Lam Research Corporation (NASDAQ:LRCX) Q2 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Timothy Archer: Yes. We’ve said in the past that we — obviously, we track that pretty closely. I think you’ve heard our customers talk about increasing utilization. We’ve certainly seen and heard from our customers talk of strengthening in pricing in those markets. How we said it would affect us? I mean, in markets like NAND, we said we would — with so much utilization taken offline, we would see some uptick in our spares business. We see that start to flow through upgrades. And as I mentioned in my script, we anticipate that a big portion of the uptick in memory spending this year will be coming through technology upgrades where — the installed base is Lam equipment and therefore, the benefit — a lot of the benefit of that WFE spending will flow to Lam as we do those technology upgrades.

The other element of the spending will be coming from the additional equipment that needs to get added to enable things like high bandwidth memory. And we’ve talked about the fact that in high bandwidth memory, Lam has a 100% market share of the critical technologies needed for stacking the DRAM. So I’ll let our customers speak to what their utilizations are but what I’d say is that all signs are pointing to the memory market beginning to come out of its pretty darn near historic downturn over the last couple of years. And so that’s what we’re looking at for this year.

Harlan Sur: That’s very helpful. And then you mentioned this, I mean, your CSBG business has grown at a 17% CAGR since 2019, right? That’s significantly faster than I think it was a 10% to 11% CAGR target that you guys put out at your last Analyst Day. I know it’s been weak over the past few quarters, just given some of the supply side discipline of your customers, lower utilizations, slowing tech migration. But assuming that you will see the pickup in activity sometime this year. You combine that with a strong continued growth in the installed base business, number of chambers continues to grow at a low double-digit growth rate. Like how should we think about the growth profile, puts and takes of CSBG this year and going forward?

Timothy Archer: Yes, I don’t know that we’re going to put a number on the growth rate for CSBG at this point. But clearly, that business has been heavily impacted by the utilization cuts that occurred within our customer fabs. And we saw that both in spares as well as a curtailment of many of the technology upgrades that typically would just occur year in, year out. And so that did have an impact on CSBG revenues. I think that going forward, I talked about how much larger the installed base is now. That’s a much larger installed base that because of the delay in technology upgrades, there’s pent-up demand there. I mean those tools need to be upgraded to be operating at the latest and most efficient and most competitive technology node for our customers. And so I don’t know the exact timing, but I do know that installed base will be upgraded and will actually generate quite a lot of revenue for Lam going forward.

Douglas Bettinger: And Harlan, maybe just like to remind you, there’s 4 components in CSBG, spare service upgrades, all of which will benefit from what Tim was describing. You also have the Reliant product line in there, which has just done amazing in the last year. That will ebb and flow to a certain extent with more mature nodes, specialty node WFE. So don’t lose sight of that one. There might be a slightly different dynamic with the Reliant product line.

Operator: The next question is from Atif Malik with Citi.

Atif Malik: First one, Tim, historically, you guys have benefited disproportionately when the NAND spending happens. And — if you were to think about your position competitively when the NAND spending recovers, I understand this year there’s more technology upgrades. But how should we think about your position coming out of this NAND downturn competitively, particularly on more layers than the whole edge process?

Timothy Archer: Yes. I think that — it’s a good question, and that was what I pointed out. I mean I think what we’re looking at in the near term in those first stages of recovery is customers are very cost sensitive. And the best way to achieve that next technology notice by upgrading the equipment that you have in place. And so Lam, we spend a tremendous amount of time investing in technologies that enable the upgrade and extension of our equipment, and that’s really of high value to our customers. I think that will actually go on for quite a long time. We have about 6,500 chambers of high aspect ratio etch, for instance, in the NAND marketplace. That creates a lot of next-generation technology through those upgrades. And beyond that, the learning you get from now running those upgraded chambers at that next technology node, tends to seed all of the ideas and understanding of the challenges that need to be solved at the mix node.

And I think that’s why the installed base positions and incumbent positions tend to be very difficult to break in this industry. And we’ve tried to break many others — break into others. And so we know that very well. What Lam has done extremely well is to collaborate closely with our customers. I talked about our close to customer strategy, putting R&D labs in very close proximity to our customers. And again, that’s just the way in which we ensure that we’re adequately meeting both their technology and cost needs going forward.