KLAC

Good afternoon. My name is Leo, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the KLA Corporation March quarter 2026 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. If you would like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press star two. Please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Lastly, if you should need operator assistance, please press star zero. Thank you. I will now turn the call over to Kevin Kessel, Vice President of Investor Relations and Market Analytics. Please go ahead.

Welcome to the March 2026 quarterly earnings call for KLA. I'm joined by our CEO, Rick Wallace, and CFO, Bren Higgins. We will discuss today's results as well as our outlook, which we released after the market close and is available on our website along with supplemental materials. We are presenting today's discussion and metrics on a non-GAAP financial basis, unless otherwise specified. We will not reference fiscal years in our discussion. All full year references we make refer to calendar years. The earnings material contain a detailed reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP results. KLA's IR website also contains future events, presentations, corporate governance information, and links to our SEC filings. Our comments today are subject to risks and uncertainties reflected in the disclosure of risk factors in our SEC filing.

Any forward-looking statements, including those we make on the call today, are also 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. We will begin the call with Rick providing commentary on the business environment in our quarter, followed by Bren with financial highlights and our outlook. Now, over to Rick.

Thanks, Kevin. KLA delivered strong results across the board for the March quarter, with revenue of $3.415 billion, up 4% sequentially, and 11% year-over-year, driven by increased investment in leading-edge Foundry Logic and High-Bandwidth Memory. Non-GAAP diluted EPS was $9.40, and GAAP diluted EPS was $9.12. We continue to see AI as a core driver of KLA's performance and an enabler for our growing momentum. Highlights in the quarter include KLA achieving the number one position in Process Control for Advanced Wafer-Level Packaging for 2025 due to continued customer adoption of KLA's packaging portfolio.

We continue to see improving momentum in advanced packaging revenue growth and market share. We now expect semiconductor process control product portfolio revenue for advanced packaging will grow from approximately $635 million in 2025 to approximately $1 billion in 2026, well above our prior estimates. KLA's service business was $775 million in the March quarter, up 16% year-over-year, but down 1% sequentially due to the timing of revenue recognition. Consistent long-term growth in service is a key aspect of KLA's business model and delivers predictable cash flow to anchor our capital return strategy. Quarterly free cash flow was $622 million. Over the past 12 months, free cash flow was $4 billion, producing a free cash flow margin of 31%.

Total capital return in the March quarter was $875 million, comprised of $626 million in share repurchases and $249 million in dividends. Total capital return over the past 12 months was $3.2 billion. Additionally, recently published industry research shows KLA increased its global share of both the overall wafer equipment and the Process Control market in 2025. This growing market leadership was highlighted by significant gains in Advanced Wafer-Level Packaging, where KLA increased its market share by 14 percentage points and achieved approximately 70% year-over-year revenue growth. KLA's market share also improved across Mask Inspection, Optical Patterned Wafer Inspection, and Electron Beam Inspection. Since 2021, KLA's share of Process Control has grown by 360 basis points and is approximately 7x greater than the nearest competitor.

Looking ahead to 2026 and 2027, our expectations for growth in the wafer equipment industry are accelerating. KLA's relevance has increased across all vectors of semiconductor manufacturing as process control enables a growing volume of design starts at the leading edge and supports the needs for increased performance and reliability in the production of High-Bandwidth Memory. It's important to distinguish that design activity and rising memory complexity are not the only catalyst driving benefits for KLA and process control. Faster product cycles, higher value wafers and masks, rising design complexity and variability, and the growing demand and complexity of advanced packaging all require significantly more process control solutions. These solutions shorten time to results by addressing process integration challenges in R&D and early fab ramp phases while continuing to manage yields with strong design mix and high volume manufacturing.

Turning to services, as KLA systems become more technologically advanced and have longer service lifetimes in fabs, our service business continues to gain strategic importance, driven by rising customer expectations for tool performance and availability across all customer segments, creating a strong, predictable, long-term tailwind for overall KLA revenue growth. KLA also recently held an investor day in March, detailing our position in the semiconductor market and our unique portfolio approach to solving customer process challenges and enhancing yield learning cycles within Process Control. We introduced new long-term revenue growth targets along with a 2030 financial model and increased our capital allocation to target over 90% of free cash flow. We also announced the 17th consecutive increase in our quarterly dividend level and an incremental $7 billion share repurchase authorization.

KLA revised up 13%-17% revenue CAGR objective through 2030, reflects strong growth across our key business segments and includes an increased long-term services revenue CAGR growth model of approximately 13%-15%. Our long-term model assumes a baseline semiconductor industry growth CAGR of 11% from 2025 to 2030, and the wafer equipment market growing 1% faster than the semiconductor industry to $215 billion ±$20 billion by 2030. Given the growing relevance of process control across all customer segments, we expect KLA to continue to outperform the wafer equipment market on the top line, driving operating leverage, and continuing to deliver our best-in-class financial model. I'll close my remarks by saying that KLA's sustainable outperformance reinforces the strength of our leadership in process control.

It also underscores the critical role KLA's suite of products and services play in enabling AI-fueled growth in the semiconductor industry. Our consistent execution reflects the resilience of the KLA operating model, the talent of our global team, and our disciplined approach to capital allocation focused on long-term investment and maximizing total shareholder value. With that, I'll turn the call over to Bren to discuss the quarter's financial highlights.

