Advantest Corporation

Management did not give quarterly revenue or EPS in this transcript. On the SoC tester market, it said the midpoint outlook was revised from $9.1 billion to $11 billion, a $2 billion increase, mainly due to growth in inferencing and compute. On share, it said SoC market share was 66% in 2025 and sees a path toward 70%+ in the future. For capacity, it reiterated the prior 10,000 93000-units-per-year target by end-2028/early-2029, but said that timing is being pulled in; it also said the company is effectively flowing through the 5,000-unit level already. Forward-looking commentary said SoC demand should remain sustainable through this year and into next year, while memory may see a downturn this year before recovering as new products and future fabs ramp.

Douglas Lefever’s tone was confident and upbeat, but practical. He emphasized that demand is broad-based across GPU, custom ASIC and CPU, with inferencing, more chips, longer test times and more test insertions all contributing to a larger TAM. He also said the company’s 93000 platform is a de facto standard across compute applications, which makes the growth source less important than the fact that the company is positioned to capture it.

The financial commentary focused more on margins and capacity than on income statement details. Management said margin was supported by favorable product mix, favorable exchange rates, scale benefits from the platform strategy, and a reversal of inventory obsolescence in the quarter. Offsetting that, they pointed to inflationary bill-of-materials pressure, especially memory pricing, and said testers use a lot of DRAM, which is why they are not assuming the current quarter’s margin level will persist. They also said there is some ability to pass through memory-related cost pressure case by case, customer by customer.

Analysts pressed on what was driving the $2 billion increase in the SoC tester TAM, and management said it is mainly inferencing and compute growth, not a clean split among GPU, ASIC and CPU. They also asked whether the increase was mainly from more chips, and management agreed, saying many more customers are doing custom ASICs and that networking has also grown significantly. On capacity, management said it is pulling forward the 10,000-unit plan, that it is already moving through the 5,000-unit level, and that it expects about 18 months of visibility now versus the historical six months. On share, management said SoC share was 66% in 2025 and memory could dip this year due to product transitions before recovering over the next few years.