Ultra Clean Holdings, Inc. (UCTT) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the UCT Reports First Quarter 2026 Financial Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Tuesday, April 28, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Rhonda Bennetto, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me today are James Xiao, CEO; Sheri Savage, CFO; and Cheryl Knepfler, VP Marketing. James will begin with some prepared remarks about the industry and highlight some of the opportunities ahead for UCT. Sheri will follow with the financial review, and then we'll open up the call for questions. Today's call contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. For more information, please refer to the Risk Factors section in our SEC filings. All forward-looking statements are based on estimates, projections and assumptions as of today, and we assume no obligation to update them after this call. Discussion of our financial results will be presented on a non-GAAP basis. A reconciliation of GAAP to non-GAAP can be found in today's press release posted on our website. Also, beginning this quarter, our non-GAAP results now exclude the impact of unrealized gains and losses on foreign exchange and our revised reference to prior periods was included in our fourth quarter earnings press release back in February. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to James. James, please go ahead.

Thank you, Rhonda, and good afternoon, everyone. We appreciate you joining us for the Q1 2026 earnings call. In my prepared remarks, I will provide my thoughts on the near and longer-term market drivers and highlight where UCT has a clear competitive advantage to capitalize on a variety of opportunities during this multiyear up cycle. Following that, Sheri will provide a financial update, and then we will open up the call for questions. We started the year out strong and delivered revenue and earnings above the midpoint of our guided range for the first quarter, driven by solid execution across a broad set of products, services and customers. As you can see in our Q2 guidance, we're seeing momentum build across the semiconductor landscape, supported by growing industry-wide investments in AI-driven computing. I'd like to acknowledge our global teams for the sense of urgency, focus and operational excellence they continue to demonstrate every day. Their commitment to our customers and to driving the continuous improvement is elevating our performance today and positioning UCT to compete and win in the next phase of AI-driven growth. The rapid expansion of AI infrastructure is fueling increased investments across the semiconductor ecosystem, with hyperscalers and cloud providers expect to deploy significant data center capacity by spending around $600 billion in 2026, driving demand sharply higher. Investment by memory companies to address the bottleneck will remove a major constraint to the overall server supply chain, increasing foundry unit demand to support this growth. AI data center growth is being fueled by the rapid adoption of generative and agentic AI, and we're now seeing the early impact of physical AI as well. This new wave is driving increased demand for AI memory and leading-edge foundry logic, further accelerating fab capacity investments. These investments are driving the surge in WFE spending, with notably strong demand in leading-edge foundry logic, high-bandwidth memory and advanced packaging, all critical enablers of AI workloads. Increasing device complexity is driving higher process and equipment intensity, especially in deposition and removal, sustaining the WFE cycle and expanding UCT's opportunity. Demand continued to build week by week, and we expect this momentum to increase as customers gain clarity on fab time lines, delivery schedules and ramp readiness. Long-term customer forecast and capacity requests reinforce our confidence in continued WFE demand growth with our services business directly tied to wafer starts. We are also seeing increasing wafer volumes across IDMs and foundries, driven by AI demand and ongoing fab expansions with higher tool utilization, creating a durable multiyear growth tailwind for our service business. We're aligned with our customers and industry sentiment that we're in the early stage of a multiyear cycle that should accelerate into the second half of this year and beyond. Strong demand is occurring alongside emerging supply side constraints, including clean room capacity and the time required to bring new fabs online. As a result, today's environment is driven not only by demand, but also by the industry's ability to scale efficiently. By executing on our UCT 3.0 growth strategy, we are strategically positioning to win in this environment. Ramp readiness remains a top priority under UCT 3.0. We are executing with urgency and a customer-first mindset. We align our teams, systems and supply chain to deliver with speed, quality and consistency. We see the AI-driven ramp as a meaningful opportunity to drive growth and expand margins through improved utilization and more efficient operations and infrastructure. In parallel, we're advancing our MPX strategy, new product introduction, development and transition to accelerate time to market through our global centers of excellence. By co-innovating earlier with customers, compressing NPI cycles and strengthening responsiveness and the supply chain resilience, we are enabling faster ramps to high-volume production near our customers. This positions us to execute at speed and scale, supporting incremental share gains as customers prioritize development velocity and ramp speed, while driving UCT's operating leverage and margin expansion through higher volumes, improved mix and greater efficiency. Supporting ramp readiness and MPX, we're making strong progress on our third UCT 3.0 initiative, digital transformation. We are upgrading our systems, processes and data infrastructure with AI compatible solutions to improve visibility, reduce cycle times and increase productivity, while enabling faster customer response. These efforts are strengthening our foundation for AI-enabled operations, increasing agility, driving productivity gains and transforming UCT into a more scalable enterprise aligned to capture growth in this multiyear AI-driven industry upturn. Our global footprint supports around $3 billion in revenue today and can scale up to $4 billion with modest incremental capital investment. Assuming continued progress in workforce development, strategic supply chain and operational scaling, we do not expect infrastructure capacity to be our constraint. As volumes ramp, this should allow UCT to drive stronger operating leverage, improve profitability and create sustainable value. In closing, while the long-term outlook remains strong, the near-term environment remains dynamic with variability across customer spending, potential supply chain constraints and geopolitics. In this environment, disciplined execution will define the winners. With our trusted partnership with key customers, strong ramp readiness and a global footprint that enables speed, agility and scale, we believe we are well positioned to capture an outsized portion of the opportunities ahead of us. I will now turn the call over to Sheri, who will summarize our first quarter results and update you with our second quarter guidance. I look forward to your questions following the financial summary. Thank you.

