Lam Research Corporation (LRCX) Presents at BofA Securities 2024 Global Technology Conference (Transcript)

Lam Research Corporation (NASDAQ:LRCX) BofA Securities 2024 Global Technology Conference June 4, 2024 12:20 PM ET

Company Participants

Doug Bettinger – Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Vivek Arya – Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Vivek Arya

This session, I’m Vivek Arya, I lead the semiconductor coverage at Bank of America Securities. I’m really delighted and honored to have Doug Bettinger, CFO of Lam Research, joining us this morning. What I thought we would do is I’ll lead off with my questions that I’ve prepared, but if at any time you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to raise your hand.

So with that, warm welcome, Doug. Thank you for helping us kick off the semiconductor part of our conference.

Doug Bettinger

Of course, Vivek. Let me begin. First, I need to read my safe harbor item. I can’t see if the slide’s up, but my attorneys always like me to get going with this, just in case I say something I’m not supposed to. I’m not going to do that today, but just in case.

Today’s discussion may include forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially. Additional information concerning factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those forward-looking statements can be found in the risk factors disclosed in our public filings with the SEC, including our most recent 10-K and 10-Q. I read that as fast…

Vivek Arya

As I could. Yes. Hard to exceed that level of excitement. But let’s maybe…

Doug Bettinger

I could tell the buzz in the room from that, yeah.

Vivek Arya

Let’s start at the top. You know, we’ll go through the nitty-gritty of, you know, quarters and spending.

Doug Bettinger

Sure, of course.

Vivek Arya

There is this march in the semiconductor industry towards the trillion dollar of sales, right…

Doug Bettinger

Everybody’s excited about it.

Vivek Arya

The decade, you know, from the $600 billion or so where we are at right now. So whether it’s at the end of the decade or thereafter, what does it mean for the semi-cap equipment industry? And then what does it mean specifically for Lam Research?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, I know, it’s a great question, Vivek. And thank you for starting with the big picture question instead of what’s happening this quarter and next quarter. Listen, this is what everybody is excited about relative to the future trajectory of the industry. And I am too, and so is everybody at Lam Research, to be perfectly honest with you.

I think of this industry as a growth cyclical industry. There is a cycle. And oftentimes at these conferences, that’s all anybody wants to talk to me about. Where are we at in the cycle? When are we going to recover? Frankly, that’s important. But when you’re running and managing a company of the scale and scope of Lam, you have to be thinking about what the future looks like. You got to plan for the long term. And sometimes you need to invest through that cycle, which frankly, we’re doing this year.

Because when we look into the future, we do see this trillion dollar industry emerging. And frankly, I don’t know exactly what year, Vivek, but I know it’s going to happen. Everybody’s all bulled up, hyped about AI. AI is a real thing, and it is going to drive a ton of silicon requirements.

And I know some of the questions you’re going to ask me, Vivek, we’ll go through that. But that is a key aspect of the growth trajectory over and above everything else that’s already here, be it analog, power, PC, smartphones. None of that is going away. But the new growth vector is AI, and frankly, automotive. The unit volume in automotive isn’t nearly as high, but the content growth is enormous in some of these electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles.

So when I step back and Tim and I talk about, hey, where are we going with the company? That’s what we think about more than anything else. The company has to be well positioned for where things are going. And so we think about that.

So the second thing is, frankly, then everybody wants to know, okay, if semi-revenue is a trillion dollars, what is WFE? If I’m being honest with you, I don’t know for sure. Capital intensity is going up, though. When I look at the cost of the most leading-edge wafers today in both NAND, in DRAM, in Foundry and Logic, it’s going up per wafer. Everybody likes to triangulate around this CapEx per revenue dollar. And that’s an important metric. And I would encourage you, though, that is an important metric. But the most important metric is CapEx per operating profit dollar. And while CapEx per revenue dollar has ticked up in recent times, CapEx for operating profit is actually dead flat, or actually ticking down a little bit.

