driver there. Can you give us a little more color on the key applications that you're serving in high bandwidth memory and maybe comment on how you see the opportunity unfolding there.

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, our wafer level packaging business continues to grow really nicely. The primary product in there is damaging copper, and you'll recall in 2023 we terminated a long-term distribution agreement there, gave us more customer proximity, better access to technology roadmaps. We talked about having a couple new product launches coming in the back part of this year associated with. A wafer level packaging business and really directly attributable to that. So there's been very strong growth within high bandwidth memory. Those are Korean customers that are ramping their production significantly.
Again, this is data center and high performance computing driven and we see a lot of growth opportunities there and our product has incumbency has established, I would say incumbency in that market, going forward.

Mike Harrison

Alright, and then, also was just wondering within the electronics business, you've been targeting 2% to 4% outperformance of the underlying market over time, in the current environment where there is some additional uncertainty or we might expect some potential slowing of the underlying market, how confident are you that you can still deliver on that outperformance of 2% to 4%?

Carey Dorman

Appreciate that question, Mike. It's not as though we're coming off a period of really robust growth in the broader electronic supply chain. You go back to 2024, you had soft MSI. You did have a strong PCB market, which we, nicely outperformed, and if you look at this quarter, our semi-business growing in the teens is, I would say vastly outperforming the underlying semi-market, and our assembly and circuitry business is both growing in double digits organically, I think it's also healthy outperformance relative to those markets.
The reason for that is our penetration of fast growing emerging growth vectors. We refer to them also as these B2B sales, about data centers and low orbit satellites that that are dislocated from the consumer electronic cycles that, used to be primary drivers of our electronics business.
We see those B2B markets as continuing to grow and have seen no slowdown in demand, if anything, acceleration. In demand there and so we are confident in our ability to continue to outperform.

Mike Harrison

All right, thanks very much.

Operator

Steve Byrne with Bank of America.

Unidentified Participant

Hi, this is Rock Hall on the line for Steve Byrne. Just given the recent, focus on rejiggering manufacturing locations the tariffs, as well as preparing for the potential of a consumer or an industrial demand pullback, is there any risk to the timelines of rollouts for Blockbuster products such as Argomax, Cupreon, and Shadow Plus, as well as any other medium term, projects getting, pushed out further?

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, it's a fair question, Rock. So there are two dynamics here, right? The first is, to protect ourselves and our customers from the impact of tariff price increases. We're localizing certain parts of our supply chain, moving production from one site to another. That's a discrete tactical activity. We'd like to believe that we have fungibility across our sites, from a production perspective, and so, that's something that's ongoing by our local teams. On the other side, as you mentioned, we do have some big products. A coming down the pipeline that require discrete manufacturing and the people working on those are different people, right?
So we are nearly finished with doubling our Argomax capacity at our site that produces that, and we've made real strides forward on active copper manufacturing and trying to scale that up and we're expecting to have A new plant ready, mid-scale plant ready to produce that in the second half of this year. So there's a lot of activity in the supply chain, but we're adequately staffed and resourced to support it.

Unidentified Participant

Understood. And just as a follow up, could you go a bit more into, how the industrial, businesses performing geographically and key market drivers that enabled, only 1% organic sales drop this quarter.

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, it's a good observation. The industrial surface treatment business, which sits within our industrial and specialty segment, had revenue and volume down about 1%. That was weakness in Europe.
A relatively stable, slightly down market in the Americas and some strong growth coming out of Asia. And so our Asian, industrial business is winning share, is participating in the, growth in the automotive sector in China, and benefiting from that.

Operator

Chris Parkinson with Wolf Research.

Chris Parkinson

Great, thank you so much, for taking my question. Then it's very clear that premiumization of the portfolios, obviously already been paying off, perhaps paying off even more, despite some uncertainty. Can you just get on some of the things, getting away from tariffs for just a second, but just what makes you. The most enthusiastic across both assembly and circuitry and how you see your product product offerings, kind of evolving throughout '25, '26, what you're from the marketplace and perhaps if you could sneak in a comment on print in there as well, it'd be greatly.
Appreciated.