Thanks, James, and good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for joining us. In today's discussion, I will be referring to non-GAAP numbers only. As James mentioned, we are seeing increased momentum from the early stages of a multiyear AI-driven expansion, and we're executing with urgency to support customer ramps while maintaining a strong focus on operational efficiency, cost discipline and margin improvement. For the first quarter of 2026, total revenue came in at $533.7 million compared to $506.6 million in the prior quarter. Revenue from products was $465.7 million compared to $442.4 million last quarter. Services revenue was $68 million in Q1 compared to $64.2 million in Q4. Our global footprint supports about $3 billion in revenue today and can scale to approximately $4 billion with modest incremental capital investment. With ongoing progress in workforce and operational scaling, we do not expect capacity constraints. As production increases over time, we would expect to benefit from improved operating leverage and corresponding margin expansion. Total gross margin for the first quarter was 16.5% compared to 16.1% last quarter. Product gross margin was 14.6% compared to 14.1% in Q4 and services was 30% compared to 29.7% last quarter. Gross margin improved primarily due to better product mix and higher volumes, driving factory efficiencies. Margins continue to be influenced by fluctuations in volume, mix and manufacturing region as well as material and transportation costs. So there will be variances quarter-to-quarter. Operating expense for the quarter was $61.1 million compared to $56.6 million in Q4. As a percentage of revenue, operating expenses were 11.4% versus 11.2% last quarter. Total operating margin for the quarter came in at 5.1% compared to 4.9% last quarter. Margin from our products division was 4.2% compared to 3.9% and services margin was 11.5% compared to 12.4% in the prior quarter. The first quarter tax rate came in at 20%, consistent with our expectations. Our mix of earnings between higher and lower tax jurisdictions can cause our rate to fluctuate throughout the year. For 2026, we expect our tax rate to stay in the low 20% range. Based on 46.3 million shares outstanding, earnings per share for the quarter were $0.31 on net income of $14.5 million compared to $0.24 on net income of $10.9 million in the prior quarter. During the quarter, we made the strategic decision to further strengthen our balance sheet and meaningfully reduce our ongoing cost of capital. In February, we priced a $600 million offering of zero-coupon convertible senior notes. We used a portion of the proceeds to fully repay our Term Loan B, reducing our annual cash interest expense by approximately $30 million. Subsequent to quarter end, we refinanced and upsized our revolving credit facility from $150 million to $250 million, reduced the interest margin by 75 basis points and extended the maturity to 2031, further enhancing our liquidity and financial flexibility. Together, these actions are expected to reduce our weighted average borrowing rate from around 6.2% to approximately 1.4%. Turning to the balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents were $323.5 million compared to $311.8 million at the end of last quarter. Operating cash flow was negative $33.3 million this quarter compared to positive $8.1 million last quarter, driven primarily by higher working capital as we build inventory to meet near-term demand and support future growth. We are seeing broad-based improvements across the semiconductor landscape heading into the second half of this year and beyond, underpinned by sustained industry investment in AI-driven computing. We remain focused on maintaining discipline around margin expansion and driving sustainable shareholder returns over time. Turning to the guidance. For the second quarter, we project total revenue to be between $565 million and $605 million and EPS in the range of $0.44 to $0.60. And with that, I'd like to turn the call over to the operator for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from the line of Charles Shi from Needham.

Maybe the first question, James, what's the WFE outlook you are seeing as of today? And I think in your prepared remarks, there's a line you mentioned you talked about solving the memory bottleneck and the relation to how that increases foundry unit output. And I'm not sure the context of that line. And are you kind of implying maybe the memory WFE growth is pretty high today, maybe some of that strength will transition more to the leading-edge foundry logic? I'm not sure what you meant by that line, but can you elaborate a little bit while you address the WFE outlook question.