So I don’t know what WFE looks like in the trillion-dollar industry. A planning metric or a thinking metric might not be unreasonable to think about 15% of revenue. Might be higher, might be a little bit lower. Largely doesn’t matter. So let’s call it $150 billion in WFE. That’s an awesome segment of the business to be involved in. And like I said, there will be a cycle around moving from the $600 billion to the trillion. But that’s where things are going.

And then if I abstract back, let’s say WFE is $150. The thing that excites me most about our company is when I look at the evolution of the architectures in most of the industry, things are going in the third dimension. That’s largely what Lam Research does for the industry, right? When things go 3D, like NAND did a decade ago, our addressable market doubled for wafer.

You see that beginning to happen today in areas like Gate-All-Around, right? You went from planar to FinFET to Gate-All-Around. Gate-All-Around is a true 3D structure in foundry and logic. Our addressable market is going to grow meaningfully. And the metric we put out is, you know, it looks like a billion dollars for every 100,000 wafer starts that we can address around things like Selective Etch and ALD.

So we can talk, and I know you have things you’re going to ask, so I won’t front run the questions. But when I look at where the industry is going, things are going in the third dimension. So semis are a great industry. Capital equipment is a great segment to be in. And frankly, the unique position Lam sits in wouldn’t trade it for anybody in the industry.

Vivek Arya

Got it.

Doug Bettinger

That’s my big preamble.

Vivek Arya

No, no, it makes a lot of sense. I just wanted to pick up on one of the things that you mentioned about WFE intensity. That’s also a topic of conversation in that, you know, this year, if you look at wafer fab equipment, WFE spending its in that low mid-90s billion or so, as you mentioned.

Doug Bettinger

Low mid-90s is how we see it, yeah.

Vivek Arya

Exactly. So somewhere around mid-teens of sales. What will help it become a bigger, what will help this intensity go up? You know, because does it stay here? Does it go up? And that question is relevant because a lot of investors look at it and say, well, I want to invest in cap equipment if I think they can grow faster, right, than the broader semiconductor industry. So what can help this intensity go up, i.e. cap equipment grow faster than the overall semiconductor industry?

Doug Bettinger

I guess what I’d tell you, Vivek, at the end of the day, it’s hard for me to decompose a trillion dollars in semi-revenue. How much was improvement in pricing units? The unit-based part is what’s important for the equipment side of things.

What I can tell you for sure, though, is capital intensity per wafer at every subsequent process node is growing. That’s the most important thing, at least when we look at it, right? I talked about FinFET going to Gate-All-Around. You’re getting a decent step up in capital intensity per wafer. And like I said, fortunately, when I abstract and look at kind of how architectures are evolving, 3D materials, it benefits the things we do.

Vivek Arya

Got it. And one other interesting thing I think, Doug, you mentioned, and I know you will have a unique perspective, right? Because before Lam, you were at Broadcom, so you have seen the semiconductor part of the industry. And some of those companies have expanded beyond just semis into systems and software. So there are so many more levers of them generating more value and hence being able to pay for this leading-edge technology.

And as we have seen, whether it’s NVIDIA or AMD and others, accelerating their roadmaps, right? From 2 years to 1 year. I imagine that’s also got to be very favorable for capital equipment.

Doug Bettinger

It’s great for capital equipment. And frankly, when you look at some of these accelerator die, the GPU is at the reticle [ph] limit. It frankly can’t get any bigger. And so how does the industry evolve in a situation like that? Advanced packaging, right? You start to hear the industry talk about chiplets and heterogeneous integration.

To create those structures, you need equipment, right? And we are, again, uniquely positioned in TSV, as an example, to do the drill and fill. That benefits the things that we do. So when I look all around this industry, frankly, and I’ve been in the industry a long time now, 30 plus years. I hate to admit it, but it has been that long. I’ve never been more excited about where we’re at. And I started in the beginning of the PC era, or maybe, yeah, actually it was the beginning. Saw mobile come, saw cloud come, and now I’m stepping back and watching, okay, automotive and AI is coming, right? Semiconductors are cool again. Great place to be.