Thanks, Rick. KLA's March quarter results reflect strong year-over-year growth with an industry-leading margin profile, highlighting our market leadership, consistent execution, and the dedication of our global teams in meeting customer commitments. Revenue was $3.415 billion, above the guided midpoint of $3.35 billion. non-GAAP diluted EPS was $9.40, and GAAP diluted EPS was $9.12, each above the midpoint of the respective guidance ranges. Gross margin was 62.2%, 45 basis points above the midpoint of guidance, driven by better-than-modeled service business mix and manufacturing scale due to higher business volume. Operating expenses were $670 million and included $389 million in R&D and $281 million in SG&A. Operating expenses were higher than expected, principally due to prototype materials timing and other reserve adjustments.

Operating margin was 42.6%. Other income expense net was $9 million in income. The variance relative to guidance was due to a significant mark-to-market gain of a strategic supply investment. The quarterly effective tax rate was 15.4%. At the guided tax rate of 14.5%, non-GAAP earnings per share would have been $0.10 higher, or $9.50. Breakdown of revenue by reportable segments and end markets, major products and regions can be found within the shareholder letter and slides. Moving to the balance sheet, KLA ended the quarter with $5 billion in total cash equivalents, and marketable securities, and debt of $5.95 billion. The company has a flexible and attractive bond maturity profile supported by investment-grade ratings from all three major rating agencies.

KLA generates consistent, strong free cash flow driven by our high-performing operating model. Over the past five calendar years, free cash flow has grown at approximately 20% CAGR, above the revenue CAGR of 16% over the same period. This growth, coupled with resilience across business cycles, enables a comprehensive capital return strategy featuring double-digit dividend growth and share repurchases to support long-term shareholder value creation. This strategy prioritizes predictable, assertive capital deployment and remains an important differentiator of the KLA investment thesis. Turning to the industry outlook for 2026, which continues to strengthen across all segments. We expect the wafer equipment market, which includes advanced packaging, to exceed $140 billion in 2026.

The strength of demand and customer engagement in ensuring KLA has the capacity to support numerous new fab projects currently under construction has led to unprecedented demand visibility from our customers. While normally we would not comment on 2027 growth rates in April of 2026, this demand environment gives us confidence in 2027 visibility for the wafer equipment market. Today, we expect the 2027 year-over-year growth rate to be higher than our growth rate expectations for 2026. KLA has strong business momentum, expanding market share, and higher process control intensity at the leading edge across all segments. Given all this, we are well-positioned to continue to increase our share of the overall market in 2026 and 2027. The strong customer momentum that we are experiencing is reflected in our growing systems backlog and sales funnel.

We continue to expect quarter-to-quarter revenue growth throughout 2026 and strong business momentum leading into 2027. For 2026, we expect sequential revenue growth for the company to accelerate, leading to high teen revenue growth year-over-year and the Semiconductor Process Control systems business to grow over 20%. KLA's June quarter guidance is for revenue of $3.575 billion, ±$200 million. Foundry logic revenue from semiconductor customers is forecasted to increase to approximately 82%, and memory is expected to be approximately 18% of Semiconductor Process Control systems revenue to semiconductor customers. In memory, DRAM is expected to account for roughly 84%, with NAND accounting for the remaining 16%. As always, these business mix approximations pertain solely to our semiconductor customers and do not fully reflect our total Semiconductor Process Control systems revenue.

Gross margin for the quarter is forecasted to be 61.75% ±1 percentage point. Although volume levels are up quarter-to-quarter, product mix is modestly weaker than in the March quarter. As discussed last quarter, the guidance also includes the persistent impact of elevated DRAM chip costs for the company's image processing computers that ship with our systems, creating a headwind to the company's gross margins. While the memory pricing environment remains challenging in the near term, we have secured the required supply to meet our build plan requirements. Our view of elevated memory pricing persisting through at least calendar 2026 is unchanged, and we continue to see a roughly 100 basis point negative impact on our gross margin over the next several quarters.

Considering this impact, the tariff environment, along with product mix and volume expectations, our view of gross margins remains unchanged at approximately 62%± 50 basis points in calendar 2026. Operating expenses are forecasted to be approximately $665 million in the June quarter. For 2026, we will continue to prioritize next-generation product development and company infrastructure investments to support expected revenue growth over the next several years, and we anticipate these expenses to grow by roughly $15 million sequentially throughout the calendar year. Our business model is designed to deliver 40%-50% incremental operating margin leverage on revenue growth over the long run. Other model assumptions include other income and expense net of an approximately $25 million expense for the June quarter, and we expect it to remain at approximately this quarterly level for the calendar year.

The planning tax rate is 14.5%. As always, we expect some quarter-to-quarter tax rate variance due to discrete items as we move throughout the year. For the June quarter, non-GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be $9.87 ±$1, and GAAP diluted EPS is expected to be $9.66 ±$1. EPS guidance is based on a fully diluted share count of approximately 131.4 million shares. In conclusion, our near-term revenue guidance reflects consistent growth and strong profitability. We expect our Semiconductor Process Control systems business to outperform the wafer equipment market in 2026, driven by rising process control intensity and growth in advanced packaging.

KLA continues to focus on delivering a differentiated product portfolio that supports customers' technology roadmaps and production efficiency, driving our long-term relevance and growth expectations. KLA operating model drives our best-in-class execution. Our focus on customer success, innovative solutions, and operational excellence enables industry-leading financial performance and consistent, predictable capital returns. As we detailed at our March Investor Day, KLA's business is uniquely positioned to capitalize on today's technology inflection points and growth drivers. We are encouraged by strengthening customer confidence and engagement, which informs our business forecast. The long-term secular trends driving semiconductor industry demand and investments in wafer equipment are compelling and represent a relative performance opportunity for KLA over the next several years.

