MKS Instruments at Baird Conference: Strategic Growth and Market Position

On Tuesday, 11 November 2025, MKS Instruments (NASDAQ:MKSI) participated in the Baird 55th Annual Global Industrial Conference. The company outlined its strategic focus on technology differentiation, customer relationships, and shareholder value. While MKS anticipates strong growth driven by secular trends and strategic investments, challenges such as tariff impacts and market fluctuations were also discussed.

Key Takeaways

• MKS projects $3.9 billion in revenue for 2025, marking a 9% year-to-date growth.
• The company is expanding its manufacturing facilities in Malaysia and Thailand.
• MKS anticipates the semiconductor industry to reach a trillion dollars by 2030.
• Free cash flow is expected to reach 15% of revenue, up from an average of 11% last year.
• MKS aims to reduce leverage to 2-2.5 times net leverage by focusing on cash generation.

Financial Results

• Projected revenue for 2025 is approximately $3.9 billion, a 9% increase year-to-date.
• EPS growth is expected to reach 22% year-to-date.
• Free cash flow generation is strong, expected to reach 15% of revenue.
• Semiconductor revenue in Q3 was $415 million, slightly down quarter-over-quarter but up over 10% year-over-year.
• Electronics and packaging revenue improved by 9% quarter-over-quarter and 25% year-over-year in Q3.
• Specialty industrial revenue stabilized at $280 million in Q3, tied to the auto industry and general industrial sectors.

Operational Updates

• MKS is expanding its CapEx to modernize manufacturing facilities, with new plants in Malaysia and Thailand.
• The company is focused on solving customers’ toughest problems and co-developing solutions.
• MKS’s service component, including chemistry, constitutes about 40% of revenue with high margins.
• The company is early in its adoption of AI internally, embedding AI in various functions.

Future Outlook

• MKS anticipates a strong 2026, driven by top-line growth and cost structure optimization.
• The company is confident in achieving its deleveraging goals, focusing on reducing debt.
• Future growth will focus on small acquisitions to support existing core businesses.
• MKS aims to return to its mid-40s margin with operational excellence programs.

Q&A Highlights

• MKS differentiates through its broad product range and close customer relationships.
• The service side of the business is about 40% of revenue, providing stability.
• The company has historically outperformed WFE growth by 200 basis points.
• Gross margin was impacted by tariffs, but MKS is confident of returning to mid-40s margins.

Readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript for a detailed understanding of MKS Instruments’ strategic insights and financial outlook.

Full transcript - Baird 55th Annual Global Industrial Conference:

Rob Mason, Senior Analyst, Baird: Are we at time? Okay, I think we’ll go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the session for MKS. I’m Rob Mason, the Senior Analyst at Baird that covers Advanced Industrial Technology. Certainly want to welcome MKS to the Industrial Conference. As you may be aware, MKS is a leading technology solutions and subsystems provider into leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing, electronics, and packaging. Very pleased to have Ram Mayampurath, the Executive Vice President and CFO, with us, as well as Keith Loop, who’s the Vice President of their Vacuum Systems and Services business. Ram’s going to go through a few slides. There should be a little bit of time at the end for Q&A, and if you have any questions, direct those up to us via the iPad, and I’ll work those in.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Thank you, Rob. Hello, everybody. Let’s just get right in. We have quite a few. MKS is a foundational leader in technology. We’ll get into the details of that in a minute here, but we provide precision solutions to our customers. We are engaged in solving our customers’ toughest problems, if you may. As the technology demand gets more complex, as the demand on equipment and technology increases, it’s good for MKS as we get into product miniaturization and more technology requirements. It works to our advantage. We have a very strong, close relationship with our customers. We do co-development with them. The proximity to the customers and the technology discussions is a core strength for MKS. We are also very focused on driving value for our shareholders. Our execution remains very strong. We’ll get into some of the numbers here in a minute.

We are very focused on driving profitability and cash flow. These are 2024 numbers, and we’ll take you through year to date 2025 as well. $3.6 billion, we spent about 8% on R&D. It’s the technology differentiation that helps, that separates us from our competition and also gives us the price and the margin advantage that we have. We are about 25% EBITDA, and we’ll get into some of the other numbers here in more detail in the slides ahead. The 85% of surround the chamber strategy and the 70% of the steps in the chemical business that we are in. We’ll talk about that in a little detail in the slides ahead.

