KLA (KLAC) FY2026 results: revenue $13.6 billion, up 11.7% on the year

KLA supplies process control equipment and services for the electronics industry, covering the manufacture of wafers, reticles and masks, chemicals and materials, integrated circuits, packaged chips and printed circuit boards, plus support across the installed base. The company was formed as KLA-Tencor in April 1997 through the merger of KLA Instruments and Tencor Instruments, which began operations in 1975 and 1976. Services were approximately 23% of what the company took in during fiscal 2026, which ended on 30 June. There are three reportable segments: Semiconductor Process Control, Specialty Semiconductor Process, and PCB and Component Inspection.

What process control does

Chips are built on silicon wafers through a long sequence of steps, including depositing film layers, patterning, removing material, heat treatment and measurement, repeated hundreds of times on advanced designs before the wafer is cut, packaged and tested. The move to smaller geometries and more complex circuitry, new materials, new transistor architectures, multi-patterning and extreme ultraviolet lithography and advanced packaging has raised both the performance and the cost of the equipment involved, with an advanced fabrication plant now costing well above 10 billion dollars. In that setting, reaching high-volume production quickly matters to a manufacturer's profitability, which is what the inspection, metrology and software products are sold to support. Demand follows customers' capital expenditure, so the business is cyclical rather than seasonal.

Semiconductor Process Control

The largest segment sells inspection, metrology and software for chip, wafer, reticle and chemical and materials manufacturers. Inspection and review tools locate, characterise and analyse defects on patterned and unpatterned wafer surfaces. Metrology systems measure pattern dimensions, film thickness and stress, layer-to-layer alignment, pattern placement, surface topography and electro-optical properties. Chemistry process control equipment qualifies incoming supplies, manages tool inputs, adjusts chamber and bath conditions and monitors process waste. Sensor wafers and reticles gather data used to visualise, diagnose and control conditions inside the production equipment. Reticle inspection and metrology systems find defects, pattern placement errors and process issues during reticle manufacture, and other systems serve wafer-level packaging along with chemistry monitoring for panel-level packaging and substrates. Software centralises and analyses the data from all of those systems for run-time process control, defect excursion identification, process corrections and defect classification, with simulation software for evaluating advanced patterning.

The other two segments

Specialty Semiconductor Process develops and sells vacuum deposition and etching process tools, including plasma dicing, used by makers of microelectromechanical systems, radio frequency communication semiconductors and power semiconductors for automotive and industrial uses. PCB and Component Inspection lets electronic device manufacturers inspect, test and measure printed circuit boards, substrates and packaged chips, pattern circuitry and shape metalised circuits in three dimensions, through direct imaging, optical shaping, inkjet and additive printing and computer-aided manufacturing software, alongside metrology for advanced and traditional packaging.

Selling and building

Revenues come mainly from product sales and related service contracts sold through a direct sales force, with direct teams in Asia, the United States and Europe and sales, marketing and service subsidiaries or branches in the major semiconductor manufacturing regions. International revenues were approximately 87% of the total in fiscal 2026 and 89% in each of fiscal 2025 and 2024. System design, assembly and testing are done in-house while components and major subassemblies are outsourced, with principal manufacturing in the United States, Singapore, Israel, China and various European locations. Some parts are designed by KLA and made to its specification and others are standard commercial products, and certain parts come from a single supplier or a limited group, which the company manages by monitoring supplier finances, funding capacity where needed, identifying alternatives and holding inventory of key parts.

People

At 30 June 2026 the company had approximately 17,000 regular full-time employees and approximately 200 part-time and temporary staff across facilities in 18 major regions, approximately 31% in the United States, 19% in Europe and the Middle East and 50% in Asia. By function, approximately 21% work in manufacturing, 27% in research and development, 27% in customer service, 4% in sales and marketing and 21% in other roles. No employees are represented by a labour union, though there is a trade union delegation in Belgium and works councils cover the German operations of two business units, and the company has not experienced work stoppages.

From KLA's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended 30 June 2026. The filing

Written from the 10-K filed 6 August 2026: read the full 10-K.