1. Applied Materials in 30 seconds

2. The logo and how the name is written

3. What the company actually does: a self-description as a materials engineering company

Applied Materials describes itself as a provider of materials engineering solutions Sourced. It is odd for an equipment maker to call itself a materials company until you look at what the tools do: lay thin films onto a wafer, take them off again, flatten them, and implant impurities into them. That is materials handling, whatever the machine looks like. The one thing it does not build is a lithography scanner, the tool that draws the pattern with light. That belongs to ASML.

There are only two reporting segments Sourced.

From the first quarter of FY2026 the 200mm equipment business moved from AGS into Semiconductor Systems. The figures above use the FY2025 definition.

Where does the back end sit? Inside Semiconductor Systems, the first row. In the Form 10-K the company writes that its products cover materials engineering, process control and advanced packaging, and describes its advanced packaging tools as the means to connect multiple chips through heterogeneous integration and push past the limits of a single die Sourced.

4. Scale: five years of revenue

Revenue, operating income, R&D expense and capital expenditure are all taken from the SEC's XBRL data, as tagged in each year's Form 10-K. FY2025 capex of US$2.26bn is 1.9 times the US$1.19bn of the previous year, and 3.4 times the level of five years earlier Our calculation.

Two things are worth reading closely here. The first is how gently the top line grows. The compound annual growth rate from FY2021 to FY2025 is 5.3% Our calculation, a different animal from the semiconductor companies that nearly tripled over the same period. An equipment maker sells to the rhythm of its customers building factories, so it feels chip demand a year or two after the chip makers do.

The second is the jump in capital spending, up 1.9 times year on year in FY2025 alone. When an equipment maker expands its own plants, it is working on the assumption that it is about to ship a great many tools. And so it proved: revenue accelerated sharply in FY2026, with third-quarter revenue (for the quarter ended 26 July 2026) of US$9.115bn, up 25% year on year and a quarterly record Sourced.

Where the 36,500 employees are

Regular employees as of 26 October 2025, across 25 countries. The Form 10-K carries no breakdown by education or job family of the kind TSMC publishes Not yet confirmed.

5. Company category and position in the back-end industry

The category is a manufacturer, specifically of semiconductor production equipment. Within the industry it sits one step upstream of the companies that make chips, such as TSMC, Samsung and Micron. It is upstream of the contract assemblers, the OSATs, as well, and an OSAT can perfectly well be an Applied Materials customer.

What is disclosed is the split of Semiconductor Systems revenue by end market Sourced. HBM, high bandwidth memory, is classified under DRAM, so part of the back-end demand surfaces there.

The DRAM share has gone from 17% to 26% in two years. The company does not say how much of that increase is HBM-related Not yet confirmed.

6. Sites and the countries where it manufactures

Being an equipment maker, it has no fabs. What it has instead are assembly, integration and test plants, and development sites, scattered across the world Sourced.

Split revenue by where the tool was delivered and the map sharpens considerably Sourced.

7. Leading products and share in semiconductor back-end work

The tools announced for back-end use in 2026

This is the part of the story that can be told concretely. The company names new products explicitly in its quarterly earnings releases, the press releases attached to its 8-K filings, and the third-quarter FY2026 release states plainly that it introduced six systems for DRAM and advanced packaging Sourced.

All of the above are the company's own descriptions, as given in the third-quarter earnings release of 13 August 2026 (the press release attached to the 8-K). None of the performance claims has been independently verified.

In May 2026 the company also announced that it had signed an agreement to acquire the NEXX business of ASMPT Sourced. NEXX makes deposition equipment for large-area advanced packaging, and Applied describes the acquisition as a way to broaden its portfolio of panel-level advanced packaging technology. However, neither the price nor the expected closing date appears in the primary sources this article checked Not yet confirmed.

On market share, plainly

1. Advanced packaging is named explicitly in the Form 10-K's list of forces reshaping the industry — the company lists "the importance of advanced packaging for AI computing" among the factors that could materially hurt results if it responds badly Sourced
2. It has named advanced packaging as a growth area in every quarter of 2026 — in the first quarter, "leading-edge logic, HBM and advanced packaging" were cited as the fastest-growing areas; in the third quarter, the company said it expected "strong growth in DRAM, leading-edge logic and advanced packaging" through the second half Sourced
3. It is launching dedicated tools aimed squarely at the back end — as the table above shows Sourced

8. Current investment plans

An equipment maker's "investment" never looks like a foundry's enormous fab spending. What counts instead is R&D expense and the capacity to build tools.