If you look at our main market segments, these are our three main market segments: semiconductor, which includes semiconductor, traditional semiconductor that MKS has been involved in, and also world-class optics, which is the lithometrology and inspection. Electronics and packaging, that came out of the large acquisition we did about three years back of Atotech business. And specialty industrial, which is a collection of several markets, if you may, includes automotive. It includes general industrial. It includes aerospace and defense, life health sciences and research. By no way is it commodity business. It is very profitable, high-margin businesses. We will get into all of them in very much detail here in the slides ahead. Just to give you an overview, those are the key market segments we play in. To take you through the next couple of slides, Keith will take you through the technology part.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: All right, thank you, Ram. As Ram said, semiconductor is our core business, as you saw on the last slide. As you can see, the semiconductor business has a long history of steady growth over the last several decades, whether it’s semiconductors for PCs or semiconductors for your mobile or handheld device. There’s been strong, steady growth of chip sales over that period. Now as we look forward in the last few years, and as we look forward, there’s still strong growth drivers in the semi business, really driven by AI, big data, or any other high-performance computing. There’s a pretty broad consensus in the industry that the semiconductor industry is going to grow to about a trillion dollars in revenue by 2030. There are even some more recent reports of even numbers significantly higher than that by 2030.

There is a lot of good, strong end demand growth for semiconductor chips. Walking the next layer back to kind of how that impacts MKS, to make all those chips, you need to build factories and fill those with equipment. There is a measure called wafer fab equipment spending, which is how much money is spent on equipment every year. You can see in the last five or six years, there has been a significant increase in equipment spending from about $30 billion five or six years ago to over $100 billion now in the last several years. As the chips have become more complex to make, the revenue that you saw there on the revenue side, it is the equipment intensity and the amount of money to spend to make that chip that has gone up as well.

Again, more factories need to be built, more equipment needs to be purchased. If we hit the trillion dollars in revenue by 2030 on kind of a similar intensity assumption, that is going to mean that we need to increase WFE from a little over $100 billion today to well over $150 billion in just the next several years by 2030. Great spot to be, good end growth drivers and good, strong end demand for our semiconductor industry. If we go another layer down and say, all right, what is all this equipment that people are buying? What is in that factory? If you go to a semiconductor fab, they are making that chip there that is in the middle. It is kind of a complex drawing there, cross-section of what a semiconductor chip looks like these days.

You can see multiple features, many layers, many different features that are made on that semiconductor chip. To do that, you can see it’s a circular repeating process in that semiconductor fab of photolithography, complex photolithography equipment to make the images, etching and deposition equipment to put the patterns down and etch away and create the patterns that you need. You need to measure it and make sure everything’s fine down to a nanometer scale. Every one of those segments has very complex equipment to produce that semiconductor chip. This cycle repeats over 80-90 times, over 1,000 process steps just to make one wafer. It can take over three months to make that wafer. Not very simple.

If you look at where MKS plays in this space, we’re in 85% of those pieces of equipment that are on the fab floor. Broad exposure, true critical technologies that enable that equipment to run in every one of those steps. We’re not just selling some components, a screw or other part. We are selling critical enabling technologies. One example is RF power, which is critical for creating plasma and etching away very, very fine features. You need very precise power, very much controlled power. That’s a key area of strength for MKS that we are in, particularly in etch and deposition equipment, where we provide that main kind of heartbeat of that piece of equipment. We also have been getting into the photolithography and inspection space with the acquisition of a photonics business back in 2016.

There we are, again, enabling critical optics subassemblies into lithography and metrology systems to enable those to continue to push the limits of what we can do for our customers. We will go to the next slide. Basically, as we look at the semiconductor business, you see strong end market growth, great long legacy position that MKS has had over the last 60 years of providing solutions in that semiconductor space and emerging with the lithography and metrology space and the photonics that is growing and building a base of as well. That chip cannot run just having a chip. It has got to go into a system. It has got to go into an overall advanced electronic device, which includes wafer level packaging, package substrate, and printed circuit boards. That leads into the next segment, which is electronics and packaging that Ram had covered.

We play a critical role, just like we do in semiconductor space, in the electronics and packaging space. We have electronic chemistry solutions that create those patterns on the printed circuit boards and those package substrates. We have equipment that goes along with those chemicals. We also have laser drilling equipment to create the features and the interconnects between the layers of the printed circuit boards. In the past, the semiconductor industry has improved performance, improved costs, and improved power efficiency through improving the semiconductor chip. We’ve gotten to a point now where these, especially these complex AI systems, are creating needs that we do not need just innovations on the semiconductor chip, but we need that package. Every layer you see below the chip to improve as well. Need better performance, more layers, quicker connections, less power consumption.