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, absolutely. So you asked about circuitry and assembly specifically and so I'll address those too. I think the general observation that we're seeing a shift towards high value B2B sales, in both of those businesses, is very exciting, and will change some of the cyclicality. That you might have seen in our assembly business and our circuitry business in the past.
So, our technologies for these very high performing server boards are different than the GPUs themselves, but the boards that the GPUs sit on inside of those data centers are very sick, very difficult to metalize and we've got, the flagship products and techno process technology for that application. And so we've been winning significant share there. We've made real strides penetrating the IC substrate market, which has been a softer market within the circuit board or within the circuitry industry, but has long term very high performance or.
Has very high growth opportunities associated with it. We've won real business with final step metalization or what it's called solder preparation for electric vehicles where there's an immersion 10 product that's been growing really nicely in the Asian electric vehicle market.
So all across the circuitry business, we're seeing new demand vectors where our technologies are preferred processes. In the assembly business, we've been skewing that business towards higher tech applications through innovation and alloys, some engineered products that have really interesting applications and data centers, and then active copper isn't contributing yet, and that's Creon.
Indeed, the number of applications and the po from the customer base is incredibly robust. The engagement with OEMs, OSATs, specifiers and applicators remains really high, and so our conviction and the, earnings potential of that technology is rock solid, and just an added level layer of growth from here forward.

Chris Parkinson

It's great color and just as a quick follow up, I think that the balance sheet is in a pretty good spot, especially after, the graphics sale. Can you to hit on you can you give us some insights on how you're thinking about, some of the talking M&A you've discussed before, buybacks, and just your comfort level, going forward for the balance of '25.
Thank you so much.

Carey Dorman

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for the question, Chris. So, leverage is as low as it's ever been in our history. 6 year history is Element Solutions. Balance sheet is in really good shape.
We pay down some debt and still have $500 million of cash to deploy, and there's a lot of volatility right now, and the volatility should create interesting opportunities to deploy that capital, and we're very well positioned to take advantage of them. With regard to M&A versus buybacks, I think the simple observation I'd make is that the hurdle for M&A is higher with our equity where it is, and that doesn't mean that, there can't be any very compelling M&A created by this opportunity, but, the buyback option looks pretty interesting too.

Chris Parkinson

Thank you so much.

Operator

Pete Operland with Truist Securities.

Pete Osterland

Hey, good morning. Thanks for taking the questions. I wanted to start by following up on the impact that tariff uncertainty might be having on customer conversations and order patterns. I guess, specifically, have you seen any signs of tariff-related pre-buying across your core markets either in the first quarter or in April?

Benjamin Gliklich

That's a good question, Pete, and that's something we've been looking for evidence of, we see the sort of headlines of folks buying new phones in anticipation of tariffs, but from where we sit in our supply chain, we're not seeing that as a direct pull on consumption of our chemistries, and so we really don't see any clear evidence of this being a pre-build. That's not to say that some of the demand isn't, but again, if you think about where the growth is coming from, these are B2B sales, and you can see the CapEx that's driving it, whether that's in data centers or in the electric vehicle market or, in the low Earth orbit satellite markets. And so we don't think that this is driven by pre-build or pre-buying, but some of it could be, in fairness.

Pete Osterland

That's a very helpful color.
As a follow up, I just wanted to ask about the margin performance within INS. You had a nice expansion there in the first quarter, despite organic growth being down. So I guess just looking to the rest of the year, as the energy business comes back, would you expect to drive segment margins higher from here, or were there any benefits to call out from mix or costs that were limited to the first quarter?

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, it's it's a good observation, right? That that offshore business is a high margin business for us and it was down year over year. We talked about that in the prepared remarks with the drivers of that are, and we do expect it to get better in the second half, which will drive margin expansion, all else equal. The reason that margins improved is, the standard cost price discipline we've we've exercised and we've seen some ongoing raw material deflation, which we expected entering the year. And so, there is a reason to see that industrial and specialty segment margin improve. . Going forward, I don't care if there's anything.

