On Tuesday, Qnity Electronics (NYSE:Q) discussed second-quarter financial results during its earnings call. The full transcript is provided below.
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The full earnings call is available at https://event.on24.com/wcc/r/5319848/5A098872998A22C3BAC0FFB2BEF049F9
Summary
Qnity Electronics reported a 22% year-over-year increase in net sales for the second quarter of 2026, with adjusted operating EBITDA up 24% and adjusted EPS growing 53%.
The company highlighted strong growth in its Semiconductor Technologies and Interconnect Solutions segments, driven by AI-driven solutions and advanced packaging, leading to a 28% organic growth in ICS.
Qnity Electronics raised its full-year outlook, expecting net sales of $5.55 billion to $5.65 billion, adjusted operating EBITDA of $1.675 billion to $1.725 billion, and adjusted EPS of $4.40 to $4.60.
The company continues to expand its capacity and innovation efforts, launching new products such as the Optavision Max Polishing Pads and enhancing its thermal materials portfolio.
Management emphasized strong customer engagement, strategic investments, and the company's position to capitalize on growth opportunities, especially in AI and high-performance computing sectors.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Good morning and welcome to the Qnity Electronics second quarter 2026 conference and webcast call. Currently, all callers have been placed in listen-only mode, and following management's prepared remarks, the call will be open for your questions. I will now turn the call over to Meg Miller, Vice President of Global Communications. You may begin.
Meg Miller, Vice President of Global Communications
Thank you and welcome to our second quarter 2026 earnings call. I'm joined by Jon Kemp, Qnity Electronics' Chief Executive Officer, and Mike Goss, Qnity Electronics' Interim Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today we issued our earnings release along with a supplemental slide presentation which can be found on our Investor Relations website. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that today's discussion will include some forward-looking statements.
These statements represent our best view of predictions and expectations for the future, but numerous risks and uncertainties may cause actual results to differ. Please refer to our earnings release and SEC filings for a discussion of these risks. We'll also be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures and I refer you to our earnings materials for information regarding our non-GAAP financial measures and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measure.
And now it's my pleasure to turn it over to Jon.
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Thank you for joining our call this morning. Last quarter we talked about how the fundamental shift from shrink to stack is becoming the driving force behind technological advancements in the semiconductor industry. Innovation is spanning well beyond transistor shrink to focus on connecting chips in new and innovative ways that will unlock the next frontier of computing. As the stack gets taller and layers multiply, the journey every chip must take lengthens and materials innovation becomes the hidden hero, quietly powering performance, yield and reliability.
Qnity Electronics sits at the center of this trend with one of the broadest portfolios of end-to-end solutions across the stack. On the front end, our suite of CMP pads, cleans and slurries and lithography materials are essential for patterning and polishing leading-edge chips. In the middle, we provide comprehensive advanced packaging solutions from both business segments to enable next-generation architectures and support chip-to-chip connections.
Finally, on the back end, our thermal materials move heat across demanding full system workloads like data centers and other AI applications. When you combine the breadth of our portfolio across the semiconductor stack with decades of innovation alongside our customers and a local-for-local model for manufacturing and technical support, it's clear why Qnity Electronics is uniquely positioned for the opportunities ahead. We're aligned with the industry's most groundbreaking technology roadmaps, embedded in our customers' next-generation platform, and able to deliver the materials and solutions they need at scale.
As AI, high-performance computing and advanced connectivity continue to reshape the industry, these advantages position us to create significant long-term value. The best proof of this differentiated position is our performance. Looking at our second quarter results, we delivered our ninth consecutive quarter of strong, profitable organic growth. Organic sales increased 22% year over year with another quarter of double-digit growth across both segments.
Adjusted operating EBITDA increased 24% and adjusted EPS grew by 53% as we continue to demonstrate our ability to drive strong operating leverage in the business. In Semiconductor Technologies, we grew organic sales 17% year over year, led by AI-driven solutions, as our advanced nodes portfolio grew more than 20% during the second quarter. We've seen broad-based improvement in fab utilization across the industry, and Advanced Logic is now tracking to the mid-80% range, while mainstream logic is in the low-80s.
In memory, we continue to see healthy utilization levels with DRAM in the high-80s and NAND in the low-80s. As customers move to increasingly advanced nodes, every wafer requires more layers, more processing complexity and more packaging steps. All of this translates to more volume and to more Qnity Electronics content. We're seeing that with continued growth at 3 nanometer, emerging activity at 2 nanometer and increasing engagement around future angstrom-era technology platforms, and that combination of improving utilization and rising content intensity continues to support our confidence in the long-term growth outlook for our semi business.
