Lam Research Value Stock - Dividend - Research Selection

Description of the company

Incorporated in 1980, Lam Research Corporation (“Lam Research,” “Lam,” “we,” “our,” “us,” or “the Company”) is a Delaware corporation, headquartered in Fremont, California. We maintain a network of facilities throughout Asia, Europe, and the United States in order to meet the needs of our dynamic customer base.

Additional information about Lam Research is available on our website at www.lamresearch.com. The content on any website referred to in this Form 10-K is not a part of or incorporated by reference in this Form 10-K unless expressly noted.

Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Forms 10-Q, Current Reports on Forms 8-K, Proxy Statements and all other filings we make with the SEC are available on our website as soon as reasonably practical after we file them with or furnish them to the SEC and are also available online at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov.

The Lam Research logo, Lam Research, and all product and service names used in this report are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Lam Research Corporation or its subsidiaries in the United States and/or other countries. All other marks mentioned herein are the property of their respective holders.

We are a global supplier of innovative wafer fabrication equipment and services to the semiconductor industry. We have built a strong global presence with core competencies in areas like nanoscale applications enablement, chemistry, plasma and fluidics, advanced systems engineering and a broad range of operational disciplines. Our products and services are designed to help our customers build smaller, faster, and better performing devices that are used in a variety of electronic products, including mobile phones, personal computers, servers, wearables, automotive devices, storage devices, and networking equipment. Our vision is to realize full value from natural technology extensions of our company.

Our customer base includes leading semiconductor memory, foundry, and integrated device manufacturers (“IDMs”) that make products such as non-volatile memory (“NVM”), DRAM memory, and logic devices. We aim to increase our strategic relevance with our customers by contributing more to their continued success. Our core technical competency is integrating hardware, process, materials, software, and process control enabling results on the wafer.

Semiconductor manufacturing, our customers’ business, involves the complete fabrication of multiple dies or integrated circuits (“ICs”) on a wafer. This involves the repetition of a set of core processes and can require hundreds of individual steps. Fabricating these devices requires highly sophisticated process technologies to integrate an increasing array of new materials with precise control at the atomic scale. Along with meeting technical requirements, wafer processing equipment must deliver high productivity and be cost-effective.

Demand from cloud computing (the “Cloud”), the Internet of Things (“IoT”), and other markets is driving the need for increasingly powerful and cost-efficient semiconductors. At the same time, there are growing technical challenges with traditional two-dimensional scaling. These trends are driving significant inflections in semiconductor manufacturing, such as the increasing importance of vertical scaling strategies like three-dimensional (“3D”) architectures as well as multiple patterning to enable shrinks.

These demand and technology inflections have significantly expanded our addressable markets from about 26% of wafer fabrication equipment (“WFE”) spending in calendar year 2013 to about 34% in calendar year 2016. We believe we are in a strong position with our leadership and competency in deposition, etch, and single wafer clean to facilitate some of the most significant innovations in semiconductor device manufacturing. Several factors create opportunity for sustainable differentiation for us: (i) our focus on research and development, with several on-going programs relating to sustaining engineering, product and process development, and concept and feasibility; (ii) our ability to effectively leverage cycles of learning from our broad installed base; and (iii) our collaborative focus with semi-ecosystem partners.

We also address processes for back-end wafer-level packaging (“WLP”), which is an alternative to traditional wire bonding and can offer a smaller form factor, increased interconnect speed and bandwidth, and lower power consumption, among other benefits. In addition, our products are well-suited for related markets that rely on semiconductor processes and require production-proven manufacturing capability, such as complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (“CMOS”) image sensors (“CIS”) and micro-electromechanical systems (“MEMS”).

Our Customer Support Business Group (“CSBG”) provides products and services to maximize installed equipment performance, predictability, and operational efficiency. We offer a broad range of services to deliver value throughout the lifecycle of our equipment, including customer service, spares, upgrades, and refurbishment of our deposition, etch, and clean products. Many of the technical advances that we introduce in our newest products are also available as upgrades, which provide customers with a cost-effective strategy for extending the performance and capabilities of their existing wafer fabrication lines. Additionally, CSBG provides new and refurbished previous-generation (legacy) equipment for those applications that do not require the most advanced wafer processing capability.

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