Applied Materials (AMAT) CEO comments that the company now expects overall packaging revenues to grow more than 70% and expects to grow process diagnostics and control business over 50% in calendar 2026
Have strong pipeline of new process diagnostics and control products that will fuel growth in 2027 and beyond.
CFO says expect very significant increase in DRAM revenues in the second half of calendar 2026 as customers begin to expand clean room capacity.
Segment-level forward guidance of this kind is how semicap managements have historically framed an upcycle: leading with the fastest-growing niche, here advanced packaging, rather than consolidated revenue, because packaging and process control are where wafer fab equipment vendors have been gaining wallet share as chip architectures shift toward heterogenous integration. The DRAM comment fits an established sequence in memory cycles, where cleanroom expansion announcements precede equipment orders by several quarters, so a second-half revenue inflection guided now is consistent with customers committing capacity ahead of an expected supply tightness. The distinction worth drawing is between guidance anchored to specific capacity additions, which tends to be more durable, and guidance resting on broad demand optimism, which has historically been the first line cut when orders pause. Peers in the wafer fab equipment complex have typically traded as a group on read-throughs of this kind, particularly where DRAM exposure overlaps. Follow-ons are the formal print and the order and backlog disclosures, where the credibility of the calendar 2026 ramp will show up first, and any corroborating capacity commentary from the memory makers themselves.