Applied Materials Inc

NASDAQ:AMAT

Earnings Call Transcript 2021-Q4

[Operator]

Welcome to the Applied Materials Earnings Conference Call during the presentation, all participants will be in a listen-only mode. Afterwards, you'll be invited to participate in a question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the conference over to Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President. Please go ahead, sir.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Good afternoon everyone, and thank you for joining Applied 's fourth quarter of fiscal 2021 Earnings Call. Joining me are Gary Dickerson, our President and CEO, and Bob Halliday, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's call contains forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ. Information concerning the risks and uncertainties is contained and Applied's most recent Form 10-Q and 8-K filings with the SEC. Today's call also includes non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to GAAP measures are found in today's earnings press release, and in our quarterly earnings materials, which are available on the IR page of our website at appliedmaterials.com. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Gary Dickerson.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Thank you, Mike. I'd like to start by thanking our employees for delivering the best year in Applied Materials ' history while navigating a dynamic and challenging environment. Demand for semiconductors and wafer fab equipment remains very strong. And in fiscal 2021, we generated $23 billion of revenue, which represents 34 % annual growth. In fiscal Q4, we hit the midpoint of our earnings guidance, despite larger than expected supply chain constraints. These constraints worsened in the last few weeks of the quarter, as we experienced delayed shipments from several suppliers. Without these supply shortages, we estimate that our Q4 revenues would have been at least $300 million higher.

We expect supply chain headwinds to persist into fiscal 2022 and mitigating them remains our top priority. For this reason, I'll begin today's call by providing some additional details about the industry's supply dynamics, both near-term and longer-term. Next, I'll describe the demand outlook, which is very strong and broad-based. I'll then talk about the progress we're making against our growth strategy and how Applied Materials is positioned to outperform the market over the coming years. I'm also happy to welcome Bob back to the CFO seat while we conduct a search for our next CFO. Later in the call, Bob will share his perspective on the state of the business and provide color on our financial performance.

So let me start with the supply side of the equation. Applied has made and continues to make strategic investments in our own global manufacturing infrastructure, so factory capacity is not a limiting factor for us. Like many in the industry, the primary challenge we face today, is availability of certain silicon components. For Applied, our issues are relatively narrow, and we are proactively collaborating with our suppliers and directly with the chip companies to find solutions or work around bottlenecks. I deeply appreciate their partnership and teamwork as we navigate these unprecedented circumstances together.

Looking further ahead, I believe we will see permanent changes in the way supply chains are designed and operated. In the semiconductor industry and beyond, there's a shift from Just-in-time to a just-in-case approach which will require higher levels of inventory, more built-in redundancy, and more burst capacity. Because the economic value of capturing upside opportunities far outweighs pure efficiency savings, we're also seeing changes in supply agreements across the ecosystem as companies place a premium on having preferential access to capacity. In addition, our customers are providing us with longer-term visibility and we're collaborating more closely than ever when it comes to capacity planning. On top of that, the strategic importance of semiconductors is now recognized at a national level.

Over the next few years as incentive programs become available in the U.S., Europe, and Asia, we expect to see a trend towards regionalized supply chains that are more resilient, but also increase capital intensity. Now, I will characterize the demand environment, which is extremely healthy. The pandemic has accelerated the digital transformation of the economy, fueling semiconductor consumption, and driving the need for next-generation silicon technologies. As a result, we see wafer fab equipment spending for calendar 2021 up around 40 % year-on-year. In other words, in the mid $80 billion range and constrained by supply, not demand. There is still a long way to go before supply and demand is balanced, especially as demand drivers continue to grow. We therefore expect wafer fab equipment spending to be up again in 2022.

While we're currently focused on resolving near-term challenges, it's important to recognize we're only at the beginning of major technology and market inflections that will play out over the next decade. As everything gets smarter from our phones to our cars, to our homes, we see a combination of unit growth and increasing silicon content per unit. For example, if you look at this year's high-end smartphones, by dollar value, the application process or semiconductor content is up about 20 % compared to last year's models. And RF content increased at twice that rate. And in data center applications, the average DRAM and NAND content per server is also growing at a 20 % compound annual growth rates. As more and more smart devices are connected at the edge, they are driving exponential growth in machine generated data that must be stored, moved, and processed.

Then, to create value from these vast volumes of data, new AI computing approaches are being developed, fueling further demand for current and next-generation semiconductors. When I talk with customers, their message is clear and consistent. They are investing strategically to be in the best position to capture value as these long-term secular trends accelerate. In our core market, Foundrylogic is about 60 % of wafer fab equipment spending in 2021. And we expect it to remain at this level or higher over the next several years. Within Foundrylogic, the spending mix is relatively balanced between the most advanced nodes, where we see a fierce battle for leadership playing out in ICAPS.

ICAPS nodes serve the fast-growing IOT communications, automotive, power electronics, and sensor markets. In memory, supply and demand fundamentals remain healthy and we expect investments to be up next year, although not as much as foundry logic. Finally, capital-intensity is also providing an important tailwind. With a deceleration of traditional Moore's Law scaling, and the transition to the new P pack T-Playbook, complexity is increasing. Simply put, more innovation is needed to get from one node to the next and its higher complexity translates to higher capital intensity. Against this backdrop, I will now describe Applied's performance and progress towards our strategic goals.