There is a lot of innovation now. You’re probably hearing a lot about AI and packaging and the different constructions to help enable those complex systems. We’re at the heart of that with our chemistry solutions and our laser drilling solutions. To kind of finalize here on the market overview, this chart really shows the value chain and the supply chain of where we play, all the way from the components that we make to the equipment that we feed into, the manufacturers that make the chips, and then ultimately to the end device OEMs.

You can see that both on the semiconductor side, where we sell to the big five equipment makers, and on the electronics and packaging side, where we feed chemistry and capital equipment to printed circuit board manufacturers that you see there and package substrate manufacturers, we are foundational to both sides of those industries. That equipment cannot run without our subsystems, and those PCBs cannot be made without our chemistries. As the technology continues to evolve, we are key enablers partnering with our customers to develop solutions in those areas.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: To catch you up a little bit on what’s 2025 key financials, if you may, you saw the 2024 numbers. If you look at our three quarters of actuals and our fourth quarter guide, we are well on our way to be $3.9 billion, close to $3.9 billion of top line, which is about a 9% growth year to date from prior year. EPS, which had a strong growth in 2023 to 2024, is projected to grow more at about 22%. This is, again, year to date growth. Free cash flow, in the first three quarters of 2025, we have almost made the free cash flow we did all of 2024. We are well on track to exceed our free cash flow growth this year compared to last year. Last year, we were about average 11% of revenue.

In this quarter, we’ll be about 15% of revenue. Free cash flow generation has been strong. We are very good at executing, changing, agile at responding to the geopolitics and the market requirements. We are very focused on managing our cost as we grow our top line. To get into some of the more specifics of each business segment that Keith just went over, $415 million in top line for semiconductor in Q3. That is quarter over quarter, slightly down, mostly because the NAND upgrade cycle, which tends to be a little lumpy, was very strong in Q2, but was not as high in Q3. The fundamentals of the semiconductor business remain very strong, but the high Q2 NAND impact made the sequential comparisons negative. The year over year change, you can see is over 10%, and our guide for Q4 remains at Q3 levels.

Again, we’ll see less impact of NAND because it’s no more driven by upgrades at this point. Electronics and packaging, which is part of the acquisition that I talked about and the details of what Keith just went through, quarter over quarter, 9% improvement in Q3. Year over year, we have a 25% growth in that business, and it’s chemistry and chemistry equipment. And a good part of that equipment business in particular is driven by the AI demand. We have a strong guide getting into Q4 as well at $295 million. Specialty industrial, like I said, it’s got a bunch of segments within it. GDP is a good measure to track that. PMI index is a good measure to go by. We are stabilized. It’s still below what it used to be, but we started the year at about $270 million-$275 million a quarter.

We are happy to exceed, get to this 284 level, 280 level in Q3, Q4. It is really tied to mostly auto industry and general industrial, which are the two bigger segments within that. Again, like I said, PMI has slightly started ticking above 50 now. We hope as it gets to its more normal levels, we will start seeing much more profitability in cash generation. To touch upon our capital allocation strategy, we are expanding our CapEx to get closer to our customers, mostly and to modernize our manufacturing facilities. We are building a new plant in Malaysia, and we have acquired land and built a chemistry plant in Thailand. We also have some activities going on in China and in Europe and Romania.

Our CapEx tends to be about 4%-5% of our revenue, closer to the 4% range, and that’ll continue for one more year, and then it’ll get back more to normal levels of 3%-4%. Investing in ourself, investing in supporting the growth of the business and continuity of the business is primary focus. Investing in technology remains our primary focus for capital allocation strategy. The second focus is we pay a modest dividend, about $60 million a year, and strengthening our balance sheet by lowering our leverage. That’s going to be our primary focus after the first two for the remaining period of time till we get our debt down to 2-2.5 times net leverage. The debt is nothing new for MKS. We always borrowed money for acquisitions. We borrowed money for the Atotech acquisitions, and we’ve been paying it down.

