Lam Research Corporation

In the recent earnings, Lam Research Corporation demonstrated strong performance in the December quarter of 2023. Financial highlights include higher revenues, gross margin, operating margin, and EPS above guided ranges. Although overall wafer fabrication equipment (WFE) spending declined, the company almost doubled its EPS compared to the cycle trough in 2019. Lam Research contributed its evolution to several factors such as improved positioning in the foundry, logic, and specialty technology segments, and growth in their customer support business group. The company ended the year with about 90,000 chambers in the field, marking a significant increased installed base. The decline in memory WFE was almost 40% year-on-year, primarily due to cuts in NAND spending. Non-memory WFE experienced a mid-single-digit decline with mature node growth in China, partially offsetting reductions in leading-edge node spending elsewhere.