Teradyne, Inc. (TER) Earnings Call Transcript

Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, and welcome to the Teradyne Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Amy McAndrews, Vice President of Corporate Relations for Teradyne. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our discussion of Teradyne's most recent financial results. I'm joined this morning by our CEO, Greg Smith; and our CFO, Michelle Turner. Following our opening remarks, we'll provide details of our performance for the third quarter of 2026 and our outlook for the fourth quarter. The press release containing our third quarter results was issued last evening. We are providing slides as well as a copy of these prepared remarks on the Teradyne Investor website that may be helpful in following the discussion. Replay of this call will be available via the same page after the call ends. The matters that we discuss today will include forward-looking statements that involve risks that could cause Teradyne's results to differ materially from management's current expectations. We caution listeners not to place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements included in this presentation. We encourage you to review the safe harbor statement contained in the slides accompanying this presentation as well as the risk factors described in our annual report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, on file with the SEC. Additionally, these forward-looking statements are made only as of today. During today's call, we will refer to non-GAAP financial measures. We have posted additional information concerning these non-GAAP financial measures, including reconciliation to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures, where available, on our investor website. Looking ahead between now and our next earnings call, Teradyne expects to participate in a technology-focused investor conference hosted by UBS. Our quiet period will begin at the close of business on December 18, 2026. Following Greg and Michelle's comments this morning, we'll open up the call for questions. This call is scheduled for 1 hour. Greg?

