Martin B. Anstice
Analyst · JP Morgan
Thank you, Shanye, and good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'll start by sharing the highlights of 2013 company performance and then discuss our outlook for 2014, which provides our perspective on Lam's opportunities and areas of focus over the next 12 months. Doug will then follow with our financial results and guidance commentary before turning the call to Q&A. 2013 was an extraordinary year for Lam Research that establishes a platform for our future and unifies more than 6,500 global employees around the achievements of an exciting vision. We achieved nearly $4 billion of revenues and delivered in excess of our targeted gross margins for the 2013, 2014 timeframe of approximately 45%, representing an increase of 170 basis points year-over-year. We grew operating profit dollars twice as fast as revenues, illustrating our ongoing focus on strong operational execution and profitable growth. We delivered on time our committed synergy targets, with $100 million in annualized cost savings and approximately $130 million in revenues, both achieved with strong collaboration and ownership across the company. Accelerated by our reenergized commitment to installed base performance, we closed the largest service contract in the company's history, tailored to support a broad range of customer-specific needs. And we defended our positions or gained market share in all of our business units through a period of evermore challenging customer requirements and competitive intensity. Combined, our performance in 2013 enabled us to outpace industry growth by a healthy margin, with system shipments up about 10% year-over-year for Lam and Novellus combined, compared with wafer fabrication equipment spending up around 3% to approximately $29 billion. This 2013 performance demonstrates solid execution against our near term financial models, at a pace that we consider slightly ahead of schedule. As we move into 2014, we're continuing to aggressively pursue opportunities to drive further efficiencies in support of our growth objectives. We continue to position next-generation products targeting increased competitive differentiation and lower cost, both critical for the achievements of next level profit performance defined by our 2015, 2016 financial model. We kicked off a multi-year plan to consolidate our real estate footprints, which we expect will drive incremental operating improvements. These plans also serve to increase the efficiency of our R&D activities and further promote collaboration across the organization, a key differentiator leveraging our culture and core value of customer, company and the individual. We also established comprehensive 3-year plans across our integrated manufacturing and supply chain, which are based on an in-depth assessment of performance over the past 18 months. Our plans are built on our sustained commitments to pilot line and high-volume manufacturing strategic locations and strategic partnerships, outsourcing and localization. We target cost, quality and service benefits through these plans, which serve to increase our focus and strengthen competitive differentiation going forward. In summary, through performance that meets or exceeds commitments made and the establishment of plans for execution for our future vision, 2013 was an extraordinary year and one which we hope serves to continue to compel our full stakeholder community, our shareholders, our customers, our suppliers and last, but not the least, our employees to invest in Lam for the long-term. With our guidance and commentary today, we believe that we are off to a great start this year, and look forward to discussing more with you in the months ahead. Our growth outlook for 2014 is enabled by our customer transition to next-generation logic and memory devices that make the much-anticipated inflections tangible and expanding opportunities for the company as customer adoption broadens through 2015. We continue to forecast 2014 WFE spending of $32 billion, plus or minus $2 billion, with an incrementally broader participation of customers assumed relative to 2013. More than ever, the landscape of this year's investment pattern is influenced by the timing of inflection-specific activities. Although overall, we expect a reasonably balanced year, first half compared to second half, we do see variability quarter-to-quarter, resulting from the influence of a consolidated customer base and remaining uncertainty around the ultimate scope and timing of spending at the 4 inflections: FinFET, 3D NAND, patterning and packaging. In the foundry segments, we saw the pace of 20-nanometer investments accelerate at the end of 2013, signaling a robust commitment in the demand for devices using 20-nanometer technology. As of today, spending is more heavily concentrated between a couple of customers, with capacity additions and conversion activities plans, primarily for the first half of this year. In the recent period, the foundry space has arguably grown more competitive, with new entrants challenging the delineation of traditional pure-play foundries and logic manufacturers. For foundries, the race to develop FinFET devices has led to multiple pilot line projects starting in the first half of this year. We expect those investments to continue through the year with total capacity additions dependent on end-user demand and the pace at which production ramps yield. Taken together, our prior forecast for foundry spending between $13 billion and $14 billion, still seems reasonable for 2014. Similarly, we maintained our forecast for microprocessor and other logic spending of around $6 billion or relatively flat with 2013 levels. Continuing the 2013 theme embedded in our forecast is the expectation that significant leading-edge logic production capacity can be satisfied through equipment reuse and capacity conversions. Looking at the memory markets, we continue to see stable pricing conditions and tight supply entering 2014, with customers who continue to exhibit due rigor in evaluating their capital spending decisions. DRAM manufacturers are accelerating transitions to the mid-2x technology nodes and their broader participation of customers are entering 20-nanometer pilot production. We forecast this supply growth in the low 30% range, led by mobile device demand, and this is accomplished largely through equipment upgrade, albeit, with capital intensity higher than prior generations. In the NAND segments, remaining planar capacity additions seem clear and the initial 3D NAND production ramp is progressing largely in accordance with our expectations. Over time, as the 3D devices move to structures with more layers, our customers appear to anticipate cost and performance benefits that support a broad industry conversion, which underpins their plans this year. We currently project between 80,000 and 100,000 wafer starts of 3D NAND shipped capacity will be installed by the end of calendar 2014. In addition, in recent weeks, 2014 planar NAND investment plans to transition