Vivek Arya

I think they’ve always been cool, but you know, not with me [ph]

Doug Bettinger

Listen, for so long, the kids coming out of college didn’t want to come to this industry. We’re hot again.

Vivek Arya

Excellent. So now that we have stipulated at the great industry, let’s go for the nitty-gritty on…

Doug Bettinger

I knew you were going to get there.

Vivek Arya

Okay, so this year, you mentioned low to mid 90s. If I take away lithography, what do you think Etch and deposition [ph] are doing year-on-year, as part of that broadly assumption?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, it’s growing. You know, if you abstract, okay, where is the growth coming from this year? Leading edge foundry and logic is actually pretty strong, right? And last year, it was pretty weak or soft. I guess I’d call it soft. So that’s a good place to be, right? I think to see the Gate-All-Around node invest, and we’re excited about that because like I said, our markets are growing there.

DRAM is an exciting place to be, and I know you’re going to ask me more, so I won’t jump into all of the detail though, but DRAM is critically enabling to the AI training compute infrastructure, right? And we’ll get into that. And you’re starting to see storage tick up as well. NLND when I look at some of these AI servers, you have a nice step up in storage requirements.

What we’re trying to understand a little bit right now at Lam is, okay, the training stuff is relatively well understood. The edge inferencing stuff, I think we’re all just beginning to peel the onion back and try to understand what that looks like. And I see that as an area, and I don’t have numbers for you yet today, but where storage is going to be more and more important as you begin to need to store these things on clients and whatnot, the large language model output [ph] but that’s going to be the next thing that we’re all getting excited about as time unfolds.

Vivek Arya

Got it. Are you surprised that despite this excitement about AI, you know, it’s really kicked off. End of ’22 you know, accelerated last year, right this year, it’s become really strong, that equipment demand hasn’t really taken off with the same intensity? Are we just working off the COVID excesses? And, you know, there will be a point where we’re going to get past that, because WFE hasn’t really, you know, been as correlated with the excitement we have seen in AI?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, that’s a good observation, Vivek. I mean, like I said earlier, this is a real cyclical industry. And your point on COVID is important because I think as the world came through COVID, and especially in electronics, a lot of demand, frankly, got pulled forward, right? If you think back to when we were all masked up and not in the office, everybody was buying new PCs, new phones, TVs, stuff like that, because we were all stuck at home, right? Our kids were going to school. And frankly, if you remember at one point, PC units, I think was 350, 350 million units.

The industry, I don’t know, sometimes we mistake what’s going on and that demand pulled forward, I think. Some of us got a little bit confused that it was secular growth. It wasn’t. And so that’s the cycle part of growth cyclical. Things got pulled forward and inventory got built with the volume assumption that was just too high, frankly.

And so we’re still digesting that, especially Vivek in memory, right? NAND is still pretty soft this year. I think next year is going to be a better year for NAND, but NAND is still pretty weak. And you and I were talking in the hall before we walked in. If you look at investment in wafer fab equipment in NAND, last year it was down 75%. That’s a shocking amount when you think about it. And it’s because we over-invested for a unit view of the world that was perhaps a little bit incorrect. That happens.

DRAM is better. DRAM has a product cycle in there and it’s got high bandwidth memory in there. And we can talk about that as we go through the rest of the conversation here. But you still have a little bit of a cycle there. So when you’re in a cycle and pricing isn’t super good and profitability is not good, investment doesn’t happen. And so that’s what you’re – we’re starting to see things turn the other way a little bit. I’ve been describing it as green shoots. Pricing is getting better. Profitability is getting better. Inevitably, and like I said, I’ve been in the industry a long time, I’ve seen lots of cycles. For every downturn, things turn back up the other way at some point. And we’re still waiting a little bit for that, especially in memory.