Thanks, Amy. Good morning. AI was the driver again this quarter. Total company revenue topped $1.3 billion, up 70% year-over-year and consistent quarter-over-quarter, with non-GAAP EPS of $2.29 up over 150% year-over-year. All 3 of our business groups: Semi Test, Product Test and Robotics grew versus the prior year, highlighting AI demand across all parts of the business. AI-driven revenue represents more than 60% of total revenue, a key proof point that our wafer to data center strategy is delivering results. From wafers to modules, to trays, to racks and interfill data centers, Teradyne equipment is used to build and test the high-performance computing that underpins the growth of agentic AI. We've previously discussed our long-term perspective on the AI transformation of the semiconductor industry and global economy. The first wave started back in 2024 with the build-out of general-purpose data centers which were used for both model training and inference. In 2026, we are in the early stages of the second wave, where data centers are optimized to serve these models to support agentic AI and inference on a global scale. The third wave is physical and edge AI. While there are already compelling examples of physical and edge AI in automotive, robotics and wearables, the full impact of AI on these segments is still to come. The strength of these ways gives us great confidence in our midterm growth plans. Let's start with Semiconductor Test. The demand for compute is far greater than supply, and the semiconductor industry is seeing dramatic expansion in capacity to meet this burgeoning demand. The portion of semi CapEx associated with test is increasing as well, from 6.4% in 2025 to 8.1% for the first 8 months of 2026. With forecasts for semiconductor CapEx being revised upward for '27, '28 and beyond, we believe that the conditions are right for prolonged expansion of the ATE TAM. CPUs and AI accelerators are key drivers of the expansion. Through our accelerated investments, Teradyne is positioned for continued growth in both the overall ATE market and share gains, driven by customers adopting dual vendor strategies. Dual vendor provides greater assurance of getting capacity when needed, minimizes the risk of supply chain disruptions and ensures that the test capability in -- that the test capability arrives in time for new device technologies. Dual vendor programs progress through several phases over multiple quarters, including initial qualification, fast follower and mature dual sourcing. We have multiple customers at different stages of this process. Our first hyperscaler customer is in the mature phase, and we expect our next major ramp in the middle of 2027. Our merchant GPU customer is in the fast follower phase with multiple devices in development, and we expect to see additional revenue in 2027. Our second hyperscaler customer has passed qualification and is now in fast follower, with an expectation of capacity buys in the second half of 2027. We also have a third hyperscaler in initial qualification. Networking devices, both copper and optical, are growing proportionately with compute. The majority of this TAM is in switches. However, retimers and DSPs are driving significant business. The majority of the networking market is currently copper and optical pluggables. Over the next few years, we believe the NPL and CPL markets will grow strongly from a small base. We are working with leaders in this segment on solutions across all test insertions, and it is clear that there are many different approaches and technologies being tried by different customers. As a result, the types of tests in the handling and alignment techniques are in flux. The key to our strategy here is to develop a strong open ecosystem -- to develop strong open ecosystem partnerships for instrumentation, handling and alignment. We have spoken before about our partnerships with Technoprobe and FiconTEC, and we have just announced a partnership with FormFactor to address optical test amongst other opportunities. Our open nonexclusive ecosystem of probing, handling and interface partners allows us to validate complete test cell solutions before they reach our customers' floors, giving them more interoperability, full control over their supply chains and lead times. This provides a faster path to high-volume production. The pace of innovation in compute and networking has accelerated, and we have been investing in R&D to ensure that our product road map is aligned with those needs. We've discussed before that there is no current ATE solution for the most complex next-generation AI and data center devices that are coming to market in 2027. The trio of new UltraFLEXplus instruments that we just introduced address that need. The first is the UltraPin5000-EM. The EM stands for extended memory. This instrument has up to 80x deeper memories than our current instrument for intensive device characterization work. The second instrument is the UltraVS64-HP. The HP stands for high power. This instrument enables testing accelerators that consume up to 15,000 amps. And finally, the UltraPort-PCIe6. This is the industry's first ATE solution for PCIe Gen 6. We also introduced the Iris 100, a solution for optical test of MicroLED and VCSEL emitters. This instrument serves both mobile applications and optical networking. To assure data center reliability and uptime, customers are increasingly turning to system-level test and burn-in. In the third quarter, we introduced new burn-in capabilities for the Titan HP platform, which enables full system test coverage across burning temperature ranges. As AI moves out in the data center and into cars, robots and wearables as part of the third wave of AI, mobile processors and microcontrollers are adding neuroprocessing units and other AI features. To address that coming market, in the third quarter, we launched the UltraFLEXplus S, a small footprint system that covers both engineering and production insertion for edge AI devices. Moving on now to memory. Memory manufacturers are bringing on more capacity for HBM, DDR, LP-DDR and flash memories. More capacity means more wafers, more wafers means more bits and more units, which means -- which means more to test in memory. In the past 2 quarters, it has become clear that the constraints on memory supply are so severe that AI accelerators are turning to lower stack heights of HBM memory to get a larger number of stacks out of the same volume of DRAM wafers. This will tend to increase the TAM for HBM performance test, an area where we have higher share. The HBM, DDR, LP-DDR and GDR markets are moving quickly from generation to generation, with higher data rates and new encoding approaches. To support these new technologies in the third quarter, we introduced the Magnum E2, our next-generation DRAM tester, with the signal integrity and throughput needed to keep pace with our memory customers. Linear and power segments, which were previously driven mainly by automotive and industrial verticals are adding capacity to deliver data center power distribution and regulation components. Our product revenue in the automotive and industrial space has grown from less than $400 million in 2025 to over $600 million in 2026. This trend will accelerate with new 800 volt standards and new technologies like IVR. The demand for AI accelerated compute goes beyond the semiconductor market. The need for nearline storage and data centers has accelerated the annual exabyte growth for HDD to over 20% in 2026. Since the test time for HDD is more closely related to the capacity than the unit volume, this as well as adding a third major customer, is driving expansion of our HDD test revenue. Scale-up networking to support large GPU clusters is predominantly served by copper connections via backplanes and cable spines, running at unprecedented data rates. This has turned backplanes and cables from commodities to highly engineered and tested elements of the HPC system, which is driving significant growth in TDR and BERT test equipment served by our MLTP joint venture. In addition, we have seen strong demand for our Omnyx board test products. Together, these contributed to almost 30% quarter-over-quarter growth for the entire product test group. Increasingly, exotic packaging and materials are being used in data center tray assemblies. These trades demand superhuman accuracy and stamina to build. ODMs and CMs are increasingly turning to flexible, physical AI-based robots to assist in assembly and test processes. As a result, electronics and semiconductor is now our largest vertical for robotics. In the third quarter, we introduced the Universal Robots Gen 7 cobot platform. The features of this platform and PolyScope X have been tailored precisely to bring physical AI to electronics assembly work cells and provide a platform for UR+ partners to plug into to support the diverse requirements of server and rack build. To sum up, our wafer to AI data center strategy is delivering. Within the third quarter, outside of compute, the rest of our portfolio delivered close to 80% of our overall sales. The R&D that we have been investing has yielded next-generation products. These products allow us to capture opportunity along the entire value chain, from wafers to modules to trays to racks. Our continued investment reflects our optimism about the near and medium-term opportunities in front of us. This was another strong quarter where AI was the driver across our business groups. We are riding a rising tide. AI has driven the semiconductor and electronics industry into a new era, and our wafer to data center strategy has positioned us to benefit from these positive changes. With that, I'll turn the call over to Michelle.