In Interconnect Solutions, our team continues to deliver exceptional results with 28% organic growth year over year, again led by content and share gains across our key growth platforms of advanced packaging and interconnect, AI PCBs and thermal management. Collectively, these platforms again grew more than 50% year over year during the second quarter. One of the biggest engineering challenges in next-generation AI systems isn't simply building smaller and faster chips, it's enabling those chips to reliably communicate with one another.
As architectures become more complex, challenges around signal integrity, power delivery and heat dissipation become increasingly difficult to solve. As we partner with customers to overcome these increasingly complex system-level challenges, we're seeing demand broaden across our portfolio and additional opportunities to increase content throughout the AI ecosystem. Moving forward, this combination of strong platform growth, expanding content opportunities and deepening customer engagement reinforces our confidence in the durable long-term growth outlook for our ICS business.
As the technology for both shrink and stack accelerates, we advanced our own innovation progress during the quarter, extending our leading technology position from front to back through both new products and broader industry engagements. At the front end, we announced an expansion of our CMP offerings with the launch of Optavision Max Polishing Pads. Our newest commercial soft polishing pad delivers superior performance in critical CMP steps to enhance surface quality, process stability and reliability for advanced architectures and nodes.
We're already seeing adoption across both leading-edge nodes and advanced packaging applications, including emerging AI- and HBM-driven architectures. At the same time, we continue to gain traction in next-generation logic, securing multiple POR wins at 16 and 14 during the first half of the year as we advance towards angstrom-level nodes. Beyond semi fab materials, in AI PCBs we are winning new business in pulse plating, a key metallization technology for the most advanced high layer-count printed circuit boards used in AI applications.
For customers, pulse plating helps deliver the precise, reliable interconnects required to support higher-density designs, stronger signal integrity and more dependable power delivery in next-generation AI systems. Shifting to back-end assembly materials, thermal management is becoming a critical performance enabler as AI systems push higher power densities across chips, packages, boards and data center infrastructure. We further strengthened our broad thermal portfolio in the first half of the year, which now spans liquid thermal interface materials, phase change materials, thermal pads, gap fillers and other advanced solutions that help customers move heat more efficiently, improve reliability and accelerate deployment of next-generation AI systems. These latest materials offerings demonstrate how we're innovating against the industry's most complex technical challenges. Just as importantly, we're backing that innovation with the targeted capital investments required to scale alongside our customers. Over the past several years, we've executed a disciplined, sustained investment in capacity deployed in step with our customers' technology roadmaps.
Since 2022, we've deployed approximately 600 million in growth investments across the business with a focus on expanding capacity and enabling the next generation of technology aligned to our local-for-local operating model. Combined with our innovation efforts, these investments position Qnity Electronics to support the accelerating demand we continue to see from our customers. It also strengthens our ability to capture long-term growth opportunities across our end markets.
Pulling this all together, our innovation isn't happening in isolation. We're pairing technology leadership with disciplined capital investment to expand the capabilities, capacity and customer proximity required to support the industry's most important roadmaps. That combination is translating into stronger customer engagement today and positioning Qnity Electronics to capture the long-term growth we see ahead. Before I turn it over to Mike, I want to touch on the end market trends that we're seeing.
As customers allocate capacity to the highest-value applications, our portfolio mix continues to evolve. Over the past six months we've seen end market composition shift, driven by the rapid growth in data centers, steady growth in automotive and other industrial markets, and slower growth in consumer electronics. With that said, our consumer electronics portfolio continues to prove resilient with positive growth given our outsized exposure to premium devices and continued content gain.
Increasingly, we see AI moving from the cloud into the physical world of devices, vehicles and machines. If the cloud is where AI learned to think, the physical world is where AI will learn to do. This presents another exciting long-term growth opportunity for Qnity Electronics where we are well positioned across the industry through our existing relationships with both OEMs and the broader fab and foundry landscape. While these chips are often less complex than data center-class processors, the market needs dramatically higher quantities of them produced efficiently and reliably.
The physical world demands chips that deliver targeted AI inside strict thermal, power and size envelopes. This means a fundamental re-architecture of how AI gets built, deployed and scaled, and progress will depend in large part on materials innovation to make it happen, and that plays directly to Qnity Electronics' advantages. Let me now hand it over to Mike to step through our financial results and guidance in more detail.
Mike Goss (Interim Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks, John, and good morning, everyone. We sustained our strong momentum in the second quarter, performing better than our expectations across both segments. We delivered net sales of $1.4 billion, up 22% year over year and 9% sequentially. On an organic basis, sales were up 22% versus the same period last year. Adjusted operating EBITDA for the quarter was $431 million, up 24% year over year. Adjusted operating EBITDA margin was 30.2%, reflecting our resiliency while continuing to invest for growth.