KLA's business has gone from being primarily indexed to leading-edge R&D investment and fab capacity ramps to now addressing all growth phases in wafer equipment, enabling leading-edge process development, tying the results in fab capacity ramps, and optimizing yield in a high-volume manufacturing environment. In addition, the growing investment in custom silicon, particularly among hyperscalers developing their own custom chips, have led to a proliferation of new higher-value design starts and increased demand on our customers to deliver performance, volume, and time to market.

As design mix and complexity grows, so does the need for process control. As a result, KLA is seeing consistent growth in process control intensity as each new chip design requires rigorous inspection, metrology, and yield optimization solutions. KLA is uniquely positioned to benefit from these trends as we expand our market leadership and deliver differentiated value to our customers. That concludes our prepared remarks. Kevin, please begin the Q&A.

Thank you, Bren Higgins. Operator, can you please provide instructions and then begin the Q&A session?

Certainly, at this time if you would like to ask a question, please press star one. If you wish to remove yourself from the queue, you may do so by pressing star two. We remind you to please unmute your line when introduced and if possible pick up your handset for optimal quality. In the interest of time we ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. We'll now take our first question from C.J. Muse with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Yeah, good afternoon. Thank you for taking the question. I guess first question, would love to dig a little bit deeper in terms of your extended lead times and visibility into 2027. Can you kind of speak to, you know, where in the portfolio, kind of what in the end markets, and you know, how? How you kind of see that progressing, perhaps, you know, soon having visibility into 2028?

Yeah, C.J. Muse, thanks for the question. It's really broad-based. Certainly we're seeing backlogs build, order flow is very high. Customer engagement as we talk about slot planning into next year is also very strong. I think when you take that, couple it with now we're working really hard here to make sure that we can enable the capacity to meet our customer timelines, but most of our focus and discussion is on how do we address the opportunities in 2027, lots of new greenfield opportunities. Yeah, I think customers wanna make sure that they're in the queue to align with their construction schedules. I think it's pretty broad-based across our product portfolio. Certainly most of it is more leading-edge centric, so it's the most advanced products in the product families.

Yeah, just to build on that, C.J. Muse, the conversations I've had with customers in the last few months, there's a higher level of urgency around securing capacity for our customers that I can remember seeing. I think it's indicative and speaks to the demand that they're feeling from their customers. There's a huge amount of interest and push to make sure that they can get slots assigned. I think the other realization they all have is that they're not alone in doing this. The whole industry is trying to support that growth as we go forward. There's no question 2027's gonna be a massive buildup.

Perfect, maybe as a quick follow-up, I guess as you think about the sequential going to the high teens in the second half, should we be thinking about kind of $14.9 billion, $15 billion as the right framework for calendar 2026 revenues?

Yeah, I think so. If you just take the commentary, you know, getting to the high teens, it gets you into the 15-ish range. I think when you look at the second half and, you know, we'll call it, you know, 15%-20% type second half sequential growth over or growth over the first half, it puts you up into that ballpark. I think you're thinking about it the right way.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll move on now to Stacy Rasgon with Bernstein Research. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys. thanks for taking my questions. You know, at the analyst day you talked about a 2030 model which had $215 billion WFE and, like, $1.4 billion in semis. I mean, it looking increasingly likely that we might get to those kinds of levels like this year or next year. I guess maybe could you talk a little bit more about the underlying assumptions for that long-term model? You know, maybe it's a little craft to ask, but, like, why isn't it higher given where we're sitting right now and what you guys are seeing?

Hi, Stacy. Great question. I think a couple things are driving the increased revenue. I think that the number you're referring to that might be closer to what we talked about for 2030 is the semi revenue number, not the equipment number. The reason the semi revenue is going higher faster is pricing. There's been more elasticity, especially around memory in that pricing that's driven that number up.

When we talk about 2030, we talk about a normalized level of capital intensity associated with the revenue that we said would be in the range of 1.3%-1.5%. If we had to redo that today, there are a lot of reasons why you would push that up from that. As you know, that was six weeks ago. Things have changed. I think the numbers around equipment haven't moved nearly as fast as the numbers around semi revenue associated with pricing. Does that help?

Yeah, that actually does help. I guess just for a quick follow-up, you know, there's been some news flow. Apologize if you've maybe mentioned this on the call or not, but there's a news flow about bans for Huawei. I guess, is there any implication of that on you? Just I guess, how are you thinking overall about the China trajectory as we go forward from here? Has your thinking there changed at all?

We got the letter. I'm not gonna say too much about it other than we're still looking at it. The impact on the company in terms of our Q2 guidance and the commentary around 2026, I would say is fairly immaterial. It's focused on not all affiliated fabs. There, the impact I would say is fairly immaterial and contemplated in the guidance we provided.

Broader thoughts on China?

I'm sorry, what's the?

I'm sorry, broad, broader thoughts on China?

I didn't hear you.

Broader thoughts on China?

Broader thoughts. Yeah, I think when you look at China overall, it's playing out more or less consistent with the way we've talked about it. I think if you look at overall spending in China, it's, you know, more or less flat, maybe a little bit up. It's been fairly flat in terms of spending levels over the last few years. What's driving our business is what's happening at the leading edge. I would expect that the China growth rate is probably lower than where the overall WFE growth rate is projected to be here moving forward.