Thanks, Greg, and good morning, everyone. Let's get into the quarter beginning with the total company. Both revenue and non-GAAP EPS came in above the high end of our guidance range as our wafer to data center strategy and the breadth of our portfolio sustained positive momentum. For the third consecutive quarter, total company sales remained at the high watermark of $1.3 billion. For the first 9 months of 2026, we delivered $3.9 billion in revenue and $7.31 of non-GAAP EPS, up over 85% and 235% year-over-year, respectively, driven by all things AI. Building on that, let's take a deeper look at revenue starting with Semi Test. Our Semi Test team once again cleared $1 billion in revenue, up 77% from Q3 2025. The revenue breakdown within Semi Test was SOC at $676 million, memory at $301 million and IST at $95 million. As expected, compute order timing was predominantly offset by strength across the rest of the Semi Test portfolio. Starting with SOC, compute revenue grew nearly 50% year-over-year on continued AI-related demand. As Greg mentioned, our customers' dual vendor strategies are opening up more opportunities for us in, and we expect healthy growth in 2027. Auto and industrial continued to strengthen, up nearly 90% year-over-year, driven primarily by power management demand increases for AI data center build-outs. Mobile was up 60% year-over-year from a low base, but remains below historical levels and a muted part of the overall SOC portfolio. Now turning to memory. Our memory business delivered another record quarter at $301 million in revenue, up from the previous record set just last quarter. This represents our fourth consecutive quarter of revenue over $200 million, driven by continued robust HBM and DRAM test solutions demand and the resurgence in NAND. Finally, turning to IST. Revenue in the quarter reached a new record at $95 million, up approximately 150% from the prior year, with continued strength in AI-related HDD storage demand from all 3 major suppliers in this space. Now on to the product test group. Revenue was $138 million, up 56% year-over-year. The group experienced broad-based growth tied to AI infrastructure build-outs from production board test to optical to high-speed [ interconnect ]. Book-to-bill for the quarter was 1.4x, with particular strength in the newest addition to the group, MultiLane Test Product JV, as the need for data center interconnect test solutions increases. Robotics revenue was $96 million, up 28% year-over-year. Our Robotics group delivered its highest third quarter revenue ever and also achieved profitability within the quarter. AI-related revenue remains elevated with robot-assisted test and assembly across the data center value chain and high demand. In the first 9 months of the year, AI-related revenue was roughly 20%. Aligned with the third wave of AI Greg mentioned, the physical and edge AI ecosystem is in early innings and building momentum. Our Robotics group has announced partnerships with industry leaders such as NVIDIA and Analog Devices as well as innovative start-ups, including Scale AI, Generalist, Bright Machines and Sereact. These partnerships reflect growing interest in physical AI. Now moving down the P&L. Gross margins for the quarter were 59.1%, up 60 basis points year-over-year, driven by strong volume and product mix, while sequentially, gross margins were down 70 basis points, driven primarily by product mix. As expected, OpEx increased, driven by more R&D and go-to-market investment in support of future growth. Finally, non-GAAP operating income was $413 million, with an operating margin of 31.6%. Now moving to capital allocation. Reinvesting in the business remains our top priority. In 2026, we will invest close to $1 billion across R&D and CapEx, with R&D investments representing a double-digit percentage of our sales. Beyond that, our strategy is to maintain the cash reserves to grow the business, return capital to shareholders through both dividends and share repurchases and keep dry powder available for accretive M&A. Each pillar of our capital allocation strategy is focused on innovating from wafer to data center, positioning us well over the near and midterm. We ended the quarter with cash and investments of $625 million, up 21% from last quarter. We had free cash flow of $227 million in the quarter. For the first 9 months of 2026, free cash flow was $806 million, up nearly 250% from the prior year period. Additionally, from a working capital perspective, we increased our inventory in support of future revenue growth. We paid $20 million in dividends in the quarter, and our share buybacks were $99 million. Now looking ahead to our fourth quarter guidance. For the quarter, we expect revenue in the range of $1.25 billion to $1.35 billion and non-GAAP EPS of $1.95 to $2.25. Gross margins are expected to be in the range of 57.5% to 58.5%, reflective of product mix and new product launches. Operating expenses are expected to run at 28.5% to 29.5% of fourth quarter sales, driven by continued investments in R&D and go-to-market. The non-GAAP operating profit rate is expected to be between 28% and 30%. Our Q4 guidance midpoint of $1.3 billion represents growth of approximately 20% over the last year's fourth quarter, which would bring full year revenue to approximately $5.2 billion, up over 60%. We expect Q4 will be our fourth consecutive quarter of revenue above $1.25 billion, representing a sustained step change in the business from a year ago. As we said last quarter, we expect 2027 to be another year of healthy growth. Our strengthening backlog and the growth in compute give us momentum, and we expect to carry and build throughout the year. For your modeling purposes, we expect FormFactor investment to close in the fourth quarter, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. The rest of our portfolio is in full effect in the second half as memory, auto and industrial, IST, Product Test and Robotics grow, offsetting a second half program timing in compute. In closing, Q3 was another quarter of strong execution. AI demand continued to pull through every part of our portfolio, from the chips that power it to the systems, interconnects and robots that build it. This is what our wafer to data center strategy is designed to capture. As we look to the fourth quarter and into 2027, the demand signals across our end markets remain strong, and we look forward to sharing an updated target earnings model on our Q4 call. I'll close by thanking all of our Teradyne team members around the world for the hard work and dedication that drives our results and positions us well for the opportunities ahead. With that, operator, we're ready for questions.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question. from C.J. Muse with Cantor Fitzgerald.

