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

Stacy Rasgon: I wanted to ask you about the mitigated versus unmitigated impact from China. So you gave the numbers, $2.5 billion, and hoping to bring that down to like $1.5 billion. But I gathered a big element of that was getting licenses. Where do you expect those licenses to be gotten? Is that only to the multinational? Do you guys expect licenses to be given to some of the Chinese folks? I mean, how — how could that happen? What is the mechanism by which you come in at the unmitigated number versus the — coming to the mitigated number versus the unmitigated number?

Brice Hill : Stacy, it’s Brice. Yes, and it’s important probably to say that this unmitigated versus mitigated, it has everything to do with the impact to the China shipments and Chinese customers. In other words, it’s not referring to whether we can ship a product we are making for those customers to non-China customers. So the unmitigated, the way we calculated this is we looked at the orders that we have for the affected customers, and that’s what you see as the total, $2.5 billion. In order to mitigate that…

Stacy Rasgon : Does that include multinationals, too?

Brice Hill : Say again?

Stacy Rasgon : I’m sorry. Does that include multinationals, too? Or is that just the local Chinese guys?

Brice Hill : It does not. It does not.

Stacy Rasgon : So just local semis, okay.

Brice Hill : Yes. And so the way we looked at that, there are some customers that we’re trying to clarify that we can apply for licenses for or we can get authorizations for once they establish that their technology is within the guidelines. So we have a process to do that. And on the other side, we expect some customers may decide to change their plan or change their technology, so it does not go above the threshold that’s affected by the rules at this point. So it’s really those two elements that we’ll be able to clarify that some customers were able to ship with or ship to or some customers changing their plans on the technology side that would allow them to qualify for shipments.

Stacy Rasgon : What would that mean though? Would that suck up like supply that would have ordinarily gotten built by somebody else though? Because otherwise, you’re just adding like lagging-edge supply into a vacuum, essentially. How do we think about like the second order effects here?

Brice Hill : Yes. We don’t think so. We expect all that equipment to be utilized. And so if that equipment has moved to a different use, then we expect it will be backfilled somewhere else for its original demand purpose, if that makes sense.

Stacy Rasgon : Got it. And I guess just one last one. Right now, I guess, you’re running at the unmitigated level. When do you think it’d be at the mitigated level? Like, how likely do you think it will be that you end up at the mitigated level at some point?

Brice Hill : It’s hard to say. It’s a process. You can imagine there’s a large number of people working on this. In fact, the whole industry is working on this. So it’s job two at this point behind increasing output. So I would say it’s still a good estimate today, and we’re — we’ll be working throughout the year on improving the number of customers and plants that we can ship to.

Operator: And our next question comes from the line of Vivek Arya with Bank of America.