Applied Materials (AMAT) perpetual market

Applied Materials is the largest supplier of the equipment and materials used to manufacture semiconductors, a critical but less visible part of the chip supply chain. Rather than making chips itself, it sells the machines that chipmakers use to deposit, etch, modify and inspect the many microscopic layers on a silicon wafer during fabrication. Because virtually every advanced chip is built using processes that rely on such wafer-fabrication equipment, Applied Materials benefits broadly from rising semiconductor demand and from the industry's push toward ever more complex manufacturing. Its business is cyclical, rising and falling with chipmakers' capital spending, which in turn tracks demand for computing, smartphones, data centers and artificial intelligence. Applied Materials competes with a handful of other large equipment makers, and its order trends are watched as a gauge of how much the industry is investing in future production capacity.