KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

KLA Corporation (NASDAQ:KLAC) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript January 25, 2024

KLA Corporation beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $6.16, expectations were $5.88. KLAC isn’t one of the 30 most popular stocks among hedge funds at the end of the third quarter (see the details here).

Operator: Good afternoon. My name is Chelsea, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the KLA Corporation December Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. All participant lines have been placed in a listen-only mode to prevent any background noise. After the speaker’s remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you.

Kevin Kessel: Thank you for joining the earnings call to discuss the December 2023 results and the March quarter outlook. I’m joined by our CEO, Rick Wallace, and our CFO, Bren Higgins. We will discuss today’s results release after the market close and available on our IR website, along with supplemental materials. Today’s discussion is presented on a non-GAAP financial basis, unless otherwise specified. Our full year references all relate to calendar years. A detailed reconciliation of non-GAAP — of GAAP to non-GAAP results in the earnings material posted on our website. KLA’s IR website also contains future investor events as well as presentations, corporate governance information and links to our SEC filings, including our most recent annual report and quarterly reports on 10-Q and 10-K.

Our comments today are subject to risks and uncertainties reflected in the risk factor disclosure in our SEC filings. Any forward-looking statements, including those we make on the call today are subject to those risks, and KLA cannot guarantee those forward-looking statements will come true. Our actual results may differ significantly from those projected in our forward-looking statements. Rick will begin the call with some comments and quarterly highlights. Bren will conclude with our financial highlights, including our guidance and outlook. I will now turn the call over to our CEO, Rick Wallace. Rick?

Richard Wallace: Thank you, Kevin. I will briefly summarize KLA’s performance for 2023 calendar year and December quarter and then set up our view for 2024. For 2023 KLA revenue was almost $9.7 billion, down 8% versus the prior year. This was higher than our expectations coming into the year as strength from legacy node customers and semiconductor infrastructure offset weaker than expected leading edge investments in both logic and memory. While overall WFE spending was down for the year, there were areas of growth in the KLA business segments, including the infrastructure business supporting wafer and mass manufacturers, automotive and specialty semiconductor process equipment. KLA’s service business grew 7% to $2.2 billion for the year.

The company continued to deliver strong industry leading margins, with non-GAAP gross margins of 62% and a non-GAAP operating margin of 39%. Free cash flow grew 6% in 2023 to a record $3.2 billion. Moving to KLA’s December quarter results, which were ahead of expectations as revenue grew 4% sequentially to $2.49 billion. Quarterly non-GAAP net income was $839 million. GAAP diluted earnings per share was $4.28 and non-GAAP diluted EPS was $6.16. We saw sequential growth in all three of KLA’s business segments. You can find specific details in our shareholder letter released earlier today. Additional highlights in the quarter include growing adoption for KLA’s 8900 Series platform for high throughput macro inspection, increased demand in the legacy node and advanced packaging categories made the platform one of the best performing product lines in our optical inspection portfolio in 2023.

Continued growth in AI enables KLA’s differentiation and helps drive industry growth. We continue to deploy deep learning and physics based algorithms across KLA’s inspection and metrology product portfolio. This has improved signal and noise recognition and reduced process learning cycles as customers resolve critical yield challenges. KLA Service business grew 1% on a sequential quarterly basis to $565 million and remained on track to resume the targeted 12% to 14% annual revenue growth trajectory in calendar 2024. As we look at CY ’24, I’m encouraged by recent reports from many of our customers that the demand environment is expected to continue to gradually improve throughout the calendar year. Through collaboration with customers, KLA is focused on preparing our teams for a return to growth as the leading edge and leveraging the KLA operating model to ensure readiness to support our customers’ needs as the demand environment improves.

In the near term, we see the March quarter at the low point for the year, we expect business levels to improve as we progress throughout the year. The KLA team will, as always, prioritize commitments to our customers and executing on our product growth apps. I’ll now hand the call over to Bren to provide more specifics around the financials and our guidance.

Bren Higgins: Thanks, Rick. Our results demonstrated the consistent execution of our global team. Despite the challenges and complexity of the current industry environment, KLA continues to show resourcefulness and the ability to adapt to meeting customers’ changing and fluid requirements. Revenue was $2.49 billion, slightly above the guidance midpoint of $2.45 billion. Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $6.16, above the midpoint of the guided range of $5.26 to $6.46. GAAP diluted EPS was $4.28. GAAP EPS was negatively impacted by $1.59 for goodwill and purchased intangible asset impairment charge. Non-GAAP gross margin was 62.6%, just above the high end of the guidance range of 60.5% to 62.5%. Non-GAAP operating margin was 40.7%. Quarterly non-GAAP net income was $839 million, GAAP net income was $583 million.