Got it. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. We'll move next to Harlan Sur with JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Good afternoon, and thanks for taking my question. On your 2026 WFE better outlook, now $140 billion+, so kind of high teens percentage type of growth outlook. On the incremental upside this year, is it being driven by new brick-and-mortar sort of greenfield programs being pulled forward or our customers just accelerating technology migrations on existing capacity or maybe focusing on improving yields on existing capacity? Any color there? Then for 2027, now you're saying WFE will go faster than 2026 versus your prior view of in line to better. Looking at your order book, is that a continuation of the broad-based spending growth across segments, foundry logic, memory, advanced packaging, or is there a particular segment that is driving the strong growth? Any color there would be helpful as well.

Yeah. I think around the 2026 view, just the urgency from customers to take slots or take deliveries, as we have moved here into better visibility into the second half, we're seeing nothing more than just general urgency across different segments with our customer base, and that's caused us to increment the views of industry growth upward. If you look at 2027, obviously you've got a lot of new fab projects, a lot of greenfield activity, both on the logic side and memory. I think you'll also see some greenfield activity in flash. And packaging will grow also. I think it's really pretty broad-based across all our different customer segments.

I appreciate that. Your services business grew 15% last year with an exit run rate of about 18%. That strong growth carried into the March quarter with 16% year-over-year growth. You guys just outlined the forward key guidance at Analyst Day of 13%-15% growth, right? Just in the current environment, just given the very high customer utilizations, more advanced services offerings, obviously lots of focus on driving as much output and yield per fab as possible, how should we think about the services growth profile this year?

I think the service will be in the range as we move across this year. Obviously, a lot of the shipments that we're shipping this year will start to flow into service as you move into next year and beyond. I think that's an accelerant to, we'll call, higher end of the range growth opportunities as we move over the next couple of years. More or less, we're trending in service in line with in line with the target range. We would expect to be within it.

Perfect. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll move on to Krish Sankar with TD Cowen. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Question. The first one, I think, Rick or Bren, I think the visibility angle is pretty interesting. How much of that is really driven by true demand, like the customers giving visibility in 2027 and even maybe into 2028, versus trying to ensure that you have enough capacity or even personnel who needs to be trained and service the tools. So how much of that do you think is actually true demand versus prepping you up for what could be potential demand? Then I have a follow-up.

I'm sorry. It's a little hard to hear. The question is the demand real? Is that the question, or do we think we're getting orders in anticipation of shortages? Is that your question?

No, no. I was just wondering how much of it is actually true demand versus customers making sure that there's enough capacity and service personnel, et cetera, people who can, like, you know, run the tools, et cetera.

Well, look, I think our customers, given these are significant investments that are gonna open these fabs. I mean, part of the discussions are not only around tools and tool delivery timing, but also in our support resources, our installation resources, applications, which are people that are out there working with our customers to drive value out of the tools, that the service teams are there to support. It's really across the company that we're in position to support what they expect to be, you know, pretty significant ramp in terms of business activities as those fabs come up to higher levels of productivity.

Got it. Thank you for that. A quick follow-up. It seems like some of the incremental WFE demand this year is coming from the CPU tightness. Intel last week spoke about incremental CPU capacity coming from Intel 3 and Intel 7, which are prior nodes where I believe the yield issues have already been solved. Will the incremental CPU demand actually benefit KLA or not as much?

Certainly, it's something we've talked about over the last year is that we're encouraged by is the broadening of investment at the leading edge and near leading edge. That has been, I think, good for KLA. Our collaboration levels are very high with our customers. If you look at, you know, the easiest way to drive efficiency out of existing install base is to drive yield. That plays to KLA's ability to help drive learning cycles and drive yield in a high volume manufacturing environment. I think we're well-positioned. We're encouraged by the engagement levels really across the install base. The broader participation, I think, lends itself to a pretty robust leading edge environment as we go forward.

Thanks, Bren Higgins.

Thank you. We'll move on now to Joe Quattrocchi with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Yeah, thanks for taking the question. Maybe just to follow up on that. You know, I guess, like, when we think about your customers trying to obviously drive higher yield to drive higher output, is that a bigger driver for potential incremental, like, Process Control system sales for you, or is it largely flowing through the service line?

It absolutely drives process control sales. It drives both, but the process control, especially if they're dealing with fabs that are already up but don't have a particularly high yield, and if they've changed die size. That's the challenge I think that they're dealing with when they're trying to put out more capability to support AI. I think that's a different fact that's driving a lot of the activity around process control. You even heard, I mean, Intel was public about increasing their metrology usage, as you heard on their call. We're definitely seeing in general, because there's a shortage in the industry, the easiest lever anyone can use is to get more yield out of the existing capacity that they have.

Even the leaders have gone back to prior nodes and added process control because they recognize that's a faster way to get more yield. That's far less true in historical cycles when they're meeting demand. Once you see utilizations go way up on leading edge, the only lever you have left, you can build new fabs, but the thing you can do before that is try to squeeze out more yield.

I think one of the other benefits we see is as the product types change that our customers are shipping, serving different parts of the market, that the need for different capability arises. It might be different than how they originally set up the fab to run a different type of parts or different mix of parts. That tends to create opportunities for us because new and different capabilities required to support different, like, higher performance compute markets, for example.