In fiscal 2021, we grew semiconductor equipment revenues, almost $5 billion or 43 % year-on-year, outpacing the market growth rate during that period. However, as I described earlier, we were unable to fully meet demand in our fourth quarter due to component shortages. And we expect to remain supply constrained going into fiscal 2022. As a result, we have grown our backlog at a Company level to $11.8 billion, which is up 77 % compared to the same period last year. Our near-term results do not fully reflect the underlying strength in our business or the progress we're making against our long-term strategy.

As a reminder, our strategy has three pillars. First, to be the pack T enablement Company and provide the foundation for customers ' power performance, area costs and time-to-market road maps. Second, to shift more of our business to subscriptions, and third to generate incremental free cash flows and profitable from our businesses in adjacent markets. We've aligned our organization and investments around these critical focus areas and are demonstrating strong momentum. Applied's P pack T enablement strategy is built upon 3 differentiated elements. We have the broadest and most enabling portfolio of unit process solutions. We can co-optimize and integrate these technologies in unique and highly enabling ways and we're focused on time-to-market acceleration with our AIX or actionable insight accelerator data platform.

Starting with our unit process tools, demand in our traditional leadership areas is very strong. Our Epion Thermal businesses both grew 70 % this fiscal year. And CMP grew more than 60 %. In our targeted growth areas, we expect our process diagnostic and control revenues to be up more than 60 % in calendar 2021. Packaging is another very exciting area for us. Our equipment revenues are up more than 55 % year-on-year, and we're on track to exceed $800 million for calendar 2021. We're also bringing highly enabling future technologies to market through a combination of organic R&D and strategic partnerships.

Moving to our co-optimized and integrated products, the customer pull for these solutions is strong, and increasing for future nodes. Co-optimization allows us to see and solve higher-value problems for customers, speed up commercialization of new innovations and capture more of the available opportunity. One example is dielectric materials, where we're driving parallel innovations in material's deposition, modification, and removal. Our CVD group has more than 15 new materials either in development or recently released. These enabled new structures or manufacturing techniques in both foundry logic and memory. The revenue opportunity we've opened up for the co-optimized etch and CMP steps is almost twice as large as the market for the standalone deposition equipment.

Another example is advanced patterning, where we're co-optimizing CVD, ALD, and CMP with our Sym3 etch, enabling us to gain more than 5 points of share in patterning this year. Integrated material solutions, or IMS, go one step beyond co-optimization by combining multiple processes with customized metrology and sensors in a single system, typically under vacuum. With IMS we can target the most complex and valuable challenges in the new P pack t. playbook. For example, this year we delivered 5 new low R or low resistance metalization integrated solutions to customers that address next-generation applications in Foundrylogic, DRAM, and NAND. This included our copper barriers seed IMS that combined 7 different process technologies in one system under vacuum. ALD, PVD, CVD, copper reflow, surface treatment, interface engineering and metrology.

This enables a 50 % reduction in interconnect resistance at the most advanced Foundrylogic nodes, and creates a multi-billion-dollar opportunity for Applied Materials, over the next 5 years. The final component of our PPACt enablement strategy is time-to-market acceleration. New digital tools that accelerate R&D, technology transfer, and high-volume manufacturing are a major focus area for our customers in the coming years, these technologies will have a huge impact on productivity and innovation and commercialization speed. They will also play a key role in making regional supply chains economically competitive and sustainable. Our AIX platform brings together process tools, sensors, metrology, with data analytics and machine learning. We currently have 25 AIX R&D acceleration engagements with leading customers, and we now expect that number to triple over the next 12 months.

Another highlight for 2021 is the progress we're making with subscription revenues. In our service business, we've already converted a significant percentage of our spares and service revenue from on-demand to long-term service agreements. We now have nearly 15,000 installed base tools covered by these agreements up 12 % year-on-year. The tenure of these agreements has grown from 1.9 years at the end of 2020 to 2.3 years today and our renewal rate is about 90%. Several customers have highlighted how these long-term agreements have allowed them to better manage disruptions in parts supply, and technical support during the pandemic. Before I hand the call over to Bob, I will quickly summarize As the digital transformation of the economy accelerates, demand for semiconductors continues to grow and is significantly outpacing supply.

We expect supply shortages of certain silicon components to persist in the near term, meaning that we don't expect to fully meet demand in Q1. Managing these constraints in partnership with our suppliers and chipmakers is our top priority. Looking beyond the near-term disruptions, I feel very positive about the future. Longer-term secular trends are driving the semiconductor and wafer fab equipment markets structurally higher. And in Applied, we're making significant progress towards our strategic plans. We're in the best position to accelerate our customers PPACt roadmap, and grow significantly faster than our markets over the next several years. Now, I'll hand the call over to Bob.

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

Thanks, Gary. I want to begin by saying I'm very happy for the opportunity to work with all of you again. I have 3 main messages today. Number 1, demand is very strong and growing. And I think it's likely to remain strong in 2022 and beyond. Number 2, supply chain constraints are impacting our ability to meet all of our demand s i n the near-term. Number 3, Applied Materials is making very good progress toward our financial targets. And we're in a great position to return capital to shareholders. I will cover each of these topics in order and give you our guidance. And then Gary, Mike and I will help with your questions. I'll begin by giving you a more detailed insight than we typically share about the demand for our products and its sustainability into 2022. Specifically, our semi systems revenue grew by 43 % in 2021.