Thanks, Charles. Yes, so the WFE outlook is really continue to grow bigger than we saw the previous quarter. We see really from our customers, they're quoting $140 billion to $145 billion in 2026. So that's dependent on where you see the '25 number end up with at 18% to 20% year-over-year growth. And we see the similar momentum. The customers are talking about 15% and above for the 2027. So to your question about the memory growth, I think that we kind of see that the AI capacity is somehow gated by the memory capacity in the past 3, 4 quarters. And now we see that all the major memory customers are investing in their greenfield factories and also upgrading their existing fabs to maximize their current footprint. So that actually gave a whole industry an unlock of the constrained capacity. So we see more of the new leading-edge new factory launches in basically all 3 leading customers, TSMC, Intel and Samsung.

Got it. So maybe the second question, James, I understand that the outlook is getting stronger on a week-by-week basis. You gave a special shout out to etch deposition, and I think that's well understood. But is there any part of your end markets that may still be a little bit slow, maybe even on a relative basis? I didn't hear you talk about lithography. I didn't hear you talk about your domestic Chinese customers. So what's going on there in those areas?

Yes. I think that, first of all, very good question. If you see the -- really the fast-growing segment in WFE overall, it is really the leading-edge foundry logic and HBM on the memory side and advanced packaging. So those are more an etch and removal intensive in terms of capital intensity. So therefore, relatively, you hear our customers are saying that they see that the first half, the deposition and etch is at mid-30s of the WFE. And in the second half, they see that increase to the high 30s of WFE. So naturally, because this high-growth area are etch and dep intensive, so we see a higher share of dep and etch in overall WFE. The flattish area we see is probably the non-dep and etch segment overall. And the surprising is the trailing node foundry logic are also not going down. They're more like flattish. China, as we discussed before, it was a kind of building inventory safety stock situation in '24 and '25. Therefore, they're really kind of become a bigger portion of worldwide WFE at 35 to 40. Now we're seeing they're back to normal in the low 20s as the portion of the worldwide WFE. So I don't think that's an outlier. It's more back to the normal business situation.

Got it. Maybe the last question from me, if I may. If I understand the typical behavior of your customers correctly, I think this is a year -- I mean this year is when they are competing for basically who can ship tools faster to their customers. How do you assess in this kind of situation, whether the requests are coming from your customers are reasonable, whether -- or if any chance some of the requests you would see unreasonable and potentially at the expense of the growth for your outer years? How do you handle the situation like that and in terms of how you allocate your capacity, grow your capacity, et cetera? Just maybe a little bit of high-level philosophical question from -- I want to understand how you operate in an environment like this.

Actually, this is a great question. I think that I really see a very healthy move as an industry. What I mean by that is that we see the customer actually giving us a long-term forecast, so we can do the planning better. And the long-term forecast is actually showing the growth momentum. They gave us a confidence to really kind of utilize our current capacity and also have the confidence to plan for the next step expansion. As I mentioned in my previous earnings call and this one, we really have capacity to really run at $3 billion run rate per year. The current run rate is still $2 billion, $2.2 billion. So we have the runway to really kind of address additional demand. And our brick-and-mortar capacity can handle up to $4 billion. So by minimal capital investment, we can have 6 to 9 months to build that capacity so we can really reach the $4 billion run rate. So in that sense, we're well positioned to address the drop-in demand from our customers.

Our next question comes from the line of Krish Sankar from TD Cowen.

This is Robert Mertens on the line on behalf of Krish. I guess the first one is just around your domestic China business. Do you have a percentage of sales figure you could share for the March quarter? And just how you sort of expect that portion of your business to trend given that the current semi-cap customers in China have been doing pretty well.

Yes. As we previously discussed, the percentage of our China business, domestic China business is less than 5% of our overall revenue. We maintain that kind of range. And what we see is that gradually the domestic Chinese WFE customers will increase their share within the China WFE market. And we see also the growth opportunity as we grow the share with those Chinese customers.

Our next question is from Christian Schwab from Craig-Hallum Capital Group.

Great. Congrats on the great quarter and outlook. Given the demand is improving week by week, I guess it's kind of crystal clear. But do you -- as you look at the year, do you have an idea of what percentage of revenue will be second half weighted versus the first half?

Yes, great question. So we -- as you can see that in our forecast, we're seeing close to double-digit growth quarter-over-quarter from Q1 to Q2. We expect a similar range of growth going forward and for the second half.

Perfect. And then can you give us -- given $4 billion in revenue driven by increased WFE, but finally seeing a very material increase in wafer starts to drive your services business. When you talk about $4 billion in revenue potential and another $1 billion that could be added given a modest amount of capital and notice to put that online, what would you anticipate would be your mix of revenue at $4 billion that would be service?