I guess first question on memory. You obviously put up a record number for September. I'm curious how we should think about the trajectory of that business into December? And then moreover, as you think bigger picture into '27, I know it's early, you're going to save that for February, your outlook. But as you sit here today and as you look at your book-to-bill, how are you thinking about maybe the rank order of growth between HBM, traditional DRAM and NAND?

C.J., it's Greg. So looking out to Q4, we think memory is going to continue at a really strong level. And going into '27, given all of the fab expansion that is coming online in '27, we're expecting significant growth for the memory business year-on-year. And you were asking in terms of like what segment is going to drive most of the growth. We would say that like this year, HBM was probably the biggest thing that drove the growth of the memory TAM. Flash came back pretty strong, and DRAM was surprisingly strong based on what we were thinking at the beginning of the year. Looking at next year, I think HBM is the start. That -- there's going to be growth across all of the segments of memory, but I think the biggest impact is going to be in HBM growth.

Very helpful. And then maybe on your gross margin guide and the strength in the 1.4 book-to-bill you highlighted for Product Test. How should we think about Product Test sequentially? I'm assuming that's up. And is that what's driving gross margins lower? And as you think about that business next year, what impact does that have to what we should be thinking about as a more normalized gross margin for Teradyne?

Yes. So I'll start with the gross margins, and then we can talk a little bit about Product Test. So within the quarter, gross margins came in at 51.1%. This is up 60 basis points from the Q3 last year. Within the Q4 guide, we're also guiding up about 80 basis points in compared to the last year. And then if you extrapolate that for full year, our overall gross margins for the year will be about 59.4%, which is up about 110 basis points year-over-year. So at the low end of the earnings model that we just put out in January, and we're going to expect to update that in the Q4 call. So thinking about the 3 segments, C.J., Product Test is actually accretive to the overall portfolio. So as you think about modeling for Q4 and into next year, we expect that to continue to be true. As you think about gross margins for 2027, I put it in a couple of buckets in terms of headwinds and tailwinds. From an overall headwinds perspective, I would say, volume, we're going to have another year of healthy growth when you think about the overall portfolio, along with some elements of mix as we think about next year. Tailwind, though, from an overall cost perspective, we are continuing to see cost pressures, inflationary pressures just across the overall ecosystem across supply, along with potential expanded capacity next year as well. And so as we look at second half of next year, we're continuing to see robust demand signal. So to the extent that we're continuing to build on our capacity, that will also be an expense that we would expect next year as well. I don't know if you want to add anything else?