Our semi systems orders grew by 78 % for the year. In fact, our semi systems orders grew in every quarter. In Q4 they were up 136 % year over year. Looking ahead, we currently expect our orders to be higher in the first half of fiscal 2022 than in the second half of 2021 across semi-systems AGS, and also display. In short, the demand environment is very strong. What's happening on the demand side is that all of the trends Gary and I talked about years ago, are playing out an even bigger way than we imagined. First, semiconductor demand is higher because we're designing more intelligence into practically everything that gets built and sold. Second, equipment capital intensity is higher. We don't have wafer size increases anymore. And the industry has run out a number of efficiencies, including fab automation, industry consolidation, and the foundry model.

Used equipment is now scarce. So even in the ICAPS markets, customers are buying new equipment and spending more. The industry is adding more wafer capacity to keep up with demand, particularly in Foundrylogic. And we believe spending will remain strong. Specifically, the industry grew Foundrylogic wafer starts by around 40 % over the past 5 years alone. At the end of our fiscal year overall fab utilization for the industry increased to the highest level of the past decade. We see FoundryLogic continuing to grow as a proportion of the industry's mix. 5 years ago, FoundryLogic represented around 53 % of WFE spending.

As of 2021, it's grown to 60 % of WFE, and we see it being even higher into the future. Even with higher wafer capacity and high utilization, we have a global semiconductor shortage that's affecting a wide range of industries, including our own. Industry-wide, we are tracking 59 fab projects with available and announced expansion capacity of 3.5 million wafer starts. These projects represent potential equipment spending of around $300 billion in future years. All of this data leads me to believe that demand is likely to remain strong. Now I'll give you more insights into our own supply situation. In Q4, our semi systems backlog was at record levels and growing quickly. In our guidance for Q4, we targeted modest semi systems revenue growth. We also widened our overall guidance range due to our concerns about the supply chain.

owards the end of Q4, we experienced later than expected deliveries of the components we need to complete and ship our build plan by the end of the quarter. The reason for the delays is that our suppliers couldn't get enough parts from their own suppliers, which include chipmakers and distributors. The supply issues are directly related to the semiconductor shortage, particularly in logic, power and analog ICs. Not all of our semi businesses were affected in Q4. Our process control, CMP, etch and packaging businesses beat our revenue targets.

Yet our overall semi systems revenue was $293 million below the midpoint of our expectation. to full semiconductor revenue impact of the shortages during the quarter was well above $300 million. In Q1, we're guiding for sequential growth of around 3 %. We have the internal capacity to easily ship several $100 million more of semi equipment. But we're planning for a modest supply increases. Looking ahead, I believe WFE spending will be up again in calendar 2022 and will remain strong, particularly for Foundrylogic, both at the leading edge and ICAPs nodes. I also believe, Applied's business will be higher in the first-half of calendar 2022 than in the second half of calendar 2021 both in semi systems and in AGS.

Next, since it's the end of our fiscal year, it's a good time to assess the progress we're making towards our 2024 financial model. In April, we outlined targets to grow our revenue, profitability, and earnings in a variety of WFE scenarios, including a base case of $85 billion and a high case of $100 billion. With everything we're seeing in the industry today, our high scenario of $100 billion is increasingly likely. 1 year into the long-term plan, we've made good progress, increasing revenue by 34 %, non-GAAP gross margin by 240 basis points, non-GAAP operating margin by 540 basis points, and non-GAAP EPS by 64 %.

We believe our semi-systems group is well on track to its growth targets based on our strong product roadmaps and the deep customer engagements Gary described. We believe AGS can exceed the growth implied in our model after growing by 21 % this year alone. In fact, AGS had record backlog of over $4.33 billion at the end of the year. 72 % of the Q4 backlog was subscription business with terms of 1 to 3 years and 65 % of new subscription bookings were multiyear. While our focus is on recurring revenue, AGS also includes our 200 millimeter equipment business. Our 200-millimeter business has been growing, along with the rest of the ICAPS market, approaching $650 million in WFE revenue in calendar 2021. Turning to our profitability metrics We expect to achieve a non-GAAP gross margin target of 48.5%, once the near-term material and logistics cost headwinds subside.

We also feel confident in our non-GAAP operating margin targets. The semi-systems group increased its operating margin by 590 basis points this year, while AGS delivered record operating margin of 31 % in Q4. A major focus for us is increasing the display group's margin to between 25 % and 30 %, and we plan to be in that range by the second half of 2022. Another of our targets is to return 80 % to 100 % of free cash flow to shareholders. In fiscal 2021, we generated a record $4.77 billion in free cash flow, and we returned 96 % mainly through stock buybacks.

We ended the year with over $5 billion remaining in buyback authorization. And given the strong demand outlook and our view of the intrinsic value of the Company, we expect to continue to be aggressive with the program. Now I'll share our Q1 business outlook. Given the supply chain challenges, we expect to modestly increase revenue to $6.16 billion plus or minus $250 million or up around 19 % year-on-year. We expect non-GAAP EPS to be around $1.85 plus or minus $0.07 or up around 33 % year-on-year. Within this outlook, we expect semi-systems revenue of around $4.46 billion up 25 % year-over-year.