Adjusted EPS for the quarter increased 53% to $1.19. Taking a closer look at each of our business segments, Semiconductor Technologies net sales were $744 million, up approximately 3% sequentially. Organic sales grew 17% year over year, driven by continued demand strength, especially for Advanced Logic and HBM chips. Semi gross margins were steady at approximately 49% and adjusted operating EBITDA margin was approximately 34%, both down a bit year over year and sequentially, in line with our expectations.
Driven by product mix in the quarter and continued investments to support advanced node growth, ICS delivered another exceptional quarter with net sales of $685 million, up more than 30% year over year and 16% sequentially. Organic sales grew 28%, led by our AI and data center platforms, advanced packaging, AI PCDs, and thermal management ICS. Gross margins were approximately 44% and adjusted operating EBITDA margin was approximately 29%, an improvement of 290 basis points year over year and roughly flat sequentially.
This was driven by sustained operating leverage on higher volumes and favorable mix. We generated adjusted free cash flow of $259 million, reflecting strong operational performance and continued execution against our cash priorities. This performance reinforces the confidence reflected in the higher guidance that we are providing today. Capital expenditures totaled $90 million in the quarter and remain on pace with our planned investments to support capacity expansion, transformation initiatives, and future growth.
We continue to anticipate elevated capex investment for the full year driven by these initiatives. Over the longer term, we expect capex to return to the 6% of net sales range. We also continue to deliver strong capital returns for shareholders through our quarterly dividend, and during the quarter we repurchased $25 million worth of shares to partially offset normal equity dilution. We're well positioned from a liquidity perspective with approximately $960 million in cash and short-term investments at the end of the second quarter.
Total debt outstanding is $4 billion with net debt leverage of approximately two times. Immediately after quarter end, we successfully repriced our senior secured term loan facility to further enhance our free cash flow profile, resulting in an annualized benefit of approximately $6 million. Looking forward, we are a few months into our multi-year transformation plan and are beginning to see tangible benefits from our efforts, with productivity and throughput improvements creating additional operating flexibility and supporting growth.
Let me share just a couple of examples of our program in action. In our Calrez business, which has seen strong growth in the first half of the year due to accelerated demand for wafer fab equipment, we're executing targeted productivity, capacity release, and automation initiatives. These actions position the business to better convert strong demand into growth. Additionally, to advance our local-for-local model, we continue to optimize our distribution footprint through targeted warehouse consolidations that simplify our network, improve service levels, and reduce operating complexity.
These actions are expected to deliver approximately 10% logistics cost savings while improving warehouse efficiency and operating leverage over time. We also continue to make meaningful progress towards IT independence. We're on track to migrate about two-thirds of our sites to our own systems by the end of this year. Each site migration reduces our reliance on transition services and gives us more direct control to run our business. Overall, we're pleased with the steady progress on the transformation plan and are confident it will unlock operating flexibility and build a stronger, more agile operating model required to support Qnity Electronics' next phase of growth. Before I hand it back to John for closing comments, let me walk through our updated guidance for the third quarter. We expect sequential net sales growth in the low single digits range. The strength is broad-based across the same secular drivers we highlighted earlier in the year, namely AI-driven applications, high-performance computing, and advanced connectivity, along with a muted seasonal peak in consumer electronics that typically characterizes our third quarter.
As a reminder, the third quarter of 2025 included approximately $40 million of net sales that was accelerated into the third quarter ahead of our pre-spin IT systems go-lives—roughly $25 million in Semiconductor Technologies and $15 million in ICS. This created an elevated prior-year comparison base that does not recur in 2026, modestly tempering the year-over-year growth in the third quarter for both segments even as underlying demand continues to remain strong.
In Semiconductor Technologies, we expect sequential net sales growth in the low single digits range with an adjusted EBITDA margin profile in the mid-30s. For ICS, we expect sequential net sales growth in the mid single digits range with adjusted EBITDA margins in the high 20s. Overall, we're watching industry supply chain dynamics closely, including memory and other materials, and are working with customers to meet their needs. The modest upward pressure we flagged earlier in the year of approximately $20 million is largely playing out as we expected, and the mitigation playbook we put in place, coupled with our local-for-local model, is doing its job. Where isolated input or logistics costs have moved higher, our targeted pricing actions are in place, and we see no near-term risks to supply or output. With our strong first half momentum and improved visibility into the second half, we're raising our full-year outlook. Net sales is now expected to be $5.55 billion to $5.65 billion. Adjusted operating EBITDA is now expected to be $1.675 billion to $1.725 billion. Adjusted EPS is now expected to be $4.40 to $4.60.