Cash flow from operations was $622 million and free cash flow was $545 million. As I just mentioned, during the quarter, KLA recognized a goodwill and purchased intangible asset impairment charge of $219 million for the PCB and display reporting unit attributed to a weaker long term outlook, primarily for the flat panel display business. We have begun investigating strategic alternatives for this business, which accounted for 1.4% of total revenue in calendar 2023. The breakdown of revenue by reportable segments and end markets and major products and regions can be found within the shareholder letter and slides. Turning to the balance sheet. KLA ended the quarter with $3.3 billion in total cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities, debt of $5.95 billion and a flexible and attractive bond maturity profile supported by strong investment grade ratings from all three agencies.

In December 2023, Fitch rating upgraded KLA’s debt rating to A from A- with a stable outlook. Moving to our outlook. Looking ahead to calendar 2024, the exact timing of a meaningful and sustainable resumption in WFE investment growth continues to remain uncertain. Though there are signs of improvements in some end markets, this improvement is off low levels, impacting our customers’ profitability and cash flow generation in the near term. KLA’s overall demand is stabilizing around current business levels, plus or minus the guidance ranges. As of now, this translates into KLA revenue bottoming in the March quarter, driven mostly by a customer project delay occurring in the last couple of months. Based on current fast schedules in our June quarter shipment plan, we expect sequential growth to return in the June quarter and continue for the remainder of the calendar year.

For calendar 2024, we currently expect WFE demand to be in the mid to high $8 billion. roughly flat to modestly up from the anticipated level in calendar year 2023. We expect that the second half of the calendar year will be stronger than the first half for WFE investment. This WFE estimate reflects our current top down assessment of industry demand as follows: In memory, we expect WFE investment to be slightly up from low levels with investments focused on high bandwidth memory capacity and leading edge node development. Both NAND and DRAM fabs are still a low utilization levels as consumer markets have not yet returned to the growth levels needed to bring factory utilization back to the high levels seen in recent years. Once customers consume this excess capacity and focus on node migration, we would expect to see new investments.

Foundry logic is expected to be slightly up with leading edge investment returning to modest growth levels, Legacy investment declining versus 2023, and China legacy node investments remaining relatively flattish to current levels. As for guidance, KLA’s March quarter guidance is as follows: Revenue is expected to be $2.3 billion, plus or minus $125 million. Foundry Logic is forecasted to be approximately 60%, and memory is expected to be 40% of semi process control systems revenue. Within memory, DRAM is expected to be about 85% of the segment mix and NAND the remaining 15%. Non-GAAP gross margin is forecasted to be in a range of 61.5% plus or minus 1 percentage point as product mix weakens quarter-to-quarter due to lower overall semiconductor process control systems revenue.

For calendar 2024, based on current industry outlook, top line growth expectations, higher forecasted growth in services and expected systems product mix, we are modeling gross margins to be relatively stable around the mid 61% range to what we delivered in 2023. Variability quarter-to-quarter is typically driven by product mix fluctuations. Operating expenses are forecasted in the March quarter to be approximately $545 million, relatively flat with the December quarter. Our calendar 2024 operating expenses, we expect $5 million to $10 million incremental growth per quarter beyond the March quarter, in line with expected sequential growth in revenue. Prototype material purchases can drive variability quarter-to-quarter. For the calendar ’24 tax rate based on current forecast, we do not expect material changes.

You should continue using the 13.5% effective rate for modeling purposes. Other model assumptions for the March quarter include other income and expense net of approximately $45 million. GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be $4.93 plus or minus $0.60. A non-GAAP diluted EPS of $5.26 plus or minus $0.60. EPS guidance is based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 135.6 million shares. In conclusion, we are optimistic that most end markets are showing signs of improvement. KLA will remain focused on supporting customers, executing on our product road map and positioning the company for a return of growth at the leading edge. The visibility into the precise timing of a sustainable demand recovery is still unclear, KLA is running the business to ensure delivery of a differentiated product portfolio that meets customers’ technology road map requirements and to execute our business in line with our longer-term growth expectations.

The KLA operating model guiding best-in-class execution, KLA continues to implement strategic objectives, which are geared to drive outperformance. With a focus on customer success, delivering innovative and differentiated solutions and operational excellence, KLA is able to deliver industry-leading financial and free cash flow performance and return capital consistently. The past few years have strengthened our confidence in the increasing importance of process control and enabling technology advancements and optimizing yield at a high design mix volume production environment. This bodes well for KLA’s long-term growth outlook despite still challenging near-term demand trends. In the meantime, KLA business continues to stabilize and the long-term secular trends driving semiconductor industry demand and investments in WFE remain very compelling.