We project AGS revenue of around $1.33 billion up 15 % year-over-year. We expect display revenue to be around $350 million in Q1 and higher as we progress through the year. Applied's non-GAAP gross margin should decline to around 47.4% primarily due to higher and near-term cost headwinds. We plan to increase non-GAAP OpEx to $970 million, which is around 15.8% of revenue, below our long-term model target of 16 %. Our guidance also assumes a 12 % non-GAAP tax rate. Finally, along with Gary, I'd like to thank all of our teams and partners for their hard work in a challenging environment. Now, Mike, let's begin the Q&A.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thanks, Bob. Now to help us reach as many people as we can, please ask just 1 question on today's call. If you have a second question, please re-queue and we will do our best to come back to you later in the session. Operator, let's please begin.

[Operator]

Thank you. [Operator Instructions, you will need to press [Operator Instructions ]. Our first question comes from C.J. Muse with Evercore, you may proceed with your question.

[C.J. Muse, Evercore]

Yes. Good afternoon, and thanks for taking the question. And welcome back, Bob. I'm sure you're happy to be back from the golf course. So I guess a couple of part question on supply constraints. You talked about not being fully resolved in January, do you expect it to be resolved in April? And how are customers reacting to the shortages? Are they waiting on a full suite of tools or are they taking whatever tools they can get? And then, lastly, considering the backlog that you highlighted, and also that longest lead time [Indiscernible] is essentially sold out for all of 2022, it certainly looks like your visibility extends now into 2023. Can you speak to that?

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

Sure. Thanks for?wovering? back. Few things. 1. Supply chain, 2. Overall demand environment, and 3. Visibility, I guess. On the first one, supply chain, we actually did pretty well managing this through about 11 months of the year and a week and then it got a little worse at the end of the quarter. And that was our issue. So now we're all over this thing. In the short-term, managing the next quarters about prioritization, project management and execution. So we have set up a cadence that every week I'm going through all the detail performance by-week of how we're doing on receipts, shipments, shortages, individual supplier names.

And Gary is going through it almost every day, okay? So we are escalating this thing. So when you say, why do we think we're going to do better in Q1? If you look at some of the public companies you know, they're up 3 % to 5 % on average, some of our suppliers. We believe that our allocation will be somewhat better than that. We also believe that we have internally allocated that effectively and we're working with our suppliers, who are our customers to free up more demand. Secondly, if you look at the early data in the first 2 weeks of the quarter, receipts were up about 15 % from the previous quarter.

So I think we're going to be okay. If you look at the stuff that caused us problems, there's miscellaneous problems all over the place but most of those are manageable. What hit us hard was this thousands theoretically of electronic components that our suppliers using our products to us. There were about 100 that we're closely monitoring last quarter and 10 that gave us problems at the end of the quarter. These are particularly around PLCs. We're monitoring the top 10 suppliers of our products and we are monitoring those 100 plus 200 other components. We want to make sure nothing goes bad. So I feel pretty good that number 1, the demand is really good, the backlogs is there, the orders are up every quarter.

It looks strong next year, it doesn't like strong next year. I think supply chain is going to get better incrementally every quarter through the year. In terms of -- visibility is great. In terms of full suite of tools, customers are taking all the tools we can ship, and we're largely keeping them happy, but we want to not get the backlog too big, but I think we are going to make progress throughout the year.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Hi, C.J. This is Gary. I'll add a little bit more. I've met with all the CEOs of our top customers, leading technologies, and ICAP s here in the last quarter. And what I would say certainly the supply situation is challenging, but there is really no change in terms of the customer demand for the products and some of the tools that again Bob -- as Bob said it's not a broad-based issue. Some of these tools are the ones that are most enabling from Applied and again, those -- nothing has changed relative to that demand.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Hey, thanks C.J.

[C.J. Muse, Evercore]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from John Pitzer with Credit Suisse. You may proceed with your question.

[John Pitzer, Credit Suisse]

Yes. Thanks for letting me ask the question. Bob, welcome back as well. It's great working with you again. My guess is you're going to get multiples of C.J. 's questions on the supply side. But I'm just kind of curious Bob, to follow-up, as the supply chain gets better, do you think by the April quarter, there is a big step function, pick up to the 500 million plus or minus that you can't ship in October and January or will it be a little bit more linear than that as supply comes online. And then to your point earlier Bob, about the backlog, just how do you safeguard against sort of a frothy backlog in this kind of environment? They are impressive numbers but typically, when customers can't get what they want, they tend to order more than they need. So how are you safeguarding against that?

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

In terms of rate of recovery and confidence in the backlog, a double booking question I think is the question. In terms of rate of recovery, what we're modeling from discussions with suppliers and our suppliers ' suppliers there are internal analysis which we're doing the best we can to model this and we believe it's accurate. We think Q1, the rate recovery, if you look at our semi business is up a little over 3 % equipment. And that's about what the industry is quarter-on-quarter. Our AGS business is a little bit lower because it's 14 weeks last year in Q1 as the Chinese holiday falls into Q1 this year. But if you look at rate of recovery.

We think it goes up a little over 3 % in Q1, we think the equipment business picks up a couple of points more every quarter and build more momentum later in the year. Now as we get more visibility, next quarter, I'll be more confident of those numbers. But that's the kind of acceleration we're picking up in shipments. We hope to do better. We might do better, but that's what we're modeling. Doubling, I don't think that's a problem right now double booking, John. If you look a breakout between memory and the Foundrylogic, Foundrylogic was 60 % this year the business. We actually think it's up next year. If you look at public statements from TSMC Intel, another big.