And finally, adjusted free cash flow is now expected to be $600 million to $700 million. At the midpoint of our updated guidance, we now expect to deliver 18% net sales growth, over 20% adjusted EBITDA growth, and adjusted EPS growth of 35% for the full year. Lastly, we'll continue investing with the strong customer ramps we're seeing while maintaining the cost discipline that supports our results. John, back to you.
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Thanks, Mike. Before we open the call to Q&A, I want to provide updates on two critical leadership roles. First, I want to officially welcome Kate Decaf, who started yesterday as President of our Semiconductor Technologies business segment. Kate brings more than 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry and a proven record of driving growth, managing global supply chains, and delivering operational excellence. We're thrilled to welcome her to Qnity Electronics.
I also want to recognize Sam Ponzo for his leadership through this transition as he returns to his role as Qnity Electronics' Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer. Second, on our search for a new Chief Financial Officer, we've been really pleased with the strong candidates we've seen and are in the final stages of our search. I look forward to sharing an update soon. To close out our remarks, I want to briefly recap the highlights from our call.
Qnity Electronics delivered another strong quarter with broad-based growth across both segments and continued momentum across the secular drivers reshaping our industry. We are benefiting from the powerful combination of both shrink and stack, where more process complexity and more layers are increasing materials intensity across the semiconductor value chain. Our portfolio breadth, customer intimacy, and disciplined investment strategy position us well to capture these opportunities and deliver durable long-term growth.
As we look ahead, we remain focused on disciplined execution, enhancing value for customers, and delivering long-term growth for our shareholders. With that, operator, we can now open the call to Q&A.
OPERATOR
If you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. If you need to remove yourself from the queue, press star 2 at any time. If you should need operator assistance, press star 0. Please be advised that today's call is being recorded. In the interest of time, please limit to one question and one follow-up. We will take our first question from Jim Schneider with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Jim Schneider, Analyst at Goldman Sachs
Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was wondering if you could maybe comment on how you're seeing sequentials play out, especially into Q4. It seems like at the even towards the upper end of your guidance, the Q4 sequential would be very muted and potentially even down a little bit sequentially. Just wanted to make sure that I understand what is driving that, and is there any pull-in that you're seeing in Q3, or do you expect that you could actually see a little bit of headwind in any of the areas?
Maybe just talk about sort of the Q4 implied sequential relative to normal seasonality. Thank you.
Mike Goss (Interim Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, thanks for the question. From our updated guidance perspective, we're really putting in a combination of the first half momentum that we saw, better second half visibility, and including customer ramp timing and industry supply dynamics. At the midpoint of that guidance that we put out today has us at 18% sales growth for the year and over 20% EBITDA growth for the year as well. As far as pacing through the back half of the year, from a third quarter perspective that does include a seasonal peak around consumer electronics that we typically see, and we expect that to be consistent in the third quarter as well.
With that, we do expect Semi to be in the low single digits range with EBITDA margins still in the mid-30s, and then ICS in the mid single digits range with EBITDA margins in the high 20s. As a reminder, as I mentioned on the prepared remarks, we did have a prior-year $40 million move between third quarter and fourth quarter that was tied to our pre-system IT go-live. But that's just from a year-over-year perspective. At a headline level, order books do remain healthy, our customer engagement remains really strong, and we're seeing inventory move across the value chain as we'd expect.
From an overall perspective though, a couple variables we are watching in the back half of the year: ongoing developments in the Middle East, as well as timing on customer ramps and trends in utilization rates that we mentioned in the prepared remarks. To the extent that those items resolve or improve, we would expect we'd have an opportunity to do better.
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, Jim, maybe to offer a little bit of historical context. Typically we'd see a small seasonal peak in the third quarter that's generally tied to consumer electronics. Consumer electronics has been fairly resilient for us this year because of our exposure to premium devices. Nonetheless, we typically would expect a little bit of a sequential deceleration third quarter to fourth quarter from a consumer electronics standpoint. And then usually, typically we see customers do a little bit of inventory control in the fourth quarter as well.
UNKNOWN Analyst
That's helpful, thank you. And then maybe as a follow-up, you cited some of the headwinds to gross and EBITDA margins in the quarter and I think they came in a little bit below where we were modeling. I'm just sort of curious. I think you called out specifically mix and investments. Can you maybe unpack those a little bit? I know ICS has lower margins, but I'm curious whether there's any like-to-like mix that was dragging on margins in the quarter.
And maybe could you talk a little bit about the prospects for gross margin improvement over the next, say, two to three quarters in light of some of the pricing actions you mentioned to offset the input cost pressures. Any other color on that would be helpful.