That's really helpful. Maybe as a follow-up, I was wondering if you could maybe talk about, you know, your own lead times and just kind of thinking about your own supply chain and kind of, you know, I think last quarter you talked about maybe things being tight from a component standpoint in the first half of this year, and then really opening up in the second half. Obviously, yeah, I think you've increased your WFE guidance now a couple times. Just how do we think about KLA's capacity to support this ramp as we continue to increase into 2027?

Yeah. Thanks, Joe. I think the thing that surprised us was the slope and duration of how quickly the business started to ramp into the first half. That did put some constraints on our ability to scale from an overall supply chain capacity point of view in the first half of 2026. As we move into 2027 and some of the context we provided and some of my comments earlier around growth rate in the second half, I think we're much better positioned to support this ramp and support, you know, customer requirements. As we look at 2027, as I said earlier, our focus has been really to ensure that we have the capacity to support the different forecasts that are out there.

We feel pretty comfortable about the guidance we gave today and our ability to support that and then some. We always try to think about all the conceivable opportunities as we plan along our supply chain. There's a tremendous amount of focus across the company to ensure that we have that capacity to support what looks to be a very strong environment next year. As we said earlier, we're hiring a lot too. We need to make sure we've got our install resources, our service resources, to be able to support the tools after we ship them. Yeah. Joe, the folks in our operations service know that we're matching the urgency in providing capability to our customers that our customers are sharing with us.

This is a time, like I said, I've not seen this before, where there's such broad demand, such, you know, capacity at breakneck speed. We're working very hard to support that. Historically, we've always done it, but it's gonna take a lot of work.

Thank you.

Thank you. We'll move on now to Timothy Arcuri with UBS. Please go ahead.

Thanks a lot. Bren, I just wanted to come back to this idea that you're outgrowing WFE this year. You're guiding up sort of high teens. I think the general consensus among all the other companies is that WFE is growing like mid-twenties. Is it that you just think that WFE growth is too high? Maybe your baseline for WFE last year is more like $120 or something, actually you don't think WFE's up even high teens? Is that how you get to the concept that you're going to outgrow this year?

Well, yeah, I think that you're right. I think the baseline is about $120, and that aligns with where the various third parties. If you do kind of a consensus view of all the different forecasts that are out there, you end up somewhere more or less in that ballpark in terms of where 2025 growth rates were. If you look at the different relative performance of the different players, it does imply that, you know, that 2025 was pretty good year, greater than 10% growth. Look, from a baseline point of view, we see it at about $120 growing to about $140+, as we said, which translates into this, you know, we'll call it, you know, mid to high teen growth rate.

If you look at the semi PC business, as I said in the prepared remarks, we expected it to grow, our systems business to grow in excess of 20%. That aligns with our view of growth. As we talked about in Investor Day, we spent a lot of time trying to explain how we're defining the market. Everybody, of course, defines it in different ways, but we believe that the approach that we've taken, as I said, it lines up with third parties. I think there's a lot of opportunity out there that starts to span not just traditional WFE, but also in the advanced packaging parts of the market.

As our revenue inflect in that part of the market, we think it's appropriate if you're gonna measure yourself on share of market, that you got the numerator, but you also get the denominator right. That's how we see it, and that's that kind of informs the forecast that we have here.

Okay. got it. I guess just, Rick, I wanted to ask you about the push out of High NA, and just, like, what the puts and takes are for you. I mean, I can see on one hand you've got, like, 25%, 30% direct attach to litho, maybe that's a bad thing that is pushing out. On the other hand, there's gonna be some other, you know, offset. Things will get more complex and things like that, which, you know, obviously would actually help you. How do you weigh those puts and takes? Thanks.

Thanks, Jim. There's no change in the High-NA forecast from everything that we've modeled. It's exactly what we've modeled and started talking about a couple years ago. In that sense, this is what we were talking about when we put out the 2030 plan. High-NA has puts and takes, as you say. Ultimately, it's gonna be better if people are printing smaller geometries and the defectivity challenges are gonna be greater. It's also the case that, you know, that's not gonna happen until the economics support it. I'd say for us, it's a push. It's gonna happen. It's gonna extend the, you know, the timeline for which people can keep getting benefit out of process. That's good for the industry.

It is in our model. There was no change from our expectations. Jim, I think this attach rate to litho, historically, when scaling was driving the innovation and the Process roadmap, that was more true than it is today. Today, you have architecture changes. You have the nature of a high mixed design environment. We talk a lot about larger die and what that means in terms of defect density, the value of that die, and how that translates to how much you're willing to invest to ensure that those die are good and are performing at spec. Process and performance requirements are much more significant. There's a lot of drivers there for Process Control that's beyond just traditional litho scaling. Look, we need a litho scaling roadmap.

As Rick said, it's important. It's good for the industry, but it's not the only factor that drives a process control intensity. The 2 nm node has higher intensity than 3 nm node, and the amount of the EUV layers hasn't changed all that much from node to node. I think that gives you an indication that it's not the only factor that influences how customers invest in our products.

Okay. Thank you both.

Thank you. We'll move on now to Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could maybe address your expectations for the advanced packaging market, and your revenue growth there in calendar 2026. Maybe just kind of talk about how that's likely to kind of filter in as we go throughout the year.

Yeah, Jim. It's a pretty exciting part of our story. Of course, we spent a lot of time talking about how that market has moved to the need for more front-end like requirements and how well the KLA portfolio is positioned here. We talked about exceeding and being somewhere in the range of $1 billion in business in advanced packaging for our Semiconductor Process Control business this year, growing from about $635 million in 2025. One of the great things that we're starting to see also is as the packaging market has evolved and more nanometer level inspection is required, that the need for more precision and more capability from the tool sets.