You missed [indiscernible]. You said 51.1%. I think you meant [ 59.1% ]. Just want to make sure that, that doesn't stay out in the atmosphere. But I completely agree with what you said that there are kind of, I'd say, equal up and down forces in terms of gross margin going into 2027.

Yes. And the only other thing I would add, C.J., in terms of Q4 and comparative to Q3, and Greg referenced kind of the continued growth in memory. And we certainly expect that. We do expect though, that Q3 was the record quarter within 2026. So we think there's a bit of a digestion period, although it's going to continue to grow from Q4 of last year. We expect that compute was at its lowest within Q3. And so we expect that, that's going to start to reaccelerate from a growth perspective in Q4. And then to your point, we also expect Product Test and Robotics to grow within fourth quarter as well.

We'll move on now to Timothy Arcuri with UBS.

You're in kind of the shape of the year. So this year kind of played out, you got this big step-up in Q1, and then it was basically flat throughout the year, Greg. Inventory though, is up like $200 million over the past 6 months. So obviously, you're portending a pretty big year next year. Can you speak to that? And I guess, particularly, it sounds like both your first and your second hyperscale customers are a little more back-end loaded next year. So does that mean like next year is going to be a back-end loaded year? Should we think of the first half as kind of flat versus the back half of this year and then a big step up in second half of next year? I ask because people are sort of thinking that it's more of a ratable ramp for the year. So if you can help us shape that, that would be great.

So I think there are 2 things that are driving the increase in inventory that you're seeing. One is, you're right, we are preparing for robust growth in 2027. The other is that many of the components that we're procuring to build these testers, the lead times for those have gone out as well. So we are needing to essentially put on order and take inventory against a sort of a longer lead time of our inputs. So there's sort of 2 things going on there. I don't think it's a good idea to just sort of extrapolate from that number to a pure growth number. In terms of the -- how next year breaks down, we'll have a lot more to say about that in our Q4 call. But I will tell you that in terms of the [indiscernible] programs, I think you're right. I think they are going to tend to be more back half loaded. But I don't particularly expect -- I think it's going to be a strong year all around, and we'll talk more about the phasing next quarter.

Okay. And I guess just, Greg, on the share gain pace, so last night, your competitor was kind of -- I mean, they keep pushing back on losing any share. And in the release last night, they -- there was some allusions to the contract manufacturing partners adding a bunch of supply for them. So how do you see your lead times affecting the pace of the share gains? Like are you being proactive enough about adding? You're having your supply chain add enough for you to keep lead times when you need them so that your customers don't just go to them and place orders with them.

Yes. So we've talked a lot about this in prior calls, that we've added significant capacity already for our primary SOC test platform, the UltraFLEXplus. We're actually at like 4x the capacity that we were about 18 months ago, and we are essentially planning our next capacity step-up for that platform. In addition, we've employed a dual member strategy for our own supply chain. So in 2026, we qualified the second CM to build that platform. We're in the process of doing that for our memory test platform as well. And we are aggressively adding capacity for both memory and our [ Eagle ] power test line. So where we are definitely looking to increase our capacity, we are doing our best to try to hold our lead times. One thing that is a little bit different is we're holding our lead times, but customers are giving us probably better forecast information about when they are going to need capacity in advance of placing those orders. So we have a pretty good viewpoint going out further than we did before, and that's helping us map out exactly what we need to do for capacity planning. We're doing our best to try and hold our lead times. I would say that if demand comes in that we haven't heard anything about from a forecasting perspective, the drop in place for that is probably longer than it was a year ago. But we're doing our best in terms of procuring material and expanding capacity so that we can still be very responsive to spot demand.

We'll move next to Mehdi Hosseini with SIG.