That concludes the prepared remarks. Kevin, let’s begin the Q&A.

Kevin Kessel: Thanks, Bren. Chelsea, if you can just give the instructions and set up the queue.

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Q&A Session

Operator: [Operator Instructions] We’ll take our first question from Harlan Sur with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Harlan Sur: Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. It looks like relative to your prior view, the March quarter came in lower by roughly about $200 million. I know you talked about a customer project delay that materialized just over the last couple of months. It looks like based on your December quarter end market mix and expected March quarter mix that it’s a Foundry Logic customer. Was that a leading edge or mature node customer, was the delay more technology-related or just weak demand trends? And does the sequential growth outlook beyond March assume that this customer comes back this year?

Bren Higgins: Hey, Harlan. It’s Bren. So yes, as we said in the prepared remarks over the last couple of months, we had a project that we were planning to ship roughly a couple of hundred million dollars of business too, that had a pushout that’s extended, I think, somewhere around 12 months. So could we see it at the end of ’24, maybe could be early ’25 as well. So it was more leading edge centric. And as a result of that, as we backfill that business with other business, we did see the percent of China go up a little bit higher than we had thought we would see when we were giving guidance at the beginning of the quarter. So it was late in the quarter, obviously affected — it didn’t affect Q4 because of the moving around of other customers and slots, but certainly had an effect on Q1.

As we think about sequential improvement into the June quarter, we also have, part of our revenue recognition policy is that when we ship to new customers, we have to go to acceptance to demonstrate that we can — that our tools are meeting specifications around reliability and matching and so forth. And there are some shipments that we shipped at the end of Q4, and we’re shipping it in the March quarter that are aligned with a couple of projects for new customers for the fats are opening late in the quarter. So our ability to get those acceptances and complete that process could be potentially constrained. So we’ll see that revenue shift into the June quarter once you get the established performance, then that revenue happens at shipment going forward with that customer.

But we do have some unique dynamics that are affecting us here in the first half. So it does give me some comfort about the sequential growth guidance as we move into June. But it is affecting what we ultimately guided for the March quarter, consistent with our revenue recognition policy.

Harlan Sur: No, I appreciate the insights there. Your total Process Control Systems business outgrow WFE yet again, right, in calendar ’23. Within that, Inspection significantly outperformed, right? It was only down 5%, but your patterning business was down almost 20%, which is actually worse versus WFE. And let’s say, most of that full year underperformance was due to the sharp drop-off in patterning just in the December quarter. So was that tied to the customer pushout dynamics, as you mentioned or is it just the lumpy shipment trends in patterning? And I guess, do you guys expect Process Control Systems business to outgrow WFE this year?

Richard Wallace: Yeah. Great question, Harlan. I think if you think about our business and the composition and how it moves with customers, Inspection, especially the leading edge Inspection is much more tied to development of new technology, whether it’s in pilot or even ramp. And some of the metrology business is more tied to capacity. So when you see a falloff of capacity, it impacts metrology more than it would impact Inspection and that’s what we saw in ’23.

Bren Higgins: Hey, Harlan. It’s Bren. On the relative performance, we do feel pretty good about the performance overall when you think about how much legacy business was in the year and how the leading edge fell off, which typically drives higher process control intensity. Also in WFE this year was a little unique in that there was a lot of carryover WFE from 2022 for a number of peers. And so that showed up in ’23, it was really activity that we started in 2022. So when you take into account those factors and look at how well we performed in ’22 relative to the overall market, we were — our growth rate was 4x what the market was. The fact that we’re mostly, I think, in line, maybe a little bit better than the overall market in ’23 is I think, a pretty good indicator of the growing process control intensity that we’re excited about here KLA.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question will come from Joe Quatrochi with Wells Fargo.

Joe Quatrochi: Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to go back to the pushout. So just so I understand, if we were to adjust for the couple of hundred million that’s now pushed into the June quarter and assumed it was still in the March quarter, I guess, would you still expect that the June quarter would be up quarter-over-quarter or would it be more flattish like we were thinking or talking about last quarter of just the first half kind of still being a similar run rate of the business?

Bren Higgins: Yeah. I think it’s more the latter, right? We’ve — obviously, you’ve got a lot of moving parts in how it affects the quarters. But as we had talked about last quarter, we saw the business generally continuing at guided level. We guided with [indiscernible] right? We ended about performing by $40 million or so. So it would have been probably flattish, more or less. But this adjustment coming out obviously has the kind of impact, and I sized it earlier. So flattish, and then we would expect to see the second half start to improve a little bit.