Operating expenses were $688 million, including $395 million for research and development and $293 million for selling, general and administrative costs.
KLA raised its estimate for the 2026 wafer-equipment market, including advanced packaging, to approximately the mid-$150 billion range and said it currently expects the market to exceed $200 billion in calendar 2027. Management tied that outlook to growing backlog and sales-funnel visibility, new fabrication projects, leading-edge logic investment, greenfield DRAM capacity, high-bandwidth-memory demand and higher process-control intensity. Advanced packaging process-control revenue was expected to reach approximately $1. 1 billion in calendar 2026, while services revenue reached $850 million in the September quarter, up 14% year over year.
The December guidance assumes semiconductor process-control revenue will remain weighted roughly 60% toward foundry and logic customers and 40% toward memory. Within memory, DRAM was expected to account for about 84% and NAND for the remainder.
Management said demand was being accompanied by delivery urgency, but it acknowledged limits on both its own supply capacity and customers’ ability to accept equipment. Fab-space shortages, delayed clean rooms and inadequate power can postpone installations even when customers are seeking faster deliveries. KLA also identified persistently high memory costs for system image processing as a margin headwind and said it was working to improve memory efficiency and reduce product costs.
China is expected to grow more slowly than KLA’s overall business, reducing its share of revenue into 2027. Executives said the company was still behind on supply in some areas but did not expect KLA itself to be the constraint on customer expansion. The next major update on 2027 market and customer-segment expectations is scheduled for the company’s earnings call in late January.