It’s just the discipline of paying it down. That remains our primary focus. Once we get our debt down to more acceptable levels of 2.5 times net, we can get into a more broader capital allocation strategy that includes returning cash back to shareholders, if you may, and also inorganic growth support, which is a core part of our strategy. We probably do not need to do any large acquisitions like the ones we have done in the past. The ones that we look at more will be tuck-ins and bolt-ons to our existing core businesses. We did buy back a small amount of stock in Q1 of this year, mostly to offset dilution, and that is very opportunistic. To sum it up, we are in some very secular growth markets as we went through the segments of market we are in.

We are very focused on driving profitability and creating value for our shareholders, and we will continue to focus on cash generation and deleveraging and strengthening our balance sheet. As we look at 2026, given the tailwind we have on the top line, given our cost structure and the cash generation and a strengthening balance sheet, we are looking at a very good 2026 as we look ahead. With that, I will stop and take any questions.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Absolutely. If there are any questions, just feel free to raise your hand, and we’ll work you into the dialogue. Ram, maybe just a high-level question. As you think about the technology portfolio that you do bring to bear, you checked a lot of boxes as we looked at the diagram around wafer construction or chip construction. How do you differentiate on the technology side versus your peers? Is it breadth, just having the touch points that you do, or just elaborate on that?

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Absolutely. Keith, do you want to start with that?

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Sure. I think one of the key things we do is, again, with the breadth of the products that we have, we have close relationships with our customers. What we ultimately do is we solve our customers’ hardest problems, as Ram had said earlier. We really do, when those technological changes happen, we are right there with them. We can see it coming with them. We can develop those solutions and enable their equipment to do what it needs to do. I think it is really about customer intimacy, which our broad portfolio enables us to get even closer and to see those inflections coming earlier and develop the solutions that are differentiating in the marketplace.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Yeah. Yeah. The differentiation that our R&D does is reflected in the differentiation we bring to our product that provides the stickiness in the business, the price stability, and the margin. The R&D dollars we spend are very well put to use. That’s the core strength there.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Yeah. You mentioned service several times in your overview. How does that mix in with the service revenue streams mix in with those that are going to be more directly tied to CapEx? What’s the mix there? Who’s trying to change that dynamic?

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: I’ll start, and Keith runs the service business, so he can certainly talk more about it. We are very, very happy with the service component in our business. The acquisition of the Atotech business and the growth of our EMP was primarily focused on driving broader portfolio products to minimize the volatility of semiconductor business, if you may. The service side of our business, including the chemistry, is about 40% of our revenue with very high margins. As that grows, it provides more stability to our overall revenue stream. Keith, feel free to add on anything more you may.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Yeah, yeah. I think the service business in total is about $500 million of that kind of 40% that you said. It has been growing. Obviously, as the install base grows, as we sell more equipment, that service business naturally grows. We have really focused on engaging the end users who are using the products and our OEM partners and finding ways to add more value even in the aftermarket. We have been able to do that and kind of outpace the growth on the service side and bring more value, leading to increased margins as well.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: We have service associated with both semiconductor, photonics, and MSD. To Keith’s point, as the install rate base increases, the service revenue potential is going to increase. The profitability of that segment is very attractive for us.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Yeah. You made mention at the end, you feel good about where you sit heading into 2026 around growth. How should we be thinking about MKS growth in the context of WFE, WFE growth as a barometer for how fast that you could grow?

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Yeah. I can, again, start, and Keith can talk more about the WFE impact to our business. Where we sit, we are very happy with the level of execution and the focus we have had in deleveraging and strengthening our balance sheet. We are happy with the investments in the portfolio that we have and the general shift in the discussion that we are having with you folks from just semiconductor to electronics and packaging as well. The acquisition that we did a few years ago is really hitting its stride now. We are seeing it in the top line, and AI is going to only take it forward. When you look forward into the years ahead, we think we are in a very well position to both drive top line and profitability. That is what I meant. WFE, you can talk more to it.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Yeah. Again, I highlighted the kind of history of WFE growth and the forecast of it going forward from the industry analysts. MKS has a long history of outperforming WFE. We’ve outperformed WFE about 200 basis points. We’ve done that over the last several decades. Everything we see going forward, we should be able to continue to outperform WFE by about that 200 basis points. Okay. What about the margin profile, thinking about the near-term margin profile, the puts and takes on gross margin given where the business is currently trending?