R&D expense went from US$2.485bn in FY2021 to US$3.570bn in FY2025, up about 1.4 times in five years Our calculation. At 12.6% of revenue, that is above the average for chip makers.

On manufacturing capacity, the CFO said in the first-quarter FY2026 earnings release that the company had roughly doubled its equipment manufacturing capacity over the past several years, strengthened its supply chain and built inventory Sourced. In the third quarter it added that it would invest further in manufacturing capacity to support the demand outlook through the end of the decade, but neither the amount nor the timing has been published Not yet confirmed.

9. Major corporate partners

Applied Materials' partnerships are not equity ties or joint ventures of the sort TSMC forms. They are joint development and joint research, almost without exception. Listed below are only those the company has named itself, in its own earnings releases Sourced.

10. Where the company is heading in this field

Facts and outlook are kept apart here as well.

What is established

Outlook

Not yet confirmed Read plainly, the facts above point towards Applied Materials' presence in the back end strengthening for now. The reason is that the back end is turning from machining into thin-film processing, and no one carries a broader range of thin-film tools than this company. Hybrid bonding is, in the end, a contest of flatness and cleanliness; a TSV is copper plating into a deep hole; taller HBM stacks are a problem of stress-controlled thin films. Every one of those is an extension of what Applied has been doing in the front end for more than thirty years.

Not yet confirmed The ways this reading could fail are equally clear. First, the bonder itself is not an Applied Materials product. Bonding tools belong to specialists such as ASMPT and Besi; what Applied has brought out are the tools either side of that step. Second, tool prices in the back end are not as high as in the front end, so unit economics differ. Third, most of the demand is concentrated on AI, and if AI investment slows, a plateau like the one in 2023 will return. The company says as much in its own Form 10-K: AI is changing rapidly, the timing and scale of AI-related investment can vary greatly, and AI-related demand is therefore difficult to forecast accurately Sourced.

11. The risks this company carries

What follows is drawn from the risk factors the company sets out in its Form 10-K, narrowed to those that matter in a back-end context Sourced.

12. Glossary

AI-generated concept

13. References

1. Applied Materials Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended October 26, 2025 (filed with the U.S. SEC on 12 December 2025). Revenue, operating income and segment results, headcount and its regional split, revenue by region, customer concentration, revenue by end market, sites and countries of manufacture, the description of the advanced packaging tools, and risk factors. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/6951/000162828025056742/amat-20251026.htm
2. Applied Materials Fourth quarter and full year FY2025 earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1, 13 November 2025). Full-year FY2025 revenue of US$28.368bn, up 4% year on year, segment revenue and operating income, and display revenue. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/6951/000162828025051998/exhibit991q42025earningsre.htm
3. Applied Materials Third quarter FY2026 earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1, 13 August 2026). Quarterly revenue of US$9.115bn, up 25% year on year, fourth-quarter guidance, the six new back-end systems, the 11 EPIC Center collaborations, the addition of Broadcom, SCREEN SPE and UC Berkeley, and the US$500m Tampines campus in Singapore. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/6951/000162828026056699/exhibit991q32026earningsre.htm
4. Applied Materials Second quarter FY2026 earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1, 14 May 2026). The EPIC Center additions of TSMC, SK hynix, Micron, Advantest and three universities, the agreement to acquire ASMPT's NEXX business, the work with Synopsys and NVIDIA, and a 15% dividend increase. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/6951/000162828026035071/exhibit991q22026earningsre.htm
5. Applied Materials First quarter FY2026 earnings release (Form 8-K, Exhibit 99.1, 12 February 2026). Samsung Electronics joining the EPIC Center, the CFO's statement that manufacturing capacity has roughly doubled over the past several years, and the move of the 200mm business between segments. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/6951/000162828026007661/exhibit991q12026earningsre.htm
6. U.S. SEC EDGAR XBRL company facts API (CIK 0000006951). Revenue, operating income, R&D expense and capital expenditure for FY2021 to FY2025, as tagged in each year's Form 10-K. https://data.sec.gov/api/xbrl/companyfacts/CIK0000006951.json

14. Claim-to-source audit

Last updated 21 September 2026 / Troy Technical
Every figure in this article comes from Applied Materials' statutory filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or from the company's own announcements. No research-firm estimates or press-based figures have been used.