the 16-nanometer devices have solidified for more than one customer. Overall, we still expect supply bit growth to be in the low 40% range. On a combined basis, we forecast memory spending will increase by 10% to 20% year-over-year, with wafer fab spends between $12 billion and $13 billion, representing an increasing proportion of WFE year-over-year at approximately 40% of the total. Adding this all together, our outlook for 2014 wafer fabrication equipment spending, with a midpoint of $32 billion, would represent the fifth consecutive year with relatively healthy and disciplined equipment spending. It's always important to note that visibility beyond this quarter and especially into the second half is clearly more limited than the near term. Where we ultimately end up in our WFE range will largely depend on production readiness and market acceptance of the technology inflections just highlighted. In this positive industry environment, which for Lam, is supplemented by inflection-led addressable market-size expansion and target market share growth, I'm very encouraged by our industry outperform opportunity. With the transition to 3D NAND, we've gained strong production tool decisions, maintaining our lead in etch while driving significant gains in deposition. Our pipeline of new products were key to our success, including our next-generation dielectric etch module, our new highly productive dielectric deposition platform and our differentiated tungsten CVD system. We are well-positioned with each of the 3D NAND pilot lines, we believe, and are focused on achieving, at a minimum, the same degree of success as production tool decisions are finalized. We believe that we have additional opportunities to gain applications through the transition to second and third-generation 3D NAND devices, where the increased number of alternating films also proliferates the complexity of the etch and deposition processes. We're actively engaged with the customers to address those challenges. In the area of multi-patterning, our conductor etch business is benefiting from the increased number of multi-packing steps required with the transition to smaller device geometries. Although device dependent, we see emerging evidence of slightly more than our early estimates of 8 to 10 new multi-packing steps in a 20-nanometer logic device for foundries, compared to a 28-nanometer baseline and the 12 to 13 steps for 16- to 40-nanometer devices. In DRAM, the number of multi-patterning steps more than doubles with the transition to 20-nanometer going from 3 or 4 in a mid-2x device to between 8 and 10 at 20-nanometer, with the same evidence of upsize on number of passes. You should expect more specificity from Lam on this in the coming quarters. This transition also presents growth opportunities for our deposition business. Many of the spacer-based, multi-patterning deposition steps can be done with batch variances [ph] today. However, customers are evaluating or starting to transition these steps to single wafer atomic layer deposition, or ALD tools, as the film conformality and uniformity requirements increased. We're engaged with multiple memory manufacturers with their offside ALD tool and, based on the feedback received so far, believe with continued hard work we are well-positioned for production tool decisions expected this year. In logic, we often talk about the transition to FinFET structures and the complexity around the transistor. However, the complexity in the back-end is growing at a rapidly accelerating pace also. As transistor densities in these devices increase, the wiring schemes required to connect these transistors become more and more complicated. Starting around the 32-nanometer node, customers introduced a metal hard mask x scheme for a couple of wiring layers. The number of layers has grown with each successive node and Lam stands to benefit as the clear market leader for this application. To maintain device reliability and performance, customers began adopting film treatments and other processes that play into a few of Lam's strengths. Our solar, ultraviolet thermal processing tool is the market leader used to improve the integrity of ultra low k films, predominately for leading edge logic devices. The number of layers required in UV cure of low k dielectric films is also increasing with each successive node; again, a positive opportunity for Lam. With thinner and more closely packed films, reliability of top lines is becoming more of a challenge. Lam has developed a unique film pretreatment module which enhances reliability and reduces resistance, a factor in device speed. Our solution was recently selected for next-generation logic devices and we expect to ship production tools through this year. In single-wafer clean, we will have shipped our third next-generation spin clean system as planned in the next couple of weeks. These tools are being installed at leading memory and logic device manufacturers and are being evaluated for a broad range of applications, including front-end-of-line. It's still early, but the initial progress and process data we have received is in line with expectations and the intensity of managing yields to a higher definition access for our customers, clearly very relevant for evaluating that opportunity. We would expect to have broader reliability and process data towards the middle of the June quarter to begin making assessments on how the tools are performing relative to our customers' requirements and our competition in the second half. As we embark on 2014 and beyond, we believe the opportunities available to Lam Research are significant. We're focused on exploiting those opportunities to their fullest by continuing to strengthen our competitiveness. We're increasing the magnitude of new product releases and customer engagements, particularly in the areas of dielectric etch, atomic layer of deposition and single-wafer clean. We're starting to execute newly developed operational plans to drive efficiencies across many aspects of the business, targeted at achieving our 2015, '16 performance ambition. We're reducing our emphasis -- sorry, we're reinforcing our emphasis on customer trust, broader collaboration and strategic relevance to our customer in light of semi equipment consolidation trends. Today, we are very focused on achieving our long-term growth objectives, competing as one integrated company. We have tremendous strength in the capability and commitments of the whole Lam Research team and I would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every employee for their contributions last year, and wish them success in pursuit of our 2014 vision, a year where, at the $32 billion WFE level, we anticipate increasing our operating income over 2013 at twice the rates of our revenue growth; further, growing cash from operations year-over-year at twice the rates of operating income. With that, I will turn the call over to Doug to discuss December quarter financial results in more detail and provide our guidance for the March 2014 quarter.