As we look at 2026, we're actually seeing meaningful revenue increases across some of our more advanced systems, as we talked about that was gonna come, and we're starting to see that both in terms of CoWoS packaging, but also emerging SOIC packaging as die stack is happening, driving hybrid bonding requirements and so on. We're pretty excited about the growth in that part of the market for us. It's likely, you know, one of the top growing markets, certainly in overall packaging, and we expect it to continue to grow into next year.

Thanks. I was wondering if you could maybe provide a little bit of color, kind of given your extended sort of order book and higher visibility, can you see a way clear to a point in time in the future where you would expect the process control intensity to really step up and start to really materially outgrow the overall WFE envelope you're forecasting? Thank you.

Well, in the last five years, we gained 160-ish basis points of share, and that translated into about a 6.5% growth rate for KLA above the market baseline. If you go back to what we talked about at Investor Day, we thought we could gain another 150 basis points plus share of the overall wafer equipment market, and that translated into a 4.5% growth for the company over the market baseline if WFE grew up to 12%. So these are small increases, but on a pretty big base, and it translates into meaningful CAGR upside, relative to the overall market, and that's our plan that then feeds into our $26 billion target for 2030.

Thank you.

Thank you. We'll move on next to Charles Shi with Needham. Your line is open.

Thanks for taking my question. I have a question around some technology in metrology. There's a lot of discussion around X-ray versus optical for CD measurement in the front end, let's say in void detection, those kind of other stuff, in Hybrid Bonding type of advanced packaging. You know, Rick, I'm sure you're familiar with all of these, the discussion around the debate around optical versus e-beam, DUV versus Actinic. I think you've said that when you can use optical, customers will stay with the optical. Is this new debate around metrology, x-ray versus optical, you would have the same view, maybe optical will eventually win, or you have some other thoughts? I understand you do have a X-ray CT tool, but I wanna get your thoughts. Thanks.

Yeah. I think that the, you know, the history of inspection and measurement, and really the industry, is you move to the highest capability tool that can do the job, initially to debug it, and then you go to the cost of ownership play. Whatever can do the job in most efficient. We talked about the roll-off, for example, in our wafer inspection portfolio, where you might debug a process at a very high level of, you know, say, E-beam during characterization along with high-end optical. If you can possibly go to higher throughput, lower cost, you do. The case of X-ray is interesting because in some ways, when we introduced Axion a few years ago, that was a product that was really solving a problem that could only be solved in failure analysis.

The challenge with that was getting the tech to work, getting adoption, and getting proof of concept with enough players that they would make the change. We've done that, but it took quite a while because the, you know, the industry is remarkably aggressive in new technology development, but slow in making changes in manufacturing, except for when it has to. I think the question is there capability that you can use and you can drive more with X-ray, and can you do it? The answer is, you might be able to do it, but the question is it something you can do in production?

You know, you can do it to debug the process, but if even in e-beam, you know, what we're seeing now with our portfolio is we might use our e-beam system coupled with our inspection system to tune that inspection system, but to offload as much as we can to higher throughput. I think there's a scenario in which you see that that's what happens with X-ray, as well. You'll wanna have the capability. The problem is always eventually is the cost. If it's something that is so out of control that the only way you can do it is with massive amounts of varied inspection metrology, and it's like very expensive, you're just not gonna do it and, you're gonna figure out another process.

I think the answer is, yeah, there's a lot of work going on, and there's people that are really focused on getting something to work, but that's different than what they'll use in volume production. As a company, we've always focused on the difference between the characterization, development phase, and what you can fan out.

When we laid out our 2030 plan, we obviously worked very closely with our customers on their packaging roadmaps, and what we anticipated was having capability across our portfolio to solve all the tool, you know, the needs they have, including in their development phase. I don't think you're gonna see a quick adoption of X-ray anytime soon. You know, those of us who have been around a while, you know, there was an X-ray lithography company 30 years ago. It's not like it's a new idea to leverage X-ray, it's just the cost and throughput is really challenging. I hope that helps.

Just to build on that, the market size, most of the adoption has been in memory, the market size has been roughly, I'll call it, you know, today it's about $75 million-$100 million. I'd say we have probably about, you know, call it a 60-ish% share of the overall market. I think as adoption starts to increase, as, you know, maybe more production opportunities become available, you could see that moving up into the, you know, $150 million range over the next few years.

The challenges of the productivity of the tool and how that then translates into volume production has, as Rick said, has been the biggest challenge and I think has affected how the pace of adoption for that technology.

Thanks. Maybe a quicker one as a second question. You gave that advanced packaging revenue outlook from $635 million-$1 billion. If I recall correctly, one quarter ago, you were basically calling advanced packaging, I mean, probably as like much lower growth. Feels like that was a upward revision to advanced packaging revenue outlook. May I ask what was the big upward revision about? I mean, it happened like just over six, 90 days, and what's changed from maybe a quarter ago?

Yeah. Yeah. We thought, a quarter ago, you know, we thought that the overall growth rate in process control advanced packaging was somewhere in excess of 30%. If you do the math on the numbers we've talked about, we're now in the upper 50% range in terms of growth. One thing about packaging, it's a shorter lead time business generally. There's clearly been, you know, momentum from a number of customers for additional capacity this year. We didn't have the visibility to it, you know, going into this calendar year. We see it growing more, I think it's going to be a little bit more of a second half dynamic in terms of half to half of that growth.