Carey Dorman

I just, I think the other point to make is that volumes in the core industrial lists are still no meaningfully from their peak, and while we are highly variable cost model, getting more volume of those plants does have some operating leverage. So we're not anticipating a lot of that in 2025, but that's still upside to margin if you think about the the long term opportunity there.

Pete Osterland

All right, very helpful. Thank.

Operator

John Roberts with Mizuho.

John Roberts

Thank you, and nice quarter in guidance. I assume your March quarter results and your June quarter guidance has a bonus accrual consistent with your full year, previous earnings targets, or if not, could you tell us, what you're assuming there?

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, look, as we answered a question earlier, we're running with full OpEx right now, so we haven't been, reducing bonus accruals on the basis of demand destruction that we haven't seen any of yet. So we have that full lever at our disclosure.

John Roberts

And any seasonal, differences you're expecting here in the next, second, third and fourth quarter versus what you had in 2024?

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, that's a great question, John, and it speaks to the Q2 guide.
It's hard to say what a normal year is, but if you go back several years, Typically, the second half was 52% 53% of IEA and the first half was was the balance. The past several years I've had a lot of different lumps associated with Supply chain disruptions and all the things we've lived through.
Last year, Interestingly enough, the second quarter was quite strong in electronics, benefiting from the pre-builds of smartphones that typically fall into Q3 and other consumer electronics device launches. So we had a stronger Q2 than typical and we didn't have the same level of Q3 uplift that we normally would have. So when we look at Q2 this year, we're assuming a more, I'll call it normal seasonal pattern on the basis of consistent demand from Q1 into Q2.
Thank you.

Operator

John Tenant with CJS Securities.

Jonathan Tanwanteng

Hi, thanks for taking my questions and next quarter. The first one is just expanding a little bit more on the stronger demand in April, I guess the stable demand. Are you seeing any pockets of weakness or strength in there, or is it a straight line continuation of what you call1 by end market number one, and I'll follow on after that.

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, it, it's really consistent with Q1, in some areas of modest acceleration around semi is what I would say.

Jonathan Tanwanteng

Okay, great. And then for the year, I just wanted to be clear, are you assuming zero demand destruction from the current tariff environment, say a base level of 10%, and with the potential for more depending on the countries and where negotiations go? Is that what I'm hearing? .
In terms of what the underlying function is at this point?

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, we're assuming the same. On in aggregate, the same demand environment that we, expect eventually leave.

Jonathan Tanwanteng

Okay, great. And that's, if you see, for example, the continuation of a of a 145% for China through the rest of the year, that's not going to meaningful impact what your expectations are for men.

Benjamin Gliklich

It's hard to say to put parameters around that because, take, for example, the latest tariff in in the tariff argument, exempting a whole series of products that we are a part of the manufacturing process. So, the devil's going to be in the details.
I wouldn't, I think trying to micro pick at that doesn't really work because you're dealing with an environment that's so volatile. So this is on the assumption that the world is continuing as normal.

Carey Dorman

And importantly, it's taking into consideration the cost impacts of that, right? And so what we're saying with this is, we can mitigate the impact of tariffs on our cost structure. And maintain our guidance range on that basis. Yeah we can go through those those levers of, what we're doing to offset cost in the different buckets if that's a follow up that folks want to go into.

Jonathan Tanwanteng

That makes sense. Thank you.

Operator

Alexei Yefremov with Keybank Capital Markets.

Aleksey Yefremov

Thanks and good morning. This is Ryan on for Alexi. Ben, I guess I'll take the low-hanging fruit here and just ask you, what exactly are you guys doing to kind of mitigate the costs that are coming in the supply chain from tariffs at this point.

