EXCLUSIVE: Brooks Automation CFO Martin Headley Gives Outlook On Semiconductor Industry (BRKS)

In an exclusive interview with Benzinga, CFO of Brooks Automation BRKS, Martin Headley described the fast paced semiconductor industry.

Giving an overview of the company, Headley went on: “Brooks Automation is a provider of robotics automation equipment, vacuum pumps, and vacuum instrumentation, historically for the semiconductor capital equipment markets."

As Headley described, Brook’s main business lies with semiconductor capital equipment market, accounting for 54 percent of 2012 revenue.

When asked about how changes in the semiconductor industry affect manufacturing processes, Brooks explained: “Continual change following Moore’s law to every two or three years reduce the size of the chip... [causes] significant capital intensity which we participate in by being a broad provider of components and sub-solutions to a wide variety of semiconductor OEMs around the globe.

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“We have to flex to changes in capital equipment demands that require us to continue to be very flexible in our business model and we have been successful in that regard.”

Headley then went on to describe the two biggest growth catalysts in the semiconductor industry, driving these huge capital expenses. The first deals with chronic demand to increase computing power on smaller and smaller semiconductors. This shifts the industry “into an area called back end semiconductor that has previously not been the provenance of such automated wafer-level handling, and Brooks has taken a leadership position in that area.

Second, the “even greater need for cleanliness and avoidance of contamination. Given that that has an increasingly adverse impact on the yield for the semiconductor chip makers, there are various solutions that are being looked at and worked at to increase the level of cleanliness. We are partaking in projects directly with some of the end users.”