Applied Materials makes the equipment with which virtually every semiconductor in the world is manufactured, and it has just had the best quarter in its fifty-nine-year history: revenue of $9.12 billion in the three months to 26 July 2026, up 25% year on year, the largest sequential increase the company has ever recorded, at a 50.3% gross margin — the highest in more than twenty-five years and the thirteenth consecutive quarter of year-on-year expansion — with guidance of $10.25 billion for the quarter that follows. It is also a business whose revenue has fallen in eight of the last twenty-three years, whose two largest customers are 34% of revenue and are not named, which takes 30% of its revenue from the one country actively funding its replacement, and which has just paid $253 million to settle an export-control matter its own annual report, filed eight months earlier, said it could not reasonably estimate.
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