Raj Persaud, Vice President, Corporate Marketing & Strategy, Applied Materials

Raj Persaud, Vice President, Corporate Marketing and Strategy, Applied Materials, Inc.

We are focused on projects and products that address key technology inflections including 3D transistor, 3D NAND, interconnect, selective material deposition and removal, patterning, inspection and packaging. As we head into 2014, we are excited about supporting our customers as they ramp the 20nm Foundry node and introduce 3D NAND into volume production.  In parallel, our R&D team in field and the factory are working closely with our customers to develop new disruptive technologies for sub-20 nanometer and beyond.

Over the past year, we have increased our investments in product development and we have been adding very strong talent in management, R&D and the field. At the same time, we've been making changes to our structure and business processes to ensure we can get new innovations to our customers faster and more efficiently.

The mobility build-out continues to drive industry growth and support healthy investment levels by our semiconductor and display customers. Our customers are really engaged in a fierce battle for mobility leadership as they race to be the first to market with new innovations that improve the performance, battery-life, form-factors and user experience of mobile device.

Increasingly, materials innovation is their most significant lever to drive performance gains in transistor, interconnect, memory and display. In display, global sales of large-format TVs are growing dramatically which, together with demand for mobile screens, is driving the need for new manufacturing capacity. We also see an intense focus on new display technology. These new manufacturing processes have more capital intensity which expands the market for Applied large-area Precision Materials Engineering equipment.