Mike Goss (Interim Chief Financial Officer)
Thank you. Yeah, thanks. So from a margin perspective in the quarter, you know, as a reminder, we did have some nice product mix take place in the first quarter, and so coming off of that into the second quarter included a combination of that as well as the growth investments that we mentioned. From an example perspective, the timing in any given quarter can have some variability in it from R&D efforts as well as product qualifications, and that can weigh in on any given quarter.
But, you know, stepping back from a perspective of the first half of the year, Semi had margins right around 35% for the first half, and I'd expect that to continue into the back half of the year. I think from a headwinds perspective we mentioned the $20 billion of costs are really logistics and energy type costs. We've seen half of that already come through in the first half and expect the remainder to come through in the back half. But like I said in my prepared remarks, our playbook is working and I expect we'll be able to offset that throughout the year.
There can always be a little bit of variability from quarter to quarter, but I think the margin profile is constructive and I expect that to continue into the back half of the year.
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Maybe going, the other thing I would add there—thanks, Mike—is as we start to see the benefits of some of the transformation program, and I think Mike gave a couple of nice examples from both a plant productivity as well as kind of a footprint optimization point of view, we're starting to see some of those opportunities kick in. Most of that will be weighted towards the back half of next year. But as we start to see both the increases in volume that help with factory loading as well as some of those transformation programs, there is an opportunity for nice incrementals to increase with both gross and EBITDA margin expansion.
OPERATOR
We'll move next to Melissa Weathers with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Melissa Weathers, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
Hi there. Thank you for letting me ask a question. I think I want to touch on the Interconnect Solutions business. You guys had another really nice quarter of sequential growth in that business and it seems like it's growing a lot faster than maybe, I don't know, even from your analyst day last September, it seems like you've seen some nice acceleration in that business. So any updated thoughts on how you guys are thinking about the long-term growth profile of that business given AI and given the shift from shrink to stack?
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks, Melissa. It's a great question. Obviously we're really pleased by the continued strong performance of the ICS segment—28% organic growth. That growth in the first half of the year that we've seen has really been powered by our three key growth platforms of advanced packaging and interconnects, AI, PCBs, and thermal management. And I think what's fundamentally different from maybe what we talked about at our investor day is the pace with which advanced packaging and thermal has really accelerated due to the adoption of AI.
And so that's really created this nice trajectory for the ICS business because of how well positioned we are on the shrink-and-stack inflection that is necessary as we go forward. What I would say is the business is still fundamentally a consumables-based business that's tied to volume. And so when you think about PCB area volumes or advanced packaging volume, thermal volumes, you know, I think the broader market is still trying to get a handle around third-party data.
And we're working with some of those third parties to try and figure out how to model that a little bit more accurately. I think everybody would like a little bit of help in that area, us included. But we're really thrilled with the continued outperformance of both content gains and new application wins that we're seeing broadly across the interconnect segment. And maybe where I would just point to the future a little bit, we're excited by the customer expansions that are taking place, particularly in advanced packaging, that are adding that capacity to the highest-value areas, which give us confidence in the long-term durability of the growth profile of the interconnect business.
Melissa Weathers, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
Great, thank you for all that color. And then maybe for my second question on the capacity side of things, I know you guys have been working over the last couple years to add capacity. Clearly things are off to a strong ramp. It seems like the Semi Technologies business is starting to ramp too, industrial semis are getting stronger, and that semi cycle is getting stronger. So are you capacity constrained anywhere? And how are you thinking about your ability to supply with both of these businesses growing pretty nicely?
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks, Melissa. So look, as we said in our prepared remarks, capacity—our strategy has always been anchored in building out that strong local-for-local model aligned to our customer footprint, and we've been steadily adding capacity since the 2022 peak. We took a look at our capacity footprint and where we were constrained in 2022, the last time the Semi market peaked, and we've been steadily adding incremental capacity in each one of our Semi businesses since that point in time.
And most of that was kind of highlighted in that $600 million of investment that we pointed to. Given our well-distributed footprint, what I would tell you is that we have existing facilities located in all of the major geographic centers. So most of our investments are high-return, quick, modular capacity expansions that are done in step with our customer technology roadmaps. And today, you know, the growth is a bit faster than what we were expecting, but we're able to quickly adjust and bring capacity online to support the ramps that we're seeing.
And we're really well prepared going into what we expect to be long-term growth in '27 and '28 from a capacity point of view.
Melissa Weathers, Analyst at Deutsche Bank
Great. Thanks, Jon.
