Lam Research Corporation LRCX

The business

Lam makes three of the machines that turn a silicon wafer into a chip. Deposition lays material down atom by atom. Etch takes it away with a precision measured in single layers. Clean removes what neither step wanted. A modern memory chip stacks hundreds of these operations, and Lam's tools do a large share of them.

The moat is that a fab qualifies a specific tool for a specific process step and then does not change it, because requalifying costs months of production. Lam is unusually exposed to memory, which is the most violent part of an already cyclical industry, and that exposure is currently the reason the numbers look like this.