Both companies reported in the first week of August, and both beat. Entegris posted quarterly revenue of $883.2m, up 11.5% from a year earlier, and the shares jumped 15.5% on 4 August. Ultra Clean posted a record $644.9m, up 24.3%, beating on both lines and rising 7% in the session. Three weeks later Ultra Clean had given the entire move back and then some. Entegris had not.

What gets consumed and what gets ordered

Entegris supplies microcontamination-control filtration, ultra-pure specialty chemicals and gases, and the sealed carriers, called front-opening unified pods, that move wafers between tools. Management disclosed on its August call that about three-quarters of revenue is tied to wafer-start unit growth and only a quarter to customer capital spending, and raised its 2026 industry wafer-start growth assumption to 7-8% from mid-single digits.

The mechanism behind the growth is content per wafer, not tool count. Purity requirements at sub-5nm and 2nm nodes raise the number of filtration steps and the specification of the carriers, so the Advanced Purity Solutions segment reached $515m, up 17%, with liquid filtration at a fourth consecutive record and segment margin of 30.3%. Materials Solutions grew 5% to $371m, held back by mainstream logic, where foundry utilization is running at 80-85%. Memory is about 30% of revenue, and molybdenum precursor volume — used in the metal layers of newer memory stacks — roughly doubled year on year. Entegris holds an estimated 22-25% of the chemical-mechanical planarization consumables market after its 2022 CMC Materials purchase, competing with Fujimi, DuPont, AGC and Resonac for sockets that are hard to switch once qualified into a customer's process flow.

Operating income grew 55.1% on that 11.5% revenue line. The risk sits in geography: Asia-Pacific was about 79% of 2025 sales, and management has said expanded export controls reduced what it can sell into China.

The echo, one to two quarters behind

Ultra Clean builds precision gas and chemical delivery subsystems, weldments and process modules to its customers' designs, plus a smaller parts-cleaning and coating service. That is a different business from selling a qualified consumable: the volume arrives after the equipment makers book orders, and the margin reflects who owns the design. Gross margin was 16.1% last quarter, up from 15.3% a year earlier but structurally below the 19.6% of 2022, because the mix keeps shifting toward products — $572.7m against $72.2m of higher-margin services. Applied Materials and Lam Research together were 58.7% of 2025 revenue. Operating cash flow was minus $41.1m on a deliberate inventory build ahead of customer ramps, and management is building toward $3.5bn of annualized capacity by year-end.

None of that deteriorated in the quarter. The selling came from outside. A 1 July Bloomberg report that Meta would resell excess artificial-intelligence compute was read as evidence of overbuilding, and in three weeks Applied Materials fell about 23%, Lam Research 27% and KLA 28%. Applied Materials then reported revenue of $9.12bn, up 25%, and fell anyway; the group lost another 4-5% on 19 August on doubts about how long AI infrastructure orders last. What is being marked down is the 2027-28 order book, and Ultra Clean's revenue is that order book with a lag.

What each price now assumes

Entegris trades at 14.5x trailing gross profit, down from 16.4x in mid-May, and 13.5x forward — the advance since spring has come from profit, not from a higher multiple. The absolute level is still full: 29.2x trailing EV/EBITDA, 36.7x forward earnings and a 2.6% free-cash-flow yield. Ultra Clean sits at 9.9x trailing gross profit, essentially the 10.0x of early May, because gross profit rose roughly 7.5% while the shares fell about a quarter; forward, it is 7.9x gross profit and 24.2x earnings against consensus for 2027 revenue of $3.87bn.

Both stocks held a strong uptrend into late July and slipped out of it in early August, their 50-day averages still above the 200-day. From the 1 July peak Ultra Clean is down 41.0% and Entegris 13.0%. Over the past month Entegris was the only gainer among six suppliers to the fabs, while MKS fell 19.5% and Applied Materials 12.0%. The businesses agree on direction and disagree entirely on quality of revenue.

The setup

Where it stands — Entegris' consumable content is compounding at a cheapening multiple; Ultra Clean's faster growth is thinner, later and concentrated in two buyers. Would confirm — Entegris Q3 revenue of $905-935m with gross margin at 47.5-48.5%, and Ultra Clean printing $700-750m. Would invalidate — Materials Solutions failing to reach double-digit growth in the second half, or Ultra Clean guiding Q4 below Q3. Watch next — Third-quarter results from both in early November, with Applied Materials' order commentary before them. Valuation — Entegris 14.5x trailing gross profit and 13.5x forward, against 16.4x in mid-May; Ultra Clean 9.9x and 7.9x.