It, it has absolutely picked up over the last 90 days or so. I think, you know, the competitive positioning, the need for more capability, as I talked about earlier, are big drivers in it. Semiconductor Process Control growing in the range of $1 billion, up from about $635 million, which, you know, translates, as I said, into the high 50% range.

Thanks, Bren. Thanks, Rick.

Thank you. We'll move on now to Srini Pajjuri with RBC Capital Markets. Your line is open.

Thank you. I have a clarification. Sorry, I've been jumping between calls here. It looks like you're raising the WFE number to about $140billion, versus $135billion-$140billion at the Analyst Day. At the same time, your annual guidance, revenue guidance is still for high teens. I understand high teens can mean a lot of things. Just trying to see if I'm reading that correctly. If you can kind of give me some additional color on that'd be great.

Yeah. I think that, you know, we're talking about a pretty small adjustment from where we were about six weeks ago. We think it's $140 billion+, and I think that, as I said, I'm pretty comfortable with the guidance that we provided. I would say it probably translates into consistent with the stronger view of the industry that translates into probably a little bit stronger view of 2026 for KLA than we thought six weeks ago. Look, we've got, you know, nine months to go here, and we have a number of opportunities to provide an update to that forecast. We're pretty excited, and we'll see how the second half plays out in terms of opportunities to reduce the risk and increase our views of performance here for the year. I think that's.

Okay

As good as we can do for now.

Yeah. That's fair enough. Thank you. Then on the 2027, just a few clarifications, Bren Higgins. You're obviously guiding for high teens or better, seems like. I'm assuming WFE is at least growing in line, or maybe, you know, you continue to outperform WFE as you've been doing over the past few years. Just trying to understand, you know, the moving pieces there. I know you said it's fairly broad-based, can you maybe parse it out by, you know, end market, memory versus logic, you know, what you're seeing. Also, what's your base case assumption for China, WFE for next year? Thank you.

Yeah. I think that if you look at the greenfield opportunities, which I think is for DRAM, but also in the flash market, is that memory is probably a few percent higher than this year. If this year memory is, about, you know, we'll call it, you know, logic foundry is about 62% of the overall spend. I think it's probably closer to 60% more memory focused versus logic into next year. I don't think, you know, it's hard to say about, you know, China. We're a little ways away, but at least in terms of how we're modeling it, you know, our general view on China is that it grows at a slower rate than overall WFE.

We haven't seen it change much, at least in terms of KLA's business levels over the last couple of years. I would say that you'll see it more along those lines. It's more greenfield, less around technology upgrades, and so that drives a different dynamic. With the rising process control intensity that we're seeing in memory, we feel very good about how well we're positioned for that activity into next year.

Got it. Thanks, Bren Higgins.

As in foundry logic continues to be very broad-based, and legacy is pretty weak this year, I would think that legacy probably has some upside into next year. I don't wanna quantify that yet, though.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll move next to Shane Brett with Morgan Stanley. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Thank you for letting me ask a question. My first question is on margin. I wanna assume that your customers are likely fighting for KLA shipment slots at the moment. Just how should we think about your ability to take advantage of this demand via margin? I'm especially curious in the context of your memory customers, given you have seen a gross margin headwind due to higher DRAM pricing, shouldn't we be able to pass this cost on earlier than the historical one year pricing pass-through cycle? Thank you.

Shane. We don't price based on scarcity at KLA. Our pricing is based on cost of ownership improvements from one generation to the next. We're pretty disciplined about that, and that translates into terms of meeting our customers' view of incremental performance and incremental cost of ownership improvement. If you start to price based on different price changes in components, I would expect that your customers would want symmetry with that. That's not how we think about it at KLA. It's much more about the value that we offer, it's a value-based pricing and how we're able from product type to product type to deliver new capability at better cost of ownership to our customers.

I think we do a pretty good job around that at KLA, and this is a headwind around memory that we think ultimately will normalize out in the future. I don't think it's gonna be with us for a little while, but we feel pretty good about the supply that we have to be able to support the growth outlook we've talked about. As I talked about at Investor Day, I think it highlights why our new product introduction cadence is so important for KLA because it allows us to introduce new products, rethink how we're pricing that incremental value, how do we share it with customers as we move forward.

And, you know, the last thing you're gonna do is go to a customer in the middle of a transaction or middle of a, you know, a buy and change that pricing. It doesn't work that way. I think we're pretty good at, and feel pretty good about what we do.

Got it. Thank you. That's very clear. For my follow-up, this is more of a clarification, and it's on advanced packaging. I understand you see your business growing 30% in packaging, but your process peers are now also talking about 50%+ growth. Correct me if I'm wrong, does that mean that relative to your initial packaging guide of approximately $12 billion, that you disclosed in late January, we should be looking at closer to $13 billion or $14 billion for this year? Thank you.

Shane, so we're growing greater than in the high 50%, as we said in the prepared remarks, the shareholder letter and the question I answered earlier. The overall market is somewhere growing up in the range of about $13 billion, we think. That's approximately 30% growth in the overall market from 2025.

All right. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We'll move on now to Edward Yang with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Hey, Rick Wallace. Hey, Bren Higgins. Thanks for the time. Just following up on DRAM and the gross margin headwind. You mentioned having procured enough tips now. Is that through calendar year 2026 or possibly longer?