Vivek Arya

Right. You mentioned, you know, when semis go up, we call them secular. And when they come down, we call them cyclical. That’s how it is, right. And you’re right about PCs, right, 340 million this year it’s more like 260, 270 million. So we are definitely…

Doug Bettinger

But I think they’re right. The inventory has largely been worked through and sell in and sell through is from what I can tell, largely balanced. So that’s a good thing. You got to go through that digestion period.

Vivek Arya

Now, you know, Lam does have a fairly large memory exposure. So one, it is impressive that despite that 75% reduction, you know, how the company was able to execute and generate very strong profitability last year. But if you look at the memory companies, they are enjoying this period of strong pricing.

Doug Bettinger

Yes.

Vivek Arya

And they’re saying that they are able to limit, you know, supply. And memory has usually been about, you know, incremental supply. There’s always a demand driver.

Doug Bettinger

Sure.

Vivek Arya

So doesn’t that kind of work against, you know, somebody who’s supplying to that industry, that your customers are more inclined to keep supply type because it helps them from a pricing perspective?

Doug Bettinger

Frankly, you know, Vivek, at the end of the day, all that really matters is demand. And if my customers are being prudent, I guess, use whatever word you want to describe it. I’m happy about that. I don’t like the cycle. It’s difficult to manage through. I would much rather supply and demand matches every single year because I know demand is growing over time. And inevitably, when demand is growing over time to invest. And that will happen. And I would much rather have the industry invest prudently, methodically, as opposed to overshooting and then undershooting. I’m happy about that, to be perfectly frank.

Vivek Arya

Got it. And then as we look at second half versus first half, which areas do you think are going to be kind of more lukewarm in terms of recovery? Which area do you have better visibility in terms of sequential growth?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, I think when I look at overall investment in the industry, it’s a little bit second half weighted. A little bit. And if I think about that by end segment, I think everything is somewhat second half weighted to a certain extent.

We’ve already talked about the fact that memory is being careful in terms of investment. I would say particularly in NAND, I don’t see a real recovery in NAND until next year, potentially. That’s not to say I don’t think the second half isn’t a little bit better than the first half. I do. But I see that, Vivek, in pretty much every segment of the business, with the exception of China. I have very clearly telegraphed that I think the spend in China is a little bit first half weighted. So you have to kind of, everything else maybe is offsetting that.

Vivek Arya

Yeah, on the topic of China, I know that you have been very consistent that demand is not falling off. It’s not really growing. They had a very strong year last year.

Doug Bettinger

Yes.

Vivek Arya

And there was, of course, this one customer, right, that the industry got approval quite late and then shipments were done. Excluding that customer, how is the overall China demand when it comes to trailing edge, when it comes to NAND or other investment?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, you know, listen, we gave you a little bit of an update on our earnings call and basically said, hey, this year, for the calendar year, ’23 versus ’24, investment in China is actually growing. Now, to your point, though, last year was a little bit second half weighted because of clarity on the one customer that you described. This year, I see it a little bit first half weighted. But for the whole year, it’s growing.

Now, I think people, I don’t know, there’s a level of concern that there’s going to be a pause in this. It’s going to go away. Guys, that’s not happening, right? And I say that because there is a very large tail of customers investing in a variety of different areas at the mature node, areas in spaces like analog, power, image sensors. It’s broad. And a couple investing in memory, primarily DRAM. And I’m sure everybody in the audience saw that the Chinese government has most recently re-upped the next big fund. I think it was $47 billion. That’s going to get deployed.

So listen, it’s not going away. When we talk to these customers, they communicate plans, intentions, roadmaps that are multi-year in duration. Now, is everybody going to succeed in this new set of customers? Maybe not. But next year, will there be a handful of new customers that aren’t here today? I bet there will be. And so when I step back and think about what’s happening, don’t worry that this is going away. It’s not going to.

Vivek Arya

If you look at China, sorry, please.

Doug Bettinger

Can we get a microphone for you so the people in the webcast can hear you?

