NAND greenfield has arrived; Double-upgrade to Buy

Research evidence excerpt

NAND greenfield has arrived; Double-upgrade to Buy

PM Summary – Upgrade to Buy

Buy Comet as NAND play with 70% EBITDA CAGR and attractive valuation

We upgrade Comet to Buy on the core thesis of rising NAND greenfield activity.

Together with the broader WFE ramp, this triggers the beginning of the revenue upcycle

for Comet, driven by its PCT division. We also see significant operating leverage for

Comet, and project its EBITDA margin expanding from 10% in 2025 to 26% in 2028E.

This is driven by a combination of higher volumes, improved product and geographic mix

(with China sales being margin-accretive), and operating expenses growing significantly

less than revenues. All in all, we project Comet’s EBITDA growing at 70% CAGR from its

2025 trough to 2028E. Our CHF 518 PO is based on 18x FY28E EV/EBITDA (see

valuation section within note).

NAND: Pickup in 2026 with greenfield-driven activity from 2027

NAND experienced a dearth of new wafer capacity in 2024/25, as NAND memory

chipmakers struggled with profitability and semicaps focused on NAND upgrades rather

than new wafer starts. As NAND demand has increased with the rise of

inference/agentic compute, NAND supply growth has picked up, led by brownfield bit

growth in 2026 at KIOXIA/Sandisk Kitakami K2 and YMTC Wuhan Phase 3 (target 50k

WPM by 2027). More significantly, there has been an increasing number of NAND

greenfield fabs announced, including Micron Singapore Fab 10B, Samsung Pyeongtaek

P5 (mixed use), and last week’s announcement of Cheongju M17. China’s YMTC may also

be planning two new NAND fabs. These fabs are set to begin wafer output from 2028

onwards, which should contribute to revenue acceleration for Comet from 2027, given

the timing of RF subsystem purchases 6-12 months ahead of fab opening.