OPERATOR
We'll take our next question from Chris Parkinson with Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Chris Parkinson, Analyst at Wolfe Research
Great. Thank you so much. Jon, your media relations team has been quite busy throughout the first and second quarter, and you've been launching products or collaborations across, you know, EV, HBM, CMP, NVIDIA, clean room space in Taiwan. I mean, there are so many things to keep track of on a weekly basis. May I ask, just when do you think we'll see the vast majority of these benefits? What are you most excited about, and were the vast majority of these announcements that hit our inbox almost on a weekly basis more or less?
Were all those basically considered at the time of the spin, or are many of those new? Thank you so much.
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, thanks, Chris. It's a great question. So really what we're trying to do, I would say, is what you're seeing is the benefit of being a pure-play company and being able to construct and tell a story that is specific to our customers and our investor base. I think that the track record of continual innovation progress and partnerships with the technology leaders in the industry has long been part of our strategy over the last several years. It's now just more in the spotlight since the separation and the spin as a pure-play company.
I would say just on the—most of them are really on the innovation point. So maybe just to underscore that a little bit, our R&D team has done a phenomenal job of really earning that seat at the design table with the leading technology companies in the industry. We've had POR wins across every single line of business, really targeting at the most advanced technologies from front end of the stack all the way to the back end of the stack. What I'm most excited about is that all of those are the fastest-growing parts of the market.
It's also the highest-value parts of the market. So that sets up a really favorable growth trajectory for Qnity Electronics going forward as we see that steady drumbeat of innovation wins and POR wins and customer partnerships for the fastest growing, most advanced technologies in the industry.
Chris Parkinson, Analyst at Wolfe Research
Got it. And just as a corollary of that question, when you look out two to three years, do you see Qnity Electronics' portfolio primarily based, from a distribution perspective across logic—mainstream versus advanced—versus memory basically the same way that you were assessing that six, 12, 18 months ago? Is there any difference on how you're evaluating that, what you're hearing from your new shareholder base? I'd love to hear your perspectives on that as well.
Thank you.
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it's a good question. You know, what we're looking at is our customers are allocating capacity to their highest-value applications. And so our mix also continues to evolve in terms of device types. What I would tell you is that advanced logic, and logic in general, continues to be the most significant part of our portfolio at roughly 80%. Memory is about 20%, with HBM and DRAM growing a little bit faster. You know, that's maybe ticked up a couple of percentage points, but it's still kind of roughly in that 80/20, 75/25 mix.
From an end-market point of view, obviously the rapid growth in data centers has ticked up a little bit. We've seen nice steady growth from several of our industrial markets in automotive, aerospace and defense, and telecom infrastructure. And then consumer electronics is positive growth, but it's growing at a slower pace than some of those other areas. So from an end-market point of view, data centers up a little bit, most of the industrial markets are steady, and maybe consumer electronics down a little bit.
I would come back to the point that I made before. The most important takeaway on this mix—from a device mix as well as from an end-market mix—is our highest growth is aligned to the highest-value parts of the market in advanced nodes, advanced packaging, interconnects, and thermal materials.
Chris Parkinson, Analyst at Wolfe Research
Great, thank you so much.
OPERATOR
We'll move next to John Roberts with Mizuho. Your line is open.
Saurabh Deer, Analyst at Mizuho (on for John Roberts)
Hi, this is Saurabh Deer on for John Roberts. Congratulations on the great results today. I have a first question on the advanced packaging. There are multiple roadmaps on the architectures in advanced packaging, and I would assume each one has different material requirements. How are you positioned to solve these different architectures, and is your content opportunity consistent across these roadmaps?
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it's a great question, and you're right. There's a wide variety of new advanced packaging architectures that are being worked on by our customer base across the industry. If I take a step back at a thematic level, all of those new architectures fundamentally do two things. They're generally larger format sizes to make, whether it's panel-level packaging or going to increase the size of the overall package. And it's tighter geometry, so smaller lines and spaces on a high layer count circuit board or an IC substrate, for example.
And the good news about both of those trends, whether you're talking about smaller and tighter geometries or larger panel sizes, you're getting into more material complexity and more material intensity. And so the more material complexity means there's probably fewer players in the market that can provide the solutions necessary to support those technology roadmaps. And then obviously the larger format package sizes result in more content for those packaging than what we see today in terms of the people who are driving that are the same people that we've been working with for the last several years to successfully commercialize the existing advanced packaging format. So, you know, we have a strong position of incumbency with a proven and trusted relationship on those technologies that give us confidence that as we migrate to additional advanced packaging architectures, you know, we're in a position to capitalize on the benefits of process complexity, more layers and more materials intensity.
UNKNOWN Analyst
Thank you. Great. And I just have one more question. So you talked about mainstream doing well in the low 80s utilization. So in terms of end market, what is driving that mainstream improvement from your last quarter and what do you expect in the next quarter?