FoundryLogic manufacturers. They're talking about multiyear commitments to WFE spending and very strong businesses on their side. We look within the mix that FoundryLogic increases its percentage of the mix next year We look at [Indiscernible] as being slightly up, a little bit more on NAND, a little bit down on DRAM, so we think that's muted and reasonable. And we don't see double booking then. We see China down a little bit next year. So I don't see the double booking thing right now.

[John Pitzer, Credit Suisse]

We'll see at the conference.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Stacy Rasgon with Bernstein Research, you may proceed with your question.

[Stacy Rasgon, Bernstein Research]

Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the impact of the constraints on the services business because it's not just services, there is hardware and everything else. If service is actually being impacted by constraints, would services be strong without them? And how do you think --how do you see services -- the evolution of services going forward into next year as the -- you work to resolve the constraint issue?

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

Services business is doing great. This year were up 21 %. We're ahead of plan to hit the 2024 model. I think we might have said on the call even that we need a compound rate of growth of 7 % a year to hit that model. We think we'll exceed that probably do double digits this year, growth in service. If you look at our service business, it's multiple components: there is 200 millimeter tool business, there is a contract services where you sign up for services 1 to 3 years, including different types of service arrangements, and then there is time and material stuff. If you look at the service business, we think it's going to grow strongly this year in double – strong double-digits.

And in fact, our customers are thanking our service guys for getting them onto parts, service contracts in the past year or 2, because our customers are in good shape in terms of support and parts. So I think that the parts issue, supply chain issues are not really impact ing our service business. The other thing which we'll point out and Gary might give you more detail, if you look at the parts of the constrained things like PLCs and stuff which are components in components, those are not the parts that are high replacement service parts in the service supply chain. So I think we're pretty good shape on the service business and it's a great business for us.

[Stacy Rasgon, Bernstein Research]

And Bob how would you guide services in fiscal '22 as a percent? Low double-digit?

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

Yeah, I think it's all double-digits growth.

[Stacy Rasgon, Bernstein Research]

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you so much

[Operator]

Thank you. Your next question comes from Vivek Arya with Bank of America. You may proceed with your question.

[Vivek Arya, Bank of America]

Thanks for taking my question. Just a clarification, what do you expect display to do overall in this fiscal '22? And then my question is, this year we have seen your foundry customers raise their prices, fabulous customers, IDM there raising their prices. What about the equipment side? How much pricing power do you guys have that can help mitigate some of these supply chain issues because you did mention a hit on your gross margin? So as you start to see some of the supply situation recover, should we expect this combination of pricing and the supply side as you recover gross margins quickly or will the gross margin recovery take time?

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Vivek this is Gary. Thanks for the question. There's two parts to this. I'll take the first part and then Bob can take the second part. Relative to display, we've talked about that many times, really good adjacent market where we can take our semi deposition in E-Beam technologies into a market with larger substrates. For '21, as expected, we're on track for a little over $1.6 billion in revenue. And maintaining strong share of our served market. We think '22 is a little higher than '21, more second half versus first half, and as Bob also discussed in the prepared remarks, we're on track to achieve our target for higher profit and free cash flow in the 25 % to 30 % range exiting 2022. And then Bob, do you have the second part.

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

In terms of -- your second question, it's a broader gross margin question. So if you look at gross margins this past year, we're up 2.4 points, which is great performance. We're on track to hit the model which is -- I think about 485 in the out years. We're a little soft right now in Q1 and that's all supply chain stuff. As you go out through the year, we expect gross margins to rise up again as we get to the supply chain issues behind us. In terms of the things that impact gross margin, we did a lot of good things into 2021: we had very good cost reduction, we had high-value products and services we sold to the customers, we recognize that value back for the customers, and then pretty good volume mix which helped too. If you look at prospectively, the cost reduction is a little slower. We will continue to realize high-value with the customers. We share that volume and we think that's going to help our margins. And if the cost continue, we may even have that discussion at some point.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Yes. So margins flattish in the first half and then maybe a little better in the second half of tweak through the supply chain?

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

I think so. And I think the years a little bit of an issue or overall, by the time we're done.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Okay. Any comments on pricing? That was kind of thing.

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

We look to share value with customers and I think that's worked for both of us.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Great thanks for that.

[Vivek Arya, Bank of America]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Toshiya Hari with Goldman Sachs. You may proceed with your question.

[Toshiya Hari, Goldman Sachs]

Hi, guys. Thanks so much for taking my question. And Bob, welcome back. Gary, in your prepared remarks, you talked about localization of semiconductor capacity going forward. Obviously, there is a lot of talks in the United States, in Europe, and Asia as well, more recently Japan. How are you thinking about the potential impact from all these projects? I think from a timing perspective, most of us are thinking 2023 or even later. But based on what you know, all the discussions you're having. How are you thinking about that?