Vivek Arya

Mic is right there.

Question-and-Answer Session

Q – Unidentified Analyst

We expect the rest of the world to start to grow faster. China still has a constant growth rate. What’s the mix going forward?

Doug Bettinger

So the question in the room for those on the webcast is, what’s the mix of China, more steady state? It’s 40 plus percent for all of us. I think it’s going to be somewhat lower. You know, if you go back before it ticked up, it was kind of in the low 30s. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable way to be thinking about it. And that’s why I’ve been telegraphing.

Listen, it’s growing this year. I think it’s the first half weighted spend in China. I think you’re going to begin to see some recovery in the rest of the world, especially in memory, that will offset it to a certain extent. I don’t think it’s going to sustainably be at a 40 plus percent level.

Unidentified Analyst

Can I just follow up? You had a positive impact on gross margin in China [inaudible]

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, so the question, again, from the webcast is, what does that mean for gross margin, basically? And the puts and takes in gross margin I always describe is there’s a product mix, there’s a customer mix, and then there’s the cost component of just the efficiencies and whatnot.

So right now, the reason I’ve been pointing to hit a China mix, and don’t read this to be because it’s a China customer, it’s a lot of smaller customers. And so profitability right now is really good. In fact, last quarter was an all-time high since we brought Lam and Novellus [ph] together in 2012. That likely doesn’t sustain as the smaller customers in China, begin to be a lower mix. I’ve encouraged people to think about the long-term profitability objectives. And gross margin for us is in the high 40s, call it 48%.

That’s the financial model of the company. And last quarter, it was higher than that. So it’ll soften a little bit in the near term. And then in the longer term, you’ll begin to see the efficiencies of the ramp of the factory in Malaysia that we’ve been talking about. That gets us, I believe, on a more consistent basis at that 48% gross margin. So that’s the way you should be thinking about it. That help? Yep, you’re welcome.

Vivek Arya

On HBM, right? Critical part of all the AI accelerators and, you know…

Doug Bettinger

We’re all excited about it.

Vivek Arya

Exactly. And can you describe what is Lam’s exposure to HBM today? Where do you see it growing? Because when we talk with a number of the end customers, they still describe it as an area of extreme supply tightness. But it’s, of course, you know, we saw AMD as they launched their next generation product. The main improvement is really just HBM. You know, 192 to 288 gigabytes. So what is Lam’s role in HBM? What’s that exposure? Where does it head next year?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, so when you look at HBM, we’re very excited about this. We do two things that are critically enabling to the structure. It’s something called deep silicon etching. It’s our tool. We call it Syndion. We pretty much own that application. We also pretty much own the application of the metallization deposition. It’s an electroplating process. We call that tool SABRE 3D. I kind of tongue-in-cheek call it the drill and fill. We do the drill and fill to put the eight die stacked together in HBM3. In my opinion, it’s the most enabling part of putting the TSV together.\

And so just to give you a few numbers on this, Tim, on our most recent call said, when we looked at our business enabling HBM this year, we believe it triples. Then if I abstract that, it’s not just HBM, but advanced packaging. HBM is part of advanced packaging for us. And when I would have been here talking to you a couple of years ago, I would have described it as a business that was hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. And then I shifted to say, you know, and I was saying this a quarter or two ago, I can easily see this as a business in the next couple of years that eclipses a billion dollars in revenue. We told you on the last call that it’s a billion dollars this year.

So this is very fast growing. It’s going to grow for the foreseeable future as much as I can see. High bandwidth memory is maybe the biggest growth driver, but not the only one, right? When people talk about chiplets and heterogeneous integration and [indiscernible] all the same equipment shows up there.

So we do the drill and fill everywhere. We sell other things into that as well. It’s not just the drill and fill, but we don’t have as strong of a position as we do with the drill and fill in other places. We do well, but anyway.

