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Kulicke and Soffa makes the machines that assemble and connect semiconductor chips and other electronics.
Kulicke and Soffa builds the machines that wire up the tiny world inside your electronics. When a chip is finished at a factory, it still has to be connected to the outside world — joined to a circuit board, linked to other chips, sealed into a package. That packaging and assembly step is Kulicke and Soffa's territory, and its machines do it at a scale and precision that humans simply cannot. If you have ever wondered how a chip the size of a fingernail gets hundreds of microscopic connections, the answer is usually a machine like theirs.
The company sells three main kinds of tools. Its ball bonders and wedge bonders use hair-thin wire to stitch a chip's tiny pads to its package — like a sewing machine that works in microns. Its advanced packaging and flip-chip tools place chips face-down onto substrates and help stack chips on top of each other, which matters more and more as makers cram more power into smaller spaces. And its electronics assembly equipment does the everyday work of soldering components onto circuit boards. Customers are the big chipmakers and contract manufacturers who pay for speed, accuracy, and uptime — a machine that stops working shuts down an entire production line. The company began in 1951 in a garage in Philadelphia, founded by a salesman named Frederick Kulicke and a physicist named Albert Soffa, and it has ridden every wave of electronics since. Today it is legally headquartered in Singapore, though much of its engineering and management has long been based in the United States. The business is highly cyclical: when chipmakers build new factories, Kulicke and Soffa sells lots of machines; when they pause, orders dry up fast. After a brutal downturn in fiscal 2024, revenue bounced back to about $1.2 billion in fiscal 2025.
Fred Kulicke and Albert Soffa met while designing electric irons at Proctor Electric, and in the summer of 1951 they started a custom engineering shop with almost no money. To pay the bills, they built whatever odd machines customers wanted, like sausage stuffers and glove stretchers. It was not glamorous work, but it taught them to solve hard mechanical problems fast, a skill that would soon matter far more than they knew.
Then came a job that changed everything. Bell Labs' Western Electric needed equipment to connect tiny wires inside early semiconductor chips, work done at a microscopic scale. Within months, the tiny partnership designed and started building the world's first wire bonder, putting it among the very first makers of semiconductor assembly equipment. The odd-jobs shop had found its real business.
A decade later, the company sold shares to the public for the first time, listing on NASDAQ. The timing was good: as the semiconductor industry boomed through the 1960s, demand for its assembly machines took off too.
A severe recession in the mid-1970s nearly broke the company, forcing it to drop every product line except semiconductor assembly. That painful focus paid off when it introduced the first fully automatic wire bonder controlled by digital electronics. The machine let it climb out of losses and take back its lead in the business it had helped invent.
By 2000, sales reached a record high, and the company moved its ball bonder manufacturing to Singapore to cut costs. It also spent heavily to grow beyond assembly, buying Probe Technology and Cerprobe and folding them into a new testing business. It was a big bet that the company could sell more to chipmakers than just the machines that put chips together.
That bet met a brutal test almost immediately. The semiconductor downturn of 2001 cut revenue sharply from the year before, and the company had to shrink fast. It laid off nearly 500 people and shut its manufacturing plant in Milpitas, California, a hard reminder of how violently this industry swings.
Two decades later, the company reached for a new kind of growth by acquiring Uniqarta and its laser transfer technology. The goal was to make that technology ready for mass production of Mini-LED and Micro-LED displays, a market that needed a cheaper, faster way to place tiny lights on screens.
It kept adding tools to its kit. The acquisition of Advanced Jet Automation expanded its high-precision dispensing abilities, the careful putting-down of tiny amounts of material, which helped with high-volume production of advanced backlights.
In 2026, the company brought in Dr. Raj Talluri as President and CEO, replacing interim chief Lester Wong, who stayed on as CFO. Talluri arrived with deep chip-industry experience from Enovix, Micron, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, a sign the company wanted leadership that knew where its customers were heading.
The company's next push was thermo-compression bonding, a precise way of joining chips that suits complex, mixed-together designs, the kind of advanced packaging that AI data centers increasingly need. It delivered its first high-bandwidth-memory system in December, still going through customer approval, and expected that line of revenue to grow fast into the new fiscal year, from a small base to over $100 million.
What makes the company interesting is where it sits in the supply chain. The "advanced packaging" race — stacking chips and connecting them in clever 3D ways — is one of the hottest areas in semiconductors, and Kulicke and Soffa sells the picks and shovels for it. The risks are real: a handful of large customers drive a big chunk of sales, competition in bonding tools is fierce, and the whole business rises and falls with chip industry spending. It also spends heavily on research and returns cash to shareholders through buybacks and a dividend — a quiet, essential company that most people have never heard of, even though it helps build the devices they use every day.
Saved answer · last researched 7 Nov 2026
A Singapore chip-machine maker earns most of its money in China, not its home region
Kulicke and Soffa builds the bonders that stitch chips into finished packages, and more than half of its recent sales come from mainland China, where assembly plants like JCET, Huatian and Tongfu keep expanding. That makes Chinese factory spending the biggest single force on its orders. When those plants slow down, the company feels it quickly. Source: WeChat public account industry report on multinationals' China revenue share, data from 2026