Martin B. Anstice
Analyst · Timothy Arcuri with Cowan and Company
Thank you for asking the questions, Tim, I'm glad you did. And I'll repeat, somewhat, the answer I gave you last time we talked about this. One of the things, I hope, everybody appreciates is the complexity associated with bringing 2 companies together. I mean, at the high level, there are integration challenges, there are product portfolio challenges, there are business process integrations, SAP systems and there is getting to know the financial performance of the company. And in every respect, we've gone through a tremendous learning curve in the last 12 to 18 months, and that includes, relative to financial performance, our guidance for the last 15, 18 months, and our guidance today is defined, in exactly the same way it has been in every year of the 13 years that I've been in Lam Research, it's our best view of our performance. And the fact that we've beaten this is sometimes the byproduct of we're kind of getting to know the company and learning how its inflows are influenced in the short term. Some part of it is, we've had changes of behavior from customers and we've had positive surprises that we've been out to exploit, competitively. And the headline that Doug conveyed, right at the end, I think, is a very important one. There is a reason why we have the long-term models of the company, they're intended to be the best commentary we can give you on financial statements and what I would not want to happen is for everybody to go, "Oh. Every time they've beaten for the last 6. Therefore, we're going to add that $0.10 to every forward-looking guidance, because that would be inconsistent with the message that we're trying to communicate. But we're doing our very best to communicate through the eyes of management, sometimes we get positive surprises, sometimes we're more effective managing the company than we originally anticipated. But the guidance and the framework of long-term models is the very best commentary we can give you.