Vivek Arya

And the other one you mentioned was this move at the leading edge from FinFET’s to Gate-All-Around. Where are we in that cycle, right? Because the revenue this year, right, for yourself and some of your peers are getting very big. So is it a case where there’s a very large deployment this year, then there is more utilization next year? Or do you think that we can see consistent growth over the next two or three years as the industry transitions to these new transaction [ph] factors?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, listen, I think everybody is pretty excited about this node, right? And I think next year, investment’s is going to be more than it is this year. We described for the Gate-All-Around node, our revenue this year, we believe will be a $1 billion. And not to confuse you with the incremental addressable market around just the Gate-All-Around sheets, the structure. Our addressable market grows by a $1 billion for every 100,000 wafer starts of capacity that gets put in place.

So don’t confuse those two things. We like throwing these big billion dollar numbers out, but there’s a delineation between those two. But a $1 billion in revenue this year.

Vivek Arya

Back to NAND and how that is levered to AI. When do you think we will start to see that being more tangibly impacted by the demand for AI? For example, we are seeing more demand for SSDs, right? So when does that start to become a factor? Is that more than ’25 factor? Are you starting to see some of that this year as well?

Doug Bettinger

Certainly see a little bit, but we’re still going through an inventory cycle as we’ve been talking about. But yeah, I think today, I don’t know, 75% or 80% of data stored is still in hard disk drives. As the industry transitions to QLC, and eventually I think they call it PLC, the five bits per cell. The opportunity for hard disk drive or excuse me, the NAND industry to take more and more of that, I think grows over time.

And maybe if you’ll allow me, when we look at these AI servers, we get excited about what it’s going to do for WFE. And let me unpack that for you a little bit. If you look at a true AI server versus an enterprise class server, and break apart the silicon, if you look at the logic square millimeters of silicon, it’s four times as much. If you look at DRAM, it’s eight times. The high bandwidth memory DRAM, eight times the content. And when we look at NAND today, it’s three to four times. And so that is an interesting thing to think through.

What does that mean for a wafer fab equipment investment, right? More silicon. And the answer is, well, it depends on how many AI servers. Here’s a data point for you to help you think about it. Because I don’t know for sure what the mix is going to be. I know it’s going to grow over time. But for every percent server mix, that is an AI server versus an enterprise class server, when we think through WFE, because of all the data that I just shared with you, it’s an incremental 1 billion to 1.5 billion and a half in wafer fab equipment required because of the intensity of silicon.

I don’t know, I see huge numbers of what’s the percent of AI servers. So again, when I step back and think about the future growth trajectory, you’re going to need more equipment. That I can tell you for sure. To what magnitude, I’m not entirely sure, but I know it’s growing.

Vivek Arya

All right. Is it crowding out investments in other areas? So for example, from an end market perspective, we hear that there’s a lot more CapEx dollars going into AI servers, right? For all the reasons that we know, and how it benefits Lam. But is it crowding out investments in traditional servers? Like, do you see that when you talk with trusting [ph]

Doug Bettinger

Listen, I think people worry about that cannibalization. Is it going that way versus this way? Frankly, I’m not the best source of an answer to that question. If I abstract though and think about it, just that Lam as an example. The use of AI and the things we’re looking at is incremental. I still need to run the ERP. I still need to run SAP. I still need to run the financial forecasting system, right, the GL, all of those things, HR system. That’s largely going to be on an enterprise server. It doesn’t need AI compute.

When I look at the things we’re doing proof of concepts for around some of the AI algorithms, it’s new stuff. So if I think about that at a higher level, I have to believe that there’s a level of this that is absolutely incremental, because these are new things. You don’t need an AI class server to run the ERP.

Vivek Arya

You mentioned, Doug, about China’s $47 billion investment plan and of course, a big US CHIPS Act [ph]

Doug Bettinger

And Europe and Japan. And every government in the world is real life criticality [ph] of this industry and wants it in their border.