Benjamin Gliklich

And I set myself up from that, for that one. So there are, there are really 3 buckets of cost increases that we're seeing from li tariffs. The first is raw materials that are imported from China to the United States, and we don't do much of that ourselves. We do have suppliers that are sourcing from China, and so we've spent a bunch of time trying to find alternative sources and understanding what those cost impacts would be to us. And that's a pricing lever that we've had to throw and we've been very clear and we've done this in the past when we've seen inflation of specific commodities where we pass that on to customers.
Directly, the second bucket are finished goods, or rather, other things that we're importing into the US from places other than China. And so one example is Mexico. We've got quite a bit of cross-border trade with Mexico. And fortunately, we qualify for the USMCA exemptions there. And so figuring out what products are going back and forth and making sure that they do qualify for those exemptions has been a a big piece of work and we've got confidence that that 10% tariff on imports in the United States isn't going to be meaningful for us.
The third bucket are things that we're shipping from the United States to China. And we do have some finished goods and raws that we're shipping into China. And what we've done to mitigate that impact is localization. Right. And so moving our sourcing and moving our manufacturing from the United States to, jurisdictions in Asia, maybe not directly into China, and shipping through and shipping to China from there. And that should be able to offset most of that impact, and net net, we don't view it as a headwind to our guidance.

Aleksey Yefremov

Understood, that's helpful. I guess just sticking on this topic. I mean, you talked about kind of China to the US and US to China. Can you maybe just size and on a dollar basis or a percentage basis of goods just kind of like what your actual exposure there is?
Thanks.

Benjamin Gliklich

US to China is in and around $10 million. China to US direct is negligible. Again, that's through our suppliers, and then the finished goods into the US from other countries is sizable, but again, we've been able to offset that through exemptions and and also some level of localization.

Aleksey Yefremov

Great, thank you.

Operator

David Silver with CL King.

David Silver

Thank you. I had a question, I guess, about maybe some of your the behavior of some of your major customers, and I'd like to maybe focus on your R&D activities and your product development activities in particular where you're collaborating closely with customers, but has the current, uncertain environment that everyone's asking about, has that.
Had a notable impact on the company in terms of the pace or the resourcing, behavior of your customers. In other words, for longer term projects where you're collaborating, what has been the behavior, has there been any change, from your major customers, given the the current uncertain environment.

Benjamin Gliklich

The short answer, David, is no. We're working on long-term projects with breakthrough associated with breakthrough technologies and, the industry, the market, the consumer is pulling those technologies, and so we continue to see very active level of engagement.
Between our R&D functions, our direct customers, specifiers, OEMs, the business is very local and so our innovation is not just, on the breakthroughs but it's on new applications, technologies, it's on sustainable applications, and we've seen no pause in momentum whatsoever. You heard us talk about two new product introductions we're expecting, in our most advanced front end, area at the end of this year, and those are continuing.
At pace.

David Silver

Okay, thank you and then just one last one, but if I caught your comments correctly, I think regarding consumer electronics you've indicated maybe a slow down or softness in the western, I think smartphone market, but then you also talked about a pick up.
In that category in Asia, and I'm just wondering if you could maybe just flush that out a little bit. Is that company specific? Is there a big shift going on that you see and why wouldn't the softness in the Western, why wouldn't the Western consumer electronics market start to look a little bit more like the the growthhier performance in Asia going forward?

Benjamin Gliklich

Yeah, you call out an interesting note, which is we talked about strength in consumer electronics in the Americas, but softness and smartphones in in in the West. That consumer electronics strength in the Americas as PCs and other consumer electronics, ex smartphones.
There was strength in the Local Chinese smartphone market in the quarter, right? We've seen some, government subsidy to drive consumer activity in China. And so we did see a strength in that local market. It's not for export, and also strength in non-smartphone consumer electronics in the Americas. That's the distinction that I would call that you've picked up, and that we saw in the first quarter.

David Silver

Okay, great.
Thank you very much.

Operator

(Operator Instructions)
Since there are no more questions from the queue, I will now turn the call back over to Ben Gliklich for closing remarks.

Benjamin Gliklich

Thank you. Thank you, everybody for joining. We look forward to seeing many of you in the weeks and months to come. Have a great day. Take care.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's call.
Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.