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Yeah. So if you look at 2024, all the way up to actually Q1 of 2025, we were well ahead of 47%. We finished Q1 at 47.4%. Since then, two things happened. One is we started seeing the impact of tariffs starting Q2. And we started seeing the impact of mix, the equipment side of the chemistry business that I talked about earlier. We started seeing the impact of that. That equipment business is lower than the corporate average margins, if you may. But it’s a good problem to have because it guarantees future very high margin chemistry sales. Among our competition, the main competition we have are. We are the only ones who sell the equipment. That model of equipment plus chemistry works very well for us because more equipment out there, it’s more chemistry for us.

The attach rate after five years, we say, is about 85%. In the earlier years, it is higher than that. That is very attractive for us. That mix did hurt our overall gross margin in the short term. Regarding tariffs, we had 115 basis points of impact in Q2, without which we would have been close to 48%. We had 80 basis points of impact in Q3. We would have been 47.4% without that. As of Q4, we have offset the impact of tariffs dollar for dollar. However, just because of math, because we do not mark up those tariffs as we pass through what we need to pass through, there will be a 50 basis points impact to the gross margin, although no impact to the dollars itself. We will offset that.

We are very confident of getting back to our mid-40s margin, 47% plus, with just ongoing operational excellence programs that we are running and once we get to a more normalized mix.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: One thing that we’ve been asking all of the companies here is to try to get some sense of as to how real is AI, right, and how you may be applying it. Yes, there’s a lot of push to make it external customer, work it into customer solutions. Internally, I’m curious if you have any areas or examples that you could point to where you’ve applied AI tools and are driving some efficiencies or savings that you’d call out.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: So internally, you mean within MKS or top line?

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Internally.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Internally. I can start and Keith, if you can think of anything specific too. We are early in our adoption of AI. We have teams of specialists in AI that’s working with us. We are trying to train more experts to be embedded in the functions, if you may, functional leaders. Within finance, for example, there’s a lot that AI can do, and we are early stages. We are scratching the surface. There’s things we can do in R&D. That is going to make our OpEx, in particular, a lot more scalable as we use more of that. We are in very early innings right now. Anything specific you want to add? No.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Yeah. Did you effort to delever the balance sheet to your target level? Have you put a timeline on when you think you could get to 2.5?

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: We haven’t put a timeline. We are very focused on getting to 2.5 times. And our past actions of prepayments, we’ve been putting money where our mouth is. The wild card or the unknown there is really the top line. At our current muted top lines, if you may, 2023, 2024 was very flat. We’ve been able to manage about $500,000,000 of payments around that every year, prepayments and mandatory payments together. But as that top line comes back to more normal levels, we can certainly accelerate that. So that’s the bit of the unknown. Plus anything else we can do from a portfolio point of view or to accelerate that, we will look at. So we haven’t given a timeline, but we are confident that we’ll get to the levels we want to. And like I said, it’s not uncommon for MKS.

It’s just that the last borrowing was larger, and the market didn’t get the top line where we needed it to be. It has taken a little longer. The discipline to get it back to acceptable levels is very critical for us. We’ve always done that.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Yeah. Just on the specialty industrial segment, you mentioned that has crept up as the years unfolded from where you began the year. Are you seeing any green shoots of more substantive improvement in that part of the business, any particular area?

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Not really. I think the two, we’ve seen slight growth in aerospace and defense and in life health sciences, if you may. The two big segments there are general industrial and auto. As you all know, in the auto news, the last one was slightly better, but not a meaningful impact yet. Unless we see something there, hopefully the interest rate cuts will drive further demand. Unless we see something meaningful in those two segments, factory build, and we have lasers that go into the factories, that’s the specialty industrial component there. The business related to the auto, we won’t see a step change from where we are.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Yeah. Is that a global business, or is it exposed to any particular region?

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Nope, 100% global.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Okay. Any region stand out as maybe better than another? I’m thinking maybe North America might be better than Europe, but.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: No, we have businesses spread all over the world. We have local for local manufacturing all over the world. I mean, if you look at MKS, our China exposure is about lower 20, 22%. Most of that is related to the chemistry and chemistry business, if you may. The China manufacturing is all local, done in China. We have factories in Europe, and we have factories in North America.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Very good. Again, maybe last call, if there’s any questions before we wrap here. No? We’ll call it then. Thank you very much, Ram.

Ram Mayampurath, Executive Vice President and CFO, MKS: Thank you. Thank you all.

Keith Loop, Vice President, Vacuum Systems and Services, MKS: Appreciate it. Good to see you.

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