Vivek Arya

Has Lam already started to see those benefits? Or do you think that they’re still to come? Have you seen any tool orders emerge because any tangible tool orders because of all of these…

Doug Bettinger

I think this is largely still on the come line, to be honest Vivek. It’s maybe a little bit. There’s been big announcements, right? Arizona, Texas, Ohio, New York. The announcements have happened but the announcements don’t really bring too much investment in equipment at this point. But you know, it’s coming. You know, it’s going to come over the next several years.

Vivek Arya

All right. One of the things I wanted to touch on, right? Is the equipment industry has this amazing part that is related to your services business, right? Very strong…

Doug Bettinger

Thanks for asking about CSBG. I love the part of business.

Vivek Arya

Yeah, so I wanted you to touch on that. And more importantly, the signals that you’re seeing in different parts of the services business when it comes to spare versus being published. What is that telling you about the future of tool orders to come?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, great. That’s a great way to kind of close our talk here. So CSBG, the customer support business group, frankly, my favorite part of the business model at Lam. Why is that? Our equipment runs for decades. It almost never goes away. It gets repurposed, repositioned, really decades. On average, over the life of our tools, we generate more revenue after we sell the tool than when we sell the tool itself. That’s important to understand because that’s where CSBG shows up.

So what is in CSBG? Spare parts, service, equipment upgrade, and the Reliant product line. And so if you think about three of those four, as long as utilization is in a crazy place, and frankly, over the last year and a half, it has been, spare, service, and upgrade should grow every year, because the installed base grows every year. We give you that number at the end of every calendar year. At the end of last year, 90,000 chambers in the installed base.

The Reliant product line, though, will ebb and flow. And frankly, last year, it grew very rapidly. This year, I think, well-telegraphed in the industry. The investment, outside of China anyway, in the mature nodes is a little bit soft. And so Reliant is down this year. Everything else is doing just fine. So what that means for CSBG revenue is, I’ve suggested it looks flattish to us this year, it’s not going to grow because Reliant is trending off a little bit. Everything else is in a good spot.

Last quarter, actually we talked about the fact that spares ticked up a little bit because we saw incremental improvement in utilization. That’s the first indication to me, at least in our business, that we’re starting to see the beginning of the green shoots in the memory cycle to a certain extent.

Vivek Arya

Were they more in NAND or DRAM?

Doug Bettinger

I didn’t break it apart, just said utilization. It’s gotten somewhat better.

Vivek Arya

And historically, what does that tell you after how many quarters…

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, that’s the $10,000 question that I’m not going to answer quite at.

Vivek Arya

Lastly, is there a difference between the services intensity in China versus X China?

Doug Bettinger

Not really. Maybe a little bit. Maybe there’s a little bit of an increased service intensity. And I say that because with a newer set of customers, usually though they’re buying more from you, right. They often will want more of a turnkey solution. It’s not unique to China, it’s just unique to having a new set of customers.

Vivek Arya

Got it. And the last 35 seconds, free cash flow, right again, very strong part. And I think what was impressive is just how well the free cash flow margin held up last year despite the severe pressure. So tell us about priorities. Is there any M&A possible still in the industry or is it pretty well consolidated?

Doug Bettinger

Yeah, it’s pretty well consolidated. You know, we’ve done tuck-ins here and there, but nothing of any scale. And so large scale enemy in this industry is in the rearview mirror, to be perfectly honest with you. And those of you that have followed the industry know that you’ve seen the last couple of big deals that try to get consummated, not, not get through the regulatory process.

Real quick in the last couple of seconds. Priorities for catch [ph] is always invest in the business first and foremost. R&D, CapEx, that’s always priority number one. Second then is okay, even with that, we generate a lot of free cash flow. Our stated intention is to return 75% to 100% of free cash flow to the equity holders of the company through an annually growing dividend and buying the stock back. And those of you that follow know we recently announced a new buyback authorization of $10 million [ph] So that is a clear indication of intention of what we plan to do.

Vivek Arya

Thank you so much, Doug.

Doug Bettinger

Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks, Vivek.