Applied Materials reports Thursday with options pricing a 10% swing

by Karl Lindström · August 12, 2026

Semiconductors & Hardware Reporter, Frontier Tech Wire

Applied Materials reports fiscal third-quarter results on Thursday, Aug. 13, at 4:30 p.m. Eastern, according to the scheduling notice on the company's investor relations site. It is the largest single data point of the week for anyone holding semiconductor capital equipment exposure, and the options market is treating it that way.

Benzinga, citing options pricing as of Aug. 9, put the implied post-earnings move in Applied Materials at 10.39%. That is the market paying to hedge a swing of roughly a tenth of the company's value in either direction on a single print. The same screen showed larger implied moves for a handful of AI-adjacent hardware names reporting this week, including 18.79% for Coherent, 13.91% for Lumentum and 13.29% for Super Micro Computer.

The bar is set by management's own guidance. In the fiscal second-quarter release, Applied Materials guided third-quarter revenue to $8.95 billion plus or minus $500 million and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share to $3.36 plus or minus $0.20. Benzinga reported consensus at $9.00 billion in revenue and $3.39 in adjusted EPS, against $7.30 billion and $2.48 in the year-ago quarter. In other words, the Street is sitting fractionally above the midpoint and asking for roughly 23% revenue growth.

The prior quarter, which ended April 26, was a record by the company's own description. Revenue came in at $7.91 billion, GAAP EPS at $3.51 and non-GAAP EPS at $2.86, with non-GAAP gross margin of 50.0% and non-GAAP operating margin of 32.1%, per the results release. Semiconductor Systems contributed $5.965 billion, Applied Global Services $1.665 billion and the display segment $280 million. The company returned $765 million to shareholders in the quarter, split between $400 million of buybacks and $365 million of dividends.

The line that matters most for the rest of the supply chain came from chief executive Gary Dickerson, who said in that release that Applied Materials now expects its semiconductor equipment business to grow more than 30% in calendar 2026. Whether Thursday's commentary holds, raises or trims that number is the read-through likely to drive smaller equipment, subsystem and metrology suppliers on Friday morning, because most of them sell into the same wafer-fab equipment budgets and none of them get a hearing this large.

Positioning going into the print is unusually tense. Yahoo Finance's quote page showed Applied Materials closing Tuesday at $525.61, with a market capitalization of $417.3 billion and a 52-week range of $154.47 to $739.67. TradingKey reported the stock opened up 4.13% on Wednesday, outpacing its sector, as traders built positions ahead of the report. Benzinga's Wednesday preview framed the setup precisely: the shares are up 105.1% year to date and, measured against Wednesday's higher price, still about 25% below the all-time high of $739.67 set on June 30. Measured from Tuesday's close the discount is nearer 29%. Both facts are true at once, which is why the implied move is what it is.

The demand backdrop underneath the print is memory. TrendForce projected in its third-quarter outlook that conventional DRAM contract prices would rise 13% to 18% quarter over quarter and NAND flash contract prices 10% to 15%, with suppliers continuing to steer capacity toward AI servers. The same note flagged the other side of that trade: record contract prices are pushing PC and smartphone buyers to the edge of what they will pay, which is why TrendForce expects the pace of increases to moderate from here even with supply still tight. Equipment orders follow memory capex with a lag, so the question on Thursday's call is how much of the 2027 memory buildout is already in the backlog.

There is also a longer arc in the estimates. Barchart, in a preview carried by Yahoo Finance in late July, put full fiscal 2026 adjusted EPS consensus at $12.14, up 28.9% year over year, and fiscal 2027 at $16.23, up 33.7%. Numbers like that assume the current equipment cycle extends well past this print. A guide that merely matches, rather than extends, would put pressure on the 2027 line rather than the current quarter.

The macro tape gave the group a small tailwind into the event. July CPI landed Wednesday at 0.1% month over month and 3.4% year over year, both in line with forecasts and an easing from June's 3.5% annual rate, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics release, and the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.62% at 26,609.95 late in the session on Yahoo Finance's quote page. Soft inflation helps long-duration growth exposure at the margin. It does not decide a semicap print.

For investors in the smaller names in this chain, the practical point is that Thursday is a shared catalyst rather than a company-specific one. Applied Materials sets the tone on wafer-fab equipment spending, advanced packaging and high-bandwidth memory tooling, and the suppliers sitting one or two tiers down usually move on that commentary before they report anything of their own. That correlation runs in both directions, which is worth remembering ahead of a print with a double-digit implied move attached.