The bulk of the Q1 earnings season may be behind the industry, but there are still some pins and needles on Wall Street as the 800-pound gorilla of process equipment reports Tuesday.
In an earnings season that could literally be called a mixed bag of results, the equipment sector in particular hasn't proved very bullish, even as some chipmakers and backend services providers have declared the industry has bottomed out and growth will return soon.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Applied, the largest equipment vendor in the world, nearly twice as big as its nearest competitor in terms of annual revenue, is looked to as a bellwether not only for the equipment biz but the entire industry. Wall Street naturally keeps close tabs on the doings at Applied.
Analysts at Wall Street firm Goldman Sachs Inc. forecast that Applied's revenues for the quarter will come in at $1.8 billion, with earnings per share of 16 percent, while orders will be down 5 percent sequentially to 1.6 billion. On its last earnings call, Applied management guided orders to be flat to down 10 percent for the quarter.
Meanwhile, San Francisco-based financial market research firm AmTech Research likewise expect Applied's April quarter orders to be down 5 percent sequentially, but believes that orders have stabilized, and that Applied could guide orders to rise 5 percent in the current quarter.
AmTech also expects Applied's quarterly revenue to be around $1.8 billion, with earnings per share of 17 cents, while analysts at Goldman Sachs, noted bears on Wall Street, expect the company to guide sequential quarterly order totals to be flattish.
"We continue to expect declining DRAM orders to negatively impact semi equipment orders (and) we expect Applied’s overall orders to weaken as we move throughout calendar Q2 and the second half of 2005," Goldman Sachs analysts said in a research note today.
While Goldman Sachs recommended investors sell Applied stock heading into tomorrow's conference call and earnings report, AmTech Research maintained its buy rating.
"Our cautious view on the stock is driven by: Our checks indicate that the company is continuing to offer attractive pricing terms to customers, which we expect to negatively impact gross margins over the coming quarters. As we wrote in our weekly out last week and in our notes post our tour of Asia in late March, several customers are indicating that they are getting favorable terms from their equipment vendors (including Applied) with price discounts on tools of over 50 percent in some cases," Goldman Sachs said.
"We believe price discounting has two important implications. First, when the equipment vendors offer price discounts during a downturn, they are continuing to ship excess capacity into the industry that already has excess capacity, thus exacerbating the imbalance between supply and demand," the analysts stated. "Second, price discounting negatively impacts gross margins. Applied experienced 400 basis points of peak-to-peak margin contraction this cycle as compared to last, we believe driven in part by price cuts. We will therefore be focused on both the timing and magnitude of price cuts on margins when Applied reports on Tuesday, as the price cuts may begin to show up in calendar Q2 or later in the year as lower margin orders begin to ship from backlog.
Goldman Sachs went on to observe that many chipmakers 2005 capex budgets are front-half loaded, including big spenders Intel, TSMC, Samsung, Hynix, Powerchip, AMD, SMIC, and STMicro, thus second-half shipments – and hence revenue – are likely to decline.
On the other hand, AmTech analyst Bill Ong suggests Applied's orders should improve sequentially in the current quarter, with business from Taiwan and Japan driving a slight rebound. "As a perspective, Applied suffered larger percentage declines from the recent order peak relative to the other major fab tool providers. The September 2004 quarter was generally the peak in fab tool orders for Lam Research, Novellus, and Mattson and Applied ," Ong stated in a research note. "KLA-Tencor's peak order quarter was June 2004, which is also its fiscal year-end, which likely contributed to some order pull-in.
"For several of the major fab tool vendors, the order decline from last year's peak levels to the current June 2005 quarter guidance is within a narrow range," Ong said. "KLA-Tencor and Novellus saw a peak to current order decline of 30 percent and 28 percent, respectively, while Lam Research experienced a 26 percent decline that was offset by some share gains.
"Applied Materials saw a more substantial decline from its order peak level of October 2004 to our current April quarter order expectations of about 40," he continued. "We believe that Applied should start to see some sequential order improvement as demand in the Asian region starts to return."
Layoffs at Applied?
Despite a relatively bullish outlook on order growth, Ong suggested that all might not be rosy at Applied.
"We believe that Applied's business units are undergoing rapid change to improve efficiencies and profitability within each product line group," Ong stated in his research note. "While historically, each product group had P/L financial responsibilities, staffing requirements were still generally controlled at the corporate function level. We believe the new internal business model delegates staff management to each product line group.
Thus, historically when Applied's business outlook weakened, headcount reductions were generally implemented across all departments. In the new model, the product groups will manage staff reductions or additions that are consistent with business unit profitability," he said.
"We believe several business units have already implemented headcount reductions such as the global services group, the etch group and the ion implant group. Business units that are maintaining their staff levels or absorbing internal transfers include CVD, PVD and AKT (the flat panel display equipment division)," Ong reported.
Applied had about 12,900 employees at the end of its January quarter, including about 700 employees from its Metron acquisition, according to AmTech. "Thus, we believe the global service group could see a more sizable headcount reduction as it absorbs Metron's service business," Ong said. "Additionally, by delegating staff reduction responsibilities to the division level, a sizable cut in staffing within the divisional group would translate to a smaller material impact as a company aggregate and thus is not likely to warrant a formal press announcement."