And sort of related to that, how should we think about the competitive threat from the local Chinese semi-cap companies? I know they've been around for a very long time and up until this point, there remains a very significant gap between incumbents like yourselves and them, but how concerned should we be, as we think about your business over the next 3 to 5 years? Thank you.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Thanks for the questions, Toshiya. Relative to localization of supply chains and things like the chips act, that's obviously good for our business. We're in discussions, as I mentioned earlier, I've met with all of the top CEOs here in the last quarter, and as they move to these other new locations, that creates an opportunity for us to support them, especially with our services business. So we're in very close cooperation with those

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

customers as they move forward with those plans. And there's opportunities. I think for them, they are also concerned about cost and cultural differences and all of those things. So that creates a tremendous opportunity, not just for our traditional services, but opportunities like AIx Applied actionable insight acceleration where I think they're also extremely focused on how to accelerate R&D ramp and optimize high-volume manufacturing in new locations. I think that really creates a tremendous opportunity for us.

The other part of the chips is really how the -- every government runs faster in innovation and commercialization. And we're also in deep discussions with a number of leading technology companies and that will also create an opportunity, I believe for Applied. Relative to the China equipment suppliers, really if you look at what every single customer is focused on, it's providing power, performance, and costs that are ahead of others. We talk about PPACt and the T is incredibly important.

And whether it's -- we talk about low resistance wiring, which is probably one of the biggest issues in the industry, where we have tremendous strength or gate all around transistors or the scaling and memory or packaging. That is incredibly complex and difficult. And the companies that are ahead on power performance and cost, capture really the majority of the market. So I really believe that Applied is even in a stronger position going forward than we've been in the past relative to local competition.

[Toshiya Hari, Goldman Sachs]

Great, thank you.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thanks Toshiya.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Krish Sankar with Cowen and Company. You may proceed with your question.

[Krish Sankar, Cowen and Company]

Hi, thanks for taking my question, and Bob welcome back. I just wanted to check on the fact that some of these constraints are pushing out revenues into next year, and it looks like maybe in the first half of next year, the WFE run rate could hit a 100 billion, so I just wanted to figure out from your vantage point, how do you think about that, and you also mentioned that you're trending towards the target model, but obviously the margins are impacted because of constraints and the target model had 10 bucks in EPS with 100 billion WFE. How much discount should we give to that 10 bucks in this constrained environment? Thank you.

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

Well, we think WFE is up next year. I think we probably said in the script. Would -- it could be up -- I think at this time we won't be too specific, we're talking to 10 % up next year, and I think, pretty confident there frankly. If you look at the run rate in the first half, the visibility is a little better in the first half, and we have very strong orders and booking potential in the first half. We actually think the second half is going to get a little stronger even on bookings and what we have today frankly. Every day we talk to customers we're bullish particularly in FoundryLogic area. If you go look at the model, it's $100 billion. I think that's a real number nowadays. I don't know if that's a real number next year at this point. I think we achieved that $100 billion, we'll hit the model and that was the model 10 bucks. I think we'll do it.

[Krish Sankar, Cowen and Company]

Thanks, Bob.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thank you, Krish.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Maybe I can add Krish one more thing, relative to 2022 and then going forward. Backlog for us is very strong. Again, I've met with all of these leading customers, FoundryLogic, Memory, ICAPS. And Bob mentioned earlier, if you look at what they're publicly talking about in terms of their investments over multiple years. It's very, very strong and some of this, obviously, I can't share publicly, but I have very high confidence that the business is going to remain strong through '22. And right now, '23 also looks good for us. And certainly, again, if you just look at all the public statements from those customers again, they're not planning on a short cycle, they're planning to be ready with capacity to capture the opportunities.

[Krish Sankar, Cowen and Company]

Thanks, Gary.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Timothy Arcuri with UBS. You may proceed with your question.

[Timothy Arcuri, UBS]

Hi, thanks. And, Bob, welcome back. I guess I have a question on WFE share. Gary, you talk about that a lot and optically your share this year is flat in the 20.2 to 20.3 range. But obviously that's not representative because you would've done $300 million more in October. So I'm wondering if you can adjust January for us. So what would January have been in terms of SSG if you had the supply? Would you have -- would that $4.45 billion guidance would have been say $300 million higher? I'm just trying to adjust your share higher because obviously this year you've gained a lot of share on an adjusted basis. Thanks.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Yeah. Tim, thanks for the question. Certainly, Q1 would have been significantly higher. I think Bob gave some color on that, but certainly demand is far higher than supply. When you take us -- and we outperformed in '19, we outperformed in '20. We're definitely we're on track to outperform in '21. We've also feel very good about '22 and going forward. But I don't know if I want to be more specific other than the color that we've already given on the call, but definitely it would have been significantly higher in Q1 and then going into 2022.

In terms of the different parts of our business, we've talked about wiring resistance in Foundrylogic. It really is the biggest challenge for our customers as they shrink these features, resistance goes up and we gave some color on copper barrier/seed tool with 7 different technologies that is worth billions of dollars. And what I said in the prepared remarks is that we have 5 of these innovations that we're delivering to customers and we haven't quantified all of them, but it's very sizable in areas where Applied is really unique in enabling the solutions to wiring resistance. In the one case, we've talked about 50 % improvement in resistance. And then you look at gate-all-around, again, we feel very good about our position in in the transistor to gain share.