Yes, I think it's a good question. So as we discussed, we see that the -- our service revenue is really a function of wafer starts and a small portion of that business is also directly correlated to the WFE growth. So in an aggregated base, we expect a double-digit growth for the year on the service side. And going forward, we still see a range of 10% to 12% as our overall revenue percentage.

Great. And then lastly, historically, if we go back to '20 and '21 as far as the last accelerated WFE spending cycle, you outgrew WFE growth materially. And should we assume the big not only market share gains and certainly your ability to potentially gain share with the ease of adding increased capacity. But as far as outgrowing WFE, there's a lag period between installing fab equipment and wafer starts being finished, which is the driver of the services business, I guess, in aggregate. Is that the way we should be thinking about the primary driver of your growth outperforming WFE? Or do you think this cycle, you're better positioned for market share gains?

Yes. So we definitely see that we will grow with the WFE growth and with really the upside potential on both product side and service side. And really, to me, the playbook is always to defend the core, which we are really in a leading position and grow the SAM. So we enter into new modules and new gas panel business as our customers expand their product portfolio. And then finally, win at inflection. So position ourselves with stronger NPI capabilities so we can align with customers' NPI road map and win in the next node inflection.

Our next question is from Edward Yang from Oppenheimer.

Just first question, related to that strong second quarter guide on the revenue side and for the remainder of the year, how should we think about gross margin progression?

Yes. Gross margin should start to continue to improve as we move through the year. Obviously, we'll see it being slightly up in Q2 and then continue to grow as we move through the year as the revenue potentially goes up. So obviously, mix and where it's shipping from does play a factor in that and things change as we move through the year, but we truly do see it moving up as we get closer to the Q4 time frame.

And Sheri, if I could dig a little deeper related to mix. I mean you've got a plethora of different products and services. Just focusing on the product side, what are the gross margin differentials between your lowest and highest? And what's your highest margin products and maybe talk some detail around that.

Yes. We probably don't publish as much on the specific product margins. But as I've mentioned before, we have a large bell curve of margins, so they can range anywhere between 10% to 50% to 60% depending upon whether it's a component part or it's a module or a gas panel. So it just really depends on the sheer volume of each of those mixes of products that play into our overall gross margin, along with how fast the revenue comes in to us and how fast we can hire labor and other costs associated with that. So those are the key factors that play into our margin as we grow revenue. So again, a large bell curve of margins. There's quite a few different products and different margins within those products as well. So that's why it makes it complicated to detail all of those out.

Got it. And maybe a question for James. Beyond the general uplift in WFE, you mentioned your UCT 3.0 strategy. I know it's a long-term vision, but just interested in the progress around that, the co-innovator and the MPX framework. And just wondering how customer receptivity has been to that? And when can we expect to see specific market share gains or new module wins around that MPX framework?

We are -- great question. We are investing in our, I call it, regionalized center of excellence. So basically, we have NPI Center of Excellence in U.S. We further enhance that. And we're actually expanding our NPI capabilities in Asia and also in Europe. So the customer wants to have the engineers co-innovate, define the spec and really design the system and modules close to their core engineering team. That's actually in Europe, in U.S. and expanding to Asia. So we follow customers' need on that. Then we will also transfer that locally by region to our HVM site, also distribute in all the regions, right, U.S. and Europe and Southeast Asia. And that's really well aligned with our customer strategy where they're also moving their global engineering footprint close to their high-value production sites. So well received by customer. We see some early momentum, and that's actually accelerating our NPI engagement with customers. We already have a pretty strong pipeline of NPI engagement with existing customers. This regionalized center of excellence just further enhance our capabilities.

Our next question is from Krish Sankar from TD Cowen.

I realize I put myself on mute after my first prior question. And my second question was going to be around the margin profile, but you just answered it. So I won't make you repeat yourself.

I'd like to turn the call back over to Sheri Savage for an announcement.

Thank you, operator. I have an announcement to make, and I wanted to share it on this call because I personally know many of you here today. After a lot of thought, I've decided to retire from UCT. Being part of UCT's journey over the past 17 years has been an incredible privilege. I'm incredibly proud of what we've built together, and I'm deeply grateful for the trust, partnership and support of our teams, our leadership and our Board. I'm confident that UCT is ideally positioned for continued growth and success in the years ahead. I'll remain fully engaged until we find my successor, looking both internally and externally, and I'll continue behind the scenes to ensure a smooth transition. Thank you for making this journey meaningful and rewarding for me. I really appreciate the support many of you have given to me over the years. And with that, thank you for joining our call today, and we look forward to seeing you when we report our second quarter earnings. Thanks.

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