Two follow-ups for me. Greg, I want to go back and see if you can qualitatively give us an update on the demand vectors. I think the targeted model is now [ stalled ]. And yes, we're going to have to wait till Q4 earnings to get an update. But I think it will be very helpful if you can shed some light into different demand vectors. It seems like everything is tracking better than expected, and next year could be second half weighted. But is there anything else you can provide because I just want to make sure that consensus is already well above your target and we're not being too aggressive. And another follow-up.

Yes. No. So I think we can definitely -- we're going to give you an updated model in January. And the last model was based around a $13 billion ATE TAM, $12 billion to $14 billion. And the TAM has grown very, very quickly. And when we were building that model, we were trying to give you an idea of what a larger Teradyne would look like without tying down sort of exactly when that would happen because of uncertainty about these growth rates. Having said that, there are multiple independent parts of Teradyne that are each growing associated with their markets and our success there. And we had to make assumptions in terms of the mix. That in our model, we assume that Semiconductor Test would be 80% of the revenue and Robotics would be 10% and Product Test would be 10%. Semiconductors are growing so fast that, that mix has changed. Also, the Semiconductor TAM growth has been so concentrated in compute, an area where we have low but growing share that essentially, we need more ATE TAM in order to hit the revenue that we had in the model that we published. So as we're looking to put together the model that we'll talk about in January, we're definitely sort of retiming all of the different groups of the company. But if you sort of run through it, compute is growing faster than we anticipated, and we're gaining share there at a modest rate because that's being driven by dual vendor strategies primarily from those customers and growth in networking. I would say that mobile is underperforming our expectations from the model as we put it together, and we're going to be relooking at that to see whether and when we would see an edge AI-driven recovery in that space. How are the -- the automotive and industrial space, we're seeing good growth there. And I think that's tracking to sort of the model that we had before. And both Product Test and Robotics are tracking the growth that we had expected in our model, but they've been sort of -- the Semiconductor growth has sort of outpaced it. So when we put it all together, I would expect to see us building an evergreen model against a much larger ATE TAM, and we'll talk about that in January. But the growth vectors are all there, and it's all positive in terms of the direction that we're going.

And follow-up, your industrial automation for me is basically physical AI is being there. And also build up manufacturing capacity in the U.S. What needs to happen for a higher growth rate? Is it just a matter of timing? Or do you have to make more modification to the model? And anything there that could help you with a higher growth rate?

Yes. So it's a great question. So with the growth of physical AI, the capabilities of physical AI, we think that, that is going to unlock significant growth in the Robotics group. The -- there are a couple of things that have to happen. Over this year, and Michelle talked a little bit about it in her script, we have been building partnerships with the labs that are working on physical AI models and physical AI implementations. We are also aligning with the CMs and OEMs that are serving primarily the AI data center build-out. They're doing server builds basically. These things are really tough to build, and the customers are quite sophisticated in terms of the adoption of technology. That is kind of fertile ground to be able to deploy robots. The thing that I will warn you is that because we are working with the labs and then the labs are working to solve the problems with the end customers, it's going to have a gestation period. So I would expect us to see robust growth in terms of the transactions that we have to the labs in '27 and the beginning of end market growth. But I think it's probably more of a 2028 thing than a 2027 thing beyond our sort of major customer in Robotics.

We'll move on now to Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs.

I was wondering if you could maybe comment on your sort of near-term visibility heading in the next several months? And specifically, I think you've talked about visibility kind of extending beyond the current quarter. So I was wondering if you can maybe, in terms of the longer-dated commentary, help us a little bit, at least directionally, with your view on Q1 preliminarily directionally sort of up, flat or down and maybe what would sort of be driving that beyond the memory drivers you talked about earlier?

Jim, it's Michelle. So from a visibility perspective, we talked about this over the last couple of quarters. So coming into the year, historically, we've had about 13 weeks of visibility. Fast forward to where we are today, we have a pretty good line of sight out a couple of quarters. So where we're sitting as we exit '26 is really strong backlog. So we have pretty good line of sight to what will play out in Q1. The caution we have around putting any guidance around it right now is we do continue to see movement within any given quarter depending on how test cells are coming together for our customers. So I would say we would expect Q1 from where we sit today to be some level of growth, but we expect the year to progressively grow throughout quarter-on-quarter versus what we saw this year, which was more of a 50-50 split.