That's a billion dollar opportunity. And relative to our FinFET position, we believe we're positioned to gain share as that goes forward. Certainly in FoundryLogic or F share is increasing, our EUV F share is increasing. Our PDC share, we've talked about our business being up more than 60 % overall. And just again, really very, very strong position with integrated solutions. I gave some color on co-optimization and gave an example in the memory market where again we have a big opportunity. So Tim, I feel really good about our position going forward.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

And Tim, I'll add one more thing for you. So I know in the past, instead of waiting for Gartner Group to come out with market share, what you always did is you took our fiscal Q2 through fiscal Q1 as a proxy for our revenue. And what's interesting is what we did back in February we disclosed in our conference call and in an April, I wrote to everybody that we've made a similar adjustment ourselves. So what we're now doing is our calendar year revenue for VLSI share purposes is now based on our financial reporting in fiscal Q2 through fiscal Q1.

And 1 benefit of that change is that as soon as we guide Q1 which we just did today, now you can forecast our WFE revenue for share purposes, and you can make an apples-to-apples with the peer group. And then I just wanted to call your attention to one other number in the script today. Bob sized our AGS 200 millimeter revenue at around $650 million for the calendar year. So now you have all of the numbers that you need to make a share assumption. I just wanted to give you that background and we look forward Bob and I to seeing the investors at your conference.

[Timothy Arcuri, UBS]

Thank you. Thank you, everyone. I appreciate it.

[Operator]

Thanks. Our next question comes from Harlan Sur with JPMorgan, you may proceed with your question.

[Harlan Sur, JPMorgan]

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my question, and Bob welcome come back to the team. On the chip shortages you talked about some of the areas which has not seeing impact this much, plus control CMP, etch packaging systems. But that leaves things like deposition implant, thermal processes, and many other areas. And I'm sure even within that it's different for different systems. Architecture is like leading the edge versus ICAP s. So I'm trying to figure out what's the implication of -- which of your end markets are getting more impacted given that there are different etch deposition, pattern intensities, pattern intensities in system configurations. Is Foundrylogic getting more impacted, is it memory that's getting more impacted, is it ICAPS or is it across all of your customers segments and also is your displayed business being impacted as well?

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Harlan, this is Gary. First off, I'd say that the display is not being impacted. Relative to the different device types, I don't know that I would separate one versus the other relative to impact. And just as an example, in the FoundryLogic business, ICAP and Varian our business in ICAP our share is up significantly in our implant market and our revenue was up 4X over the last 2 years. Again, I think that when you look across the different products, there are specific components. It's not broad-based, but again, I wouldn't necessarily say that it's one market or another when you look at the impact.

[Harlan Sur, JPMorgan]

Okay. Thank you.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thanks, Harlan.

[Operator]

Thanks. Your next question comes from Joe Quatrochi with Wells Fargo. You may proceed with your question.

[Joe Quatrochi, Wells Fargo]

Yeah. Thanks for taking the question. I want to double-click on your expectations for first half calendar 2022 being above second half '21. Does that apply to memory as well or should we think about that growth being mostly FoundryLogic driven and maybe memory is more second half weighted?

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

If you look at our 2021 data in terms of memory versus logic, we were a little stronger in the first half on memory. And then if you look at the actual data, so our foundry was a little stronger in the second half and our memory nano a little stronger than the first half and DRAM a little strong in second half actually. If you look at next year, we think the year is flattish. We think it's probably a little more second half weighted than memory next year. I think foundry's pretty strong throughout the year, but I don't think there's a big delta.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Yeah. So overall WFE --

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

I think the overall WFE is up. I think Foundry is a bigger percentage. I think memory is kind of flattish and up a little bit drams down a little bit. I think the split within next year. My memory is memory is, it was a little better in the second half, but I'm not sure.

[Joe Quatrochi, Wells Fargo]

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thanks, Joe.

[Operator]

Thank you. Our next question comes from Patrick Ho with Stifel. You may proceed with your question.

[Patrick Ho, Stifel]

Thank you very much. And likewise, Bob. I guess one rodeo wasn't enough for you, so welcome back. Maybe just following up on the AGS side of things. Given the high utilization rate, the high demand for chips today, have you seen any core incremental type of pickups in your services?business? just because your customers are trying to keep their tools running as best as possible? Are you seeing any incremental pickup in subscription businesses just because of the current environment.

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

I think the answer is yes. I'm not sure if I cover it completely on the call I'll give you some -- you guys like data. If you look -- I want to look at sustainability of all this. So we looked at bookings, backlog, orders, rates, stuff like that. The other thing I looked at was growth in wafer starts and tool utilization. So I'm not sure we said in the call, but tool utilization at the end of the calendar fiscal year was at an all-time high in the last 11 years I looked back at across all device types. So that gave me confidence this thing is sustainable and looks pretty good and is good for our service business.

Then I also looked at growth in WFE starts and growth in wafer starts, I think I've said in the call is about 40 % Foundrylogic and about 20 % memory since 2016, particularly strong in 300 millimeter wafer starts for Foundrylogic. So that if you go with -- the question you asked Patrick, we grew our service business 12 % -- 21 % last year, we 're looking at about 12 % this year. And if you look at high utilization, FoundryLogic tool is growing particularly well for us. We did pretty well in etchs and previous years also. I see a service and we increased our contract and the life of our contracts from 1 to 3 years. The subscription revenue business, sustainability of the service business looks really good.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

Hey Patrick, this is Gary, yeah, just one other comment. In the discussions I've had with all of these CEOs, one thing that was pointed out was that, having these subscription agreements and forecasted parts management, they said we're profiling better than others, because they have those parts there. So from a supply standpoint, they said that was a big differentiator and gives them more conviction to continue and expand that type of approach.