Longer. I feel very good about our supply situation going into, to support our build plans through next year.

Great. Second question's on AI CapEx assumptions. You know, a couple of hyperscalers reported tonight as well. Not a couple, a few. A couple have appeared to have come in a little light on CapEx tonight, Microsoft and Google, for the quarter. Meta and Amazon were a bit higher. We all appreciate those numbers can be lumpy quarter-to-quarter. You know, given sporadic market concerns around data center CapEx durability, can you bridge your updated 2026 WFE view of greater than $140 billion and your expectation of, you know, growth in 2027, to the underlying AI infrastructure assumptions? You know, put differently, what level of hyperscaler end customer AI CapEx do those WFE forecasts effectively require?

Yeah. When we talk and like I said, we've had all these conversations with customers recently about what is their expected demand and what kind of capacity are they bringing online. Recently, within the last two weeks, I've had those conversations both on the foundry logic side and on the memory side. They're still, with all these very aggressive plans through 2026 and 2027, they're not gonna close the gap. In some cases, the gap is even expanded from where it was a few months ago because of the demand. This equilibrium between what the CapEx, the hyperscaler guys say and into WFE, you just can't because we're way under serving those demands. Our contention has been for quite a while that there's not enough silicon to be able to support the plans that people have.

The WFE is literally just as fast as we can go as an industry. That's kind of what we're seeing when we talk to our customers and we talk to their plans for build-out in 2027. The reason 2026 isn't bigger is 'cause they can't build enough fabs fast enough. And take the extreme of this, 'cause he said it on his call. If you say, you know, what Elon Musk was saying about SpaceX and the demands and why he talked about building Terafab was 'cause it was gonna be a massive shortage of semiconductor capacity through 2030.

Nothing about the short term, I think that confuses a lot of people, what is talked about short term in terms of the hyperscaler CapEx and the buffer between that and what's happening in terms of the ability of the industry to bring on all that capacity. I understand, you know, people are trying to correlate it, but there's a massive assumption in there that this thing is even close to filling that capacity, and it's not.

I agree with you. Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you. We'll take our last question from Chris Caso with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.

Yeah, thank you. Good evening. Just as a follow-on to the prior question, it does certainly sound like demand is well ahead of the industry's ability to supply. Does that cap the amount that KLA can ship to customers and that, you know, the customers have clean room space to be able to put tools right now? I mean, you talked about, you know, perhaps the opportunity to increase the view as the year goes on. Are we sort of toward the upper limits of what can be supplied in 2026 and we're just gonna have to supply it in 2027, 2028?

Well, yeah, I think so. The way to think about this, and I think this is, you know, we are an ecosystem, so it kind of takes all the parts of the ecosystem to make it happen. When you look at what are, you know, what are the constraints or what are the limits? I know when we talk in the AI world about, you know, you have power constraints or other constraints. In the semiconductor industry, the first constraint is how many fabs do you have? Like, how many shelves can you fill? Then you got to have enough equipment from all the different suppliers to be able to make a functioning line. In many ways, this is why we talk about the overall investment in the industry.

You kind of have to think about it in aggregate because let's say we could infinitely ship, there'd be nowhere to send it because you'd be sending it at a fab that haven't been built yet. That's why we look very closely at what the overall industry is doing, what our customers are doing. That's why when we say you can get a marginal increase in 2026 to the numbers we're talking about, you can't go from $140billion-$200billion in 2026, and there's only so much you can add in 2027, and those fabs have to be built now. When, you know, when our customers say, "It's just not easy," it's because it takes a long time to get through.

Even in places where they build fabs very quickly, it takes a long time to build them and then to get the, you know, the equipment. The fastest in the world places to build fabs have big plans for expansion next year, and they're still going to be short by the end of next year. You know, that's how the whole system is working. When we give our guidance for the year, it's yes, it's what we can do, but it's also collectively what we as an industry can do. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. That's clear. Thank you. For the last question, I have something more mundane on gross margins for the year. I think you indicated, you're kind of sticking with a view of 62% for the year. Can you talk about the pluses and minus in that? I know you had some mixed headwinds earlier and there's some cost increases. You know, what should we be watching for on the gross margins this year?

It's pretty consistent guidance with what we had last quarter. I would say the memory pricing environment is on the margin worse. I thought that the headwind was 75 to 100 basis points. I think it's 100 basis points now. You know, part of that has been the relative pricing on DDR4 versus DDR5, where they're generally, and it depends on what type of memory level, but more or less the same prices. You still have tariff dynamics. I would expect as we move through the year, the tariff headwind that we have at KLA will become less, but it's still, you know, a meaningful, I'll call it. I talked about 50 to 100 basis points of overall impact.

I'd say we're operating at the, you know, the middle of the higher end of that range today, but would expect that to come down to the lower end of the range as we go through the year with some of the things we're doing here operationally. Overall mix generally is pretty consistent with how we thought about it. Like anything else, there's always puts and takes. In general, we said 62% ± 50 basis points, and we still feel that that's an appropriate way to think about the company at the revenue guidance that we provided for the year.

Got it. Thank you.

Mark.

Thank you. Thank you, Chris, and thank you everybody for tuning in. We appreciate your support. Apologies for those that weren't able to get a question on this call. We will catch up with you in a follow-up call. With that, I'll turn the call back to the operator to provide any closing remarks.

Thank you. This concludes the KLA Corporation March quarter 2026 earnings call and webcast. Please disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.