Financial Contrast: Ultra Clean (