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

Brice Hill : Yes. Thank you. So two things. And it depends on which time period you look at. But if we — if we look forward, the gross margin impact is really that they’re generally smaller customers. So the profitability of those customers for Applied is higher. And when we talk about mitigation, as we go forward, it’s going to be TBD as to who we sell that product to and what the profitability is. So at this point, we’re expecting the impact that we described. And if you look at the current quarter, we did have specific inventory for customers that’s unique. We are working to qualify some of that inventory, and we were successful to a degree, but we did have specific inventory that we had to take a demand reserve on.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Timothy Arcuri with UBS Securities.

Timothy Arcuri : Gary, I had a question about WFE intensity. So we’re exiting this year at 15.5%, and you were saying that through 2030, you think WFE is going to grow faster than semiconductors. You’ve certainly been beating that drum now for a while that WFE intensity is going to keep going up. And obviously, there are some underlying upward pressures. But China has obviously been ordering tools and building capacity well ahead of demand now, in part due to the fear of these bans. So if China becomes a little more of a lagging tier region, wouldn’t that lower WFE intensity a bit and maybe argue that maybe it has to reset a bit?

Brice Hill : Tim, I’ll jump in for a second here, just because I have the picture of the graph in my mind that we use. So — we do think intensity is gradually increasing, and it’s because of the reasons Gary described. A lot of steps in the process are becoming more complex and require more equipment, and we see that. And then when we think about China and ICAPS specifically, in the past, there’s been a lot of reuse of existing fabs and existing process tools. And that allowed for a low intensity. And that’s not been what’s happening in the past few years and with recent additions. We’ve talked about the number of factory projects that we see. So as capacity gets added, even in the ICAPS space, what you see is an intensity level that’s more like what we were experiencing on the leading-edge just a few years ago. And that’s also serving to raise the overall average of intensity. So we’re pretty confident that intensity will continue to rise.

Gary Dickerson : Tim, on the — relative to ICAPS, just reminding people that there was a time period where you had a lot of movement of business to foundries. And during that time period, there were many factories and tools that came on the market, all of that stuff is gone. So that’s what Brice was referring to relative to ICAPS capital intensities. And then if you look at all of the — I went through a list of key inflections technology inflections for customers and I gave some color around wiring and the number of steps that are increasing. That’s what we’re seeing really in all of the different segments of the business. So I think that capital intensity is probably the right ZIP code if we look through 2030.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Joseph Moore with Morgan Stanley.

Joseph Moore: Great. I wonder if you could talk about the environment in China with the multinationals. Obviously, they need to get a license, they did immediately get a license, but it’s a 12-month license. So would you say that you generally see the footprint moving away from China with those multinational customers? Do you see any potential for that to become an issue down the road? Can you just talk generally to the fact that the multinationals were included in this?