[Patrick Ho, Stifel]

Great. Thank you.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thanks, Patrick. And, Operator, we have time for 2 more questions, please.

[Operator]

Thank you. Your next question comes from Quinn Bolton with Needham & Company. You may proceed with your question.

[Quinn Bolton, Needham & Company]

Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask about your outlook for China next year. In 2022, you said it would be down slightly wondering if you could give us a little bit more color, what's driving that decline? Is it just digestion of capacity put in place this year? Do you see any political or export control impact or perhaps a trend towards supplier localization in China next year?

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

Let me give you some -- you guys are good data guys and I'll give you some data. So 3 things in China, it's down some next year, but pretty strong. The second thing is if you look at trend in local versus -- spending by local companies versus international companies, it's trending up. It was high seventies, 77 % this year, about 82 % next year. The third is mix and business. So they have trended like the rest of the world to go a little bit more Foundry. So they were like 52 % -- 48 % percent memory this year, they're going to like 52 % next year. So they're trending that way. In terms of where it's down, I think DRAM is now a little bit in China next year and Foundry, but the mix to Foundry is trending up.

[Quinn Bolton, Needham & Company]

Thank you.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thank you.

[Operator]

Thank you. And the last question comes from Sidney Ho with Deutsche Bank. You may proceed with your question.

[Sidney Ho, Deutsche Bank]

Thanks -- thanks for squeezing me in. I have a question on the process control side. You guys talked about process control was not an area that was impacted by supply constraints and now growing about 80 % -- 60 % for this year. You also talked about a number of AIX engagements potentially tripling next year instead of doubling. Just can you help us understand how these engagements impact your revenue growth potential. Do they generate translate into revenue in the same year or number of years, do they increase over the overall size of the market or just an opportunity for Applied to gain shares? And generally, just how you measure success with those engagements. Thanks.

[Gary Dickerson, CEO]

This is Gary. Thanks for the question. The fastest growing largest part of our PDC businesses are E-Beam product family. And we have tremendous leadership there. We're growing share a significant amount. The strength is really on our resolution and speed of imaging, and we're expanding that gap with coalfield emission where we have about 50 % resolution advantage versus others. And so when you think about certainly the growth there, we have line of sight to really good growth also in 2022, this call optimization with E-Beam is very, very important. We talked about that and example for capacitor scaling, where we're combining a new material we call Draco with innovative etch technology and basically optimizing these process is incredibly complex.

You are trying to optimize many, many different parameters at the same time and the goal is to optimize those recipes as fast as possible with big process window, because that directly impacts yield. So this combination with E-Beam is incredibly important. When you think about again, capacitor scaling, or gate-all-around or any of these big inflections, the ability to map that out and look at those fingerprints across a chip, you look at pattern loading for isolated dense structures, fingerprints across the wafer, being able to map out this multidimension space and with the unique imaging of those features, which we have with our E-Beam system.

And then we talked about the Applied process recipe optimization, Applied Pro within AIX, is really an enormous focus for all of our different customers. So it certainly is growing our -- our PDC business, but even more impactful, the opportunity for us to capture value with our IMS platforms or co-optimized platforms is worth billions of dollars. So that is an accelerator for us that were, that gives us a tailwind, whether it's low or gate-all-around, memory scaling, all of those different capabilities and that's a great leading indicator going from 25 engagements to 75 next year. It does translate into wins in terms of these big inflections, accelerating the inflections but T of the PPACt is worth an enormous amount for our customers. So it's really -- it's tremendously synergistic with our overall strategy and opportunity.

[Sidney Ho, Deutsche Bank]

Thank you.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

Thank you, Sydney. And Bob, would you like to help us close the call with some summary thoughts and --

[Bob Halliday, CFO]

I have some summary thoughts, but first I'm going to go off script and just say it's great to be back with the team including Gary. And when I visualize coming back, I thought to myself a little bit like Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Terminator, I'll be back. And then, unfortunately we won't hear something more as Gabe Kaplan welcome back Carter, but am back anyway. Let's do the three-legged stool. Our markets are strong and great shape. We think WFE is up next year and frankly I'm positively bias ed to '23. Second, Applied's position is strong. Our spending -- our demand is great.

Our orders are great. Our back load is great. The mix of the demand is really favorable for us, including FoundryLogic, these advanced devices, ICAPS. It's really great. Number 3 is our financial performance accountable returns. I have to admit I was impressed that the gross margins went up 240 points this year, and we're up 540 points or 5.4% operating margins. And last year we returned 96 % of free cash flow to investors and we look at a really strong cash flow this year. So I think the Company is just in fundamentally great shape. We have supply chain headwinds. We take full accountability for making it work and delivered to customers. We are all over this issue the next quarter or so, we're going to make a lot of progress. But fundamentally, this Company is in great shape and I'm looking forward to work with all of you again.

[Michael Sullivan, Corporate Vice President]

All right, thanks, Bob. We'd like to thank everybody for joining us today. A replay of the call is going to be available on our website by 5:00 PM Pacific Time today. And Gary and I look forward to seeing many of you at the Credit Suisse Conference in Scottsdale in just a little while. And so Happy Thanksgiving and thank you for your continued interest in Applied Materials.

[Operator]

Thank you. This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.