Who Owns Applied Materials?

Michael McNeilly founded Applied Materials in Santa Clara in 1967 to build chemical vapor deposition equipment for Silicon Valley's young semiconductor industry. The company nearly failed in the mid-1970s after diversifying into unrelated ventures; the board recruited James C. Morgan in 1976, who refocused it entirely on chip equipment and ran it as CEO for more than 25 years.

Morgan's Applied defined the modern equipment industry. The Precision 5000 platform, introduced in 1987, replaced batch processing with single-wafer multi-chamber handling and became the best-selling system in wafer fab equipment history. Through the 1990s the company expanded from deposition into etch, ion implant, planarization, and inspection, becoming the first equipment maker to pass $1 billion and then $5 billion in annual revenue.

The 2000s tested the model. The 2001 downturn and the 2009 financial crisis each cut revenue deeply, and a diversification into solar panel equipment mostly failed while the display business survived. The brand's product lines kept consolidating around flagships: Endura for physical vapor deposition, Producer for chemical vapor deposition, Sym3 for etch, Reflexion for CMP, and eBeam-based systems for metrology and defect inspection.

Gary Dickerson became CEO in 2013, arriving through the $4.9 billion Varian Semiconductor acquisition of 2011. His strategy reframed the company around materials engineering: as lithography stopped shrinking features on its own, chipmakers needed Applied's deposition and etch tools to build transistor structures atom by atom. That positioning placed the brand at the center of the industry's most valuable technology transitions, from FinFETs to gate-all-around transistors, high-bandwidth memory, and advanced packaging.

Blocked deals mark the decade's boundaries: the Tokyo Electron merger collapsed under US antitrust pressure in 2015, and the Kokusai Electric acquisition died waiting for Chinese approval in 2021. Meanwhile US export controls since 2019 progressively restricted what the brand can sell into China, once its largest market.

The business has since set records. FY2025 closed October 26, 2025 with $28.37 billion in revenue, a sixth consecutive growth year, and Q3 FY2026 brought a record $9.12 billion quarter as AI-related spending pulled forward orders for leading-edge logic, DRAM, and packaging tools.