Applied Materials, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMAT) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Gary Dickerson : Yes. Krish, the other thing I would add is that we’re — we’ve made a change in our organization more than three years ago, forming our ICAPS group. And we have just very, very deep engagements with our customers, both on a technical and a support side of our business. And we have the broadest set of innovative products for ICAPS. If I look at where we’re at today, those are some of the areas that — where we have a significant backlog. MDP and implant in FY ’23 are very, very strong for us. Those are areas where we have significant demand from customers. And ICAPS is similar in that to the — all of the — the rest of our business. This is always a race for all of these customers relative to power, performance and cost.

And ICAPS is really materials enabled. We have a really strong team there. We have a great pipeline of products I will guarantee you every year we’ll not be up. That’s for sure. We’re not going to guide ’24, but we are in a very good position in ICAPS relative to enabling technology for future inflections.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Mark Lipacis with Jefferies.

Mark Lipacis : Gary, maybe for you. It seems like the consensus for WFE this year is somewhere in the $65 billion to $75 billion range. And I’m not asking you to give a guidance or an outlook for next year. But I’m wondering in the scenario where that is proven to be too cautious of an outlook for next year. Based on the conversations that you have with your customers, would you say that, that would be because lead times are long and customers just — they don’t want to cancel orders or there’s new secular drivers, like bigger chips or advanced packaging or trailing node, like some of the things you’ve talked about or just competition at the leading edge is driving people to invest more, enabled by subsidies? What are your customers suggesting to you or what — I mean, your backlog grew even as memory came down, like what do you think are the biggest drivers into next year, regardless of whatever the end number is? And what could surprise on the upside?

Gary Dickerson : Yes, Mark, thanks for the question. So all of our customers in any of these different markets, the technology is moving very, very quickly. So they’re all racing against each other for power, performance cost, their relative competitive position. So certainly, as you mentioned in the leading edge foundry/logic, there’s a tremendous amount of focus there, high-performance computing and a number of those different markets. And again, for Applied, what we’ve talked about is real strength in enabling new structures that are critical to competitive positions for our customers. Gate-all-around is an incremental $1 billion for Applied for 100,000 wafer starts more than what we’re currently capturing with FinFET. We’re on path to gain 5 points of share in the transition from FinFET to gate-all-around.

Wiring is probably the #1 focus, and I don’t know that everyone really understands how important that inflection is for our customers. That’s an area where we have tremendous strength. We’re enabling a 50% reduction in wiring resistance with integrated platforms that combine many technologies together. So that’s another one where Applied is really well positioned. Packaging has grown for Applied to nearly $1 billion, and we have over 50% share in the broad — in our served market. And we have, by far, the broadest position in advanced packaging, and we’re still in the early innings of that inflection. But again, that’s all part of this technology race for all of our customers. ICAPS, I mentioned that earlier on the call. Those are also markets where I think it’s surprising to people, including you’ve seen some of our peers talking about ICAPS growth over a longer period of time, there are technology inflections there.