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yes, on mainstream logic, we're seeing kind of steady improvement so far this year, consistent with our expectations. And what we talked about at the end of the first quarter, I would think from an end market, we're seeing what I would say the data center and the industrial demand is doing better. And that's what's driving the utilization increase. And that's what we're hearing from our customer. And so it's really being driven by data center automotive in some of those industrial end markets.
We expect that to see kind of sequential steady improvement there. Obviously we are watching the impacts of the memory markets and I think it may be a little bit of—we may not see quite as much utilization improvement in mainstream logic as we would otherwise given some of the supply chain dynamics. Nonetheless, I think that we see continued steady progress there. What I'm most excited about from mainstream logic is the broader participation in physical AI where we see demand moving from cloud to the edge and going to devices, vehicles and machines.
I think a lot of that physical AI creates a lot more opportunities for broader participation from both the OEMs as well as the different fab and foundry partners. And Qnity Electronics is well positioned in the broader industry landscape no matter where the chips are coming from.
OPERATOR
We'll move next to Frank Mitsch with Fermium Research. Your line is open.
Frank Mitsch, Analyst at Fermium Research
Thank you. Good morning and nice results. John, you indicated that advanced nodes grew over 20% in the second quarter. I recall, you know, at the investor day your expectation was a growth of steady growth of around 7% for advanced nodes. I'm just curious as to how should we think about the near term. What's your visibility there and, you know, can we expect, you know, this 20% growth in advanced nodes to continue? What's your outlook there?
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, good question, Frank. I think broadly we're really pleased obviously by the performance in our semi segment. We're really well positioned in the advanced nodes across both logic and memory. I think what we're seeing this year that's a little bit new and different is a lot of broad-based participation from all of the market technology leaders. It's been a long time since we saw the most advanced nodes successfully commercialized across all of the logic leaders and across all of the memory leaders.
And so typically when we're working on R&D programs two or three years out for the most advanced technology platforms, you know, we're hopeful that they will all commercialize when planned, but you don't actually know that until they actually scale it up. And what we're seeing this year is successful scale-up, particularly around, you know, whether it's HBM3, HBM4 on the memory side. Obviously 3 nanometer has gone really well and we're seeing, you know, really strong pull for 2 nanometer and 18A.
We're really excited by that, the increased support that we have to customers as they scale up those next-generation platforms. You know, we alluded to that on the call and so look, I don't think we're in a position to maybe provide color on what the advanced node growth rate is going to be every quarter. What I can tell you is that, you know, we talked about at our investor day migrating towards, you know, getting to be there—50% or 45% to 50% of our portfolio would be driven by advanced nodes.
And at the track record and the pace that we're on, we'll probably get there early. I think we're kind of exiting here the first half of the year kind of right at 40%.
Frank Mitsch, Analyst at Fermium Research
Excellent. Thank you so much. And I'm just curious if you could provide your latest take on what you would expect MSI growth to be for the broader industry here in '26. Yeah, thanks.
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Good question. Our latest view, and we continue to watch it closely, is that our MSI is expected to be in the high single digits for 2026 and then additionally PCB growth, which is not a metric we watch, it's kind of in the mid to high single digits for the year.
Frank Mitsch, Analyst at Fermium Research
Thank you so much.
OPERATOR
We'll move next to Bhavesh Lodaya with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Bhavesh Lodaya, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets
Hi, good morning, John and Mike. Congrats on the solid result. Maybe the first one on just a follow-up to the previous question and discussions. So if I look at semi stack looking at a volume growth of 18%, it continues to be significantly ahead of traditional metrics like MSI, also meaningfully higher versus the last quarter. Is it just more CMP steps? Are you seeing more share gains? Business wins? Maybe if you could break out the outperformance and then broadly do you consider MSI as an accurate metric to track your performance going ahead?
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, Babesh, good question. So you know, look, I mean we're a consumable business, so we're always going to be somewhat correlated to wafer volumes or to some volume metric across the stack. And at this point, you know, as we've continued to say, you know, MSI continues to be the best indicator of overall wafer volume. I think what we're seeing right now is the outperformance with the success that we're seeing from our customers in advanced nodes.
Building on the answer to the last question, it's pushing our content outperformance even higher because we're seeing more customers successfully commercialize their most advanced technology. And obviously that's where we're seeing the most content gained, is in the most advanced technology. So in an environment where all of our customers are successful with their most advanced technology, that's what's pushing our content outperformance considerably above that MSI benchmark.
I would say in addition to that, we are seeing some nice incremental share gains. The fastest part of growth in our semi portfolio is really our CMP portfolio of pads, cleans and slurries and that's where we're seeing the most content gains and that's also where we're seeing some incremental share gains, particularly on the cleans and slurry side. And then the lithography business continues to do really well. Right. So we're doing really well in some of the—you know we talk a lot about EUV and for our portfolio EUV is important, but not so much in the photoresist layer, but there's a lot of ancillary layers around the photoresist that are really important. And our R&D team and business team has done a great job partnering with customers on how do they get the most out of their EUV investment by working on the layers around the photoresist to make that as efficient and as effective as possible.
Bhavesh Lodaya, Analyst at BMO Capital Markets
Thank you. And then we have seen some M&A activity in your subsector recently. Now clearly you have a lot going on around internal organic growth investment and initiatives but would love to hear updated thoughts on capital allocation M&A, especially in light of the balance sheet coming in much better now versus value separated.
Mike Goss (Interim Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah, thanks for the question. You know we continue to execute against our capital allocation framework and as you just mentioned, our first priority is always going to be organic reinvestment in the business because that is certainly the highest and best return for our dollars and that's going to always be focused on not only just CapEx but R&D and making sure the R&D team is fully focused and funded where we need to go. Beyond that from an inorganic perspective, we certainly are continuing to watch the market.
As we said before, our priority is going to be from a kind of bolt-on and tuck-in perspective and that's going to be focused in not only areas that are adjacent to where we play now, but really focused in areas like high growth like advanced packaging and thermal management. So we're focused on now. We have an active pipeline and a very disciplined process that we're following and obviously it's a dynamic market but it's something that we continue to watch consistently.
OPERATOR
and once again for your questions. That is Star one on your telephone keypad. We'll move next to Edward Yang with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Edward Yang, Analyst at Oppenheimer
Hi John, congrats on the quarter and continued great execution since the spin. First question just on your—and thank you for the end market commentary. Could you just remind us on your margin profile across your data center business versus auto and electronics.
Mike Goss (Interim Chief Financial Officer)
Yeah. From an end market perspective, in our margin profile, obviously total company, we focus and have a blended margin around 30% that we continue to focus on. From a mix of semi versus ICS, semi is consistently in the mid-30s and they did that again in the second quarter here. From an ICS perspective, we used to think about ICS kind of in the mid-20s and we've seen them continually to drive towards the high 20s and we believe they're structurally in the high 20% range from an EBITDA margin profile.
And so I think that's where we stand halfway through the year that I expect that profile to be consistent and continue through the back half of the year. And we do expect to see a kind of a mix where ICS growth and margin profile will continue to outpace the semi business for the back part of the year, just qualitatively. Obviously we don't provide specifics on margin profile by end markets, but you can think the proxy for that would be where is the most advanced technology going and what does that architecture look like by end market?
So obviously data center used to be more broadly in line with the rest of the industrial economy. I would say the AI-led transformation has improved the most advanced content. So AI data centers would have a very strong margin profile really driven by the amount of advanced technology content that's in those. A lot of the other industrial markets across aerospace and defense and automotive are going to have kind of a more balanced mix. And then premium consumer devices is also a somewhat more balanced mix as well with maybe the lowest margin profile on the consumer electronics and relative to some of the other key end markets.
So what we like about that is the fact that some of the industrial markets are the fastest growing parts of the portfolio is another positive trajectory on driving value going forward.
Edward Yang, Analyst at Oppenheimer
Great. And can you give us an early
UNKNOWN Analyst
View into 2027 growth? Your long term model was for 7% growth, but you grew 10% last year, guiding for 18% growth this year. WFE companies are looking for growth rates to be stable at very high levels for next year. What do you see?
Jon Kemp, Chief Executive Officer
Yeah, it's a good question. And you know, I think it's probably a little too early to speculate on 2027, but the important thing that we think about and the takeaway for me is, you know, we continue to see this broad based demand that John mentioned earlier. Investment across the same secular drivers that we're seeing this year and that's across the AI driven applications, high performance computing and advanced connectivity. The thing I'm excited to see is the continued evolution of the customer roadmaps that we've been covering.
Even on today's call, you know, customers have put a lot of steel on the ground. And, you know, we expect that that will drive the capacity coming online as we move forward and kind of all things trending forward in that direction. So we're well positioned to capitalize on that expected growth from a broad portfolio perspective, but also kind of the front end to the back end of our collective business. So all of those things together, I think 2027 is stacking up nicely.
Thank you.
OPERATOR
And once more for your questions. That is Star One. We'll pause a moment to allow any further questions to queue. And it does appear that there are no further questions at this time. This does conclude the call and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time and have a wonderful day.
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