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Here's How Much a $1000 Investment in KLA Made 10 Years Ago Would Be Worth Today
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For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. Not only can it impact your investment portfolio, but it can also help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.
Another thing that can drive investing is the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This particularly applies to tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.
What if you'd invested in KLA (KLAC - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to KLAC for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?
KLA's Business In-Depth
With that in mind, let's take a look at KLA's main business drivers.
San Jose, CA-based KLA Corporation is an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of process diagnostics and control (PDC) equipment and yield management solutions required for the fabrication of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) or chips. The company has a comprehensive portfolio of products addressing each major PDC subsegment—photomask (reticle) inspection, wafer inspection/defect review and metrology.
Reticle production is vital to the semiconductor device formation process. Reticles are used to control the precise deposition of materials onto the wafer, which ultimately change its chemical characteristics, imparting specific functionalities to the ICs thus created. Inspection and metrology tools measure the quality of the reticles, helping to improve reticle production yields. As a result of the broader applicability of semiconductors, shrinking form factors and increasing functionalities of individual chips, reticle design and production are growing in importance. Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor were the largest customers in the last three years, accounting for more than 10% of total sales in each year.
KLA reported revenues of $10.496 billion in fiscal 2023. Product revenues accounted for 79.8% while the rest came from Service segment.
KLA’s two main product lines are defect inspection and metrology. The company’s defect inspection tools have very broad application in chip, wafer, reticle, storage, compound semiconductor and MEMS manufacturing. Metrology tools are used to gather critical dimension measurements of the wafer and process dimensions such as film thickness, lithography overlay and surface profiling. The company’s metrology products are used in chip, wafer, reticle and solar device manufacturing. KLA also offers other products and services.
In addition to new tools, KLA also offers a comprehensive portfolio of refurbished tools that upgrade and improve yields of existing equipment under the KT-Certified program. Refurbished tools are currently sold to IC, reticle, substrate, MEMS and data storage manufacturers.
Although KLA is a major player in each of its served markets, it faces competition from other large equipment suppliers such as Applied Materials and Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation.
Bottom Line
Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio requires research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in KLA ten years ago, you're likely feeling pretty good about your investment today.
A $1000 investment made in May 2014 would be worth $11,381.24, or a 1,038.12% gain, as of May 13, 2024, according to our calculations. Investors should note that this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.
The S&P 500 rose 178.03% and the price of gold increased 75.05% over the same time frame in comparison.
Analysts are anticipating more upside for KLAC.
KLA is benefiting from strong performance of the wafer inspection business owing to rising demand for advanced wafer inspection applications in leading-edge technology development. Growing adoption of KLA’s 8900 series platform for high throughput macro inspection, increased demand in the legacy node and advanced packaging categories made the platform one of the best performing product lines in its optical inspection portfolio in 2023. Growing investments across multiple nodes, and rising capital intensity in Foundry & Logic are driving the top-line growth. KLA's emphasis on integration of AI into its solutions has driven its outperformance in the semiconductor market. However, weakness in the PCB, Display and Component Inspection remains a headwind. Softness in memory and leading-edge, logic and foundry investments has been a concern.
Shares have gained 5.51% over the past four weeks and there have been 7 higher earnings estimate revisions for fiscal 2024 compared to none lower. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.
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Here's How Much a $1000 Investment in KLA Made 10 Years Ago Would Be Worth Today
For most investors, how much a stock's price changes over time is important. Not only can it impact your investment portfolio, but it can also help you compare investment results across sectors and industries.
Another thing that can drive investing is the fear of missing out, or FOMO. This particularly applies to tech giants and popular consumer-facing stocks.
What if you'd invested in KLA (KLAC - Free Report) ten years ago? It may not have been easy to hold on to KLAC for all that time, but if you did, how much would your investment be worth today?
KLA's Business In-Depth
With that in mind, let's take a look at KLA's main business drivers.
San Jose, CA-based KLA Corporation is an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) of process diagnostics and control (PDC) equipment and yield management solutions required for the fabrication of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) or chips. The company has a comprehensive portfolio of products addressing each major PDC subsegment—photomask (reticle) inspection, wafer inspection/defect review and metrology.
Reticle production is vital to the semiconductor device formation process. Reticles are used to control the precise deposition of materials onto the wafer, which ultimately change its chemical characteristics, imparting specific functionalities to the ICs thus created. Inspection and metrology tools measure the quality of the reticles, helping to improve reticle production yields. As a result of the broader applicability of semiconductors, shrinking form factors and increasing functionalities of individual chips, reticle design and production are growing in importance. Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor were the largest customers in the last three years, accounting for more than 10% of total sales in each year.
KLA reported revenues of $10.496 billion in fiscal 2023. Product revenues accounted for 79.8% while the rest came from Service segment.
KLA’s two main product lines are defect inspection and metrology. The company’s defect inspection tools have very broad application in chip, wafer, reticle, storage, compound semiconductor and MEMS manufacturing. Metrology tools are used to gather critical dimension measurements of the wafer and process dimensions such as film thickness, lithography overlay and surface profiling. The company’s metrology products are used in chip, wafer, reticle and solar device manufacturing. KLA also offers other products and services.
In addition to new tools, KLA also offers a comprehensive portfolio of refurbished tools that upgrade and improve yields of existing equipment under the KT-Certified program. Refurbished tools are currently sold to IC, reticle, substrate, MEMS and data storage manufacturers.
Although KLA is a major player in each of its served markets, it faces competition from other large equipment suppliers such as Applied Materials and Hitachi High-Technologies Corporation.
Bottom Line
Anyone can invest, but building a successful investment portfolio requires research, patience, and a little bit of risk. So, if you had invested in KLA ten years ago, you're likely feeling pretty good about your investment today.
A $1000 investment made in May 2014 would be worth $11,381.24, or a 1,038.12% gain, as of May 13, 2024, according to our calculations. Investors should note that this return excludes dividends but includes price increases.
The S&P 500 rose 178.03% and the price of gold increased 75.05% over the same time frame in comparison.
Analysts are anticipating more upside for KLAC.
KLA is benefiting from strong performance of the wafer inspection business owing to rising demand for advanced wafer inspection applications in leading-edge technology development. Growing adoption of KLA’s 8900 series platform for high throughput macro inspection, increased demand in the legacy node and advanced packaging categories made the platform one of the best performing product lines in its optical inspection portfolio in 2023. Growing investments across multiple nodes, and rising capital intensity in Foundry & Logic are driving the top-line growth. KLA's emphasis on integration of AI into its solutions has driven its outperformance in the semiconductor market. However, weakness in the PCB, Display and Component Inspection remains a headwind. Softness in memory and leading-edge, logic and foundry investments has been a concern.
Shares have gained 5.51% over the past four weeks and there have been 7 higher earnings estimate revisions for fiscal 2024 compared to none lower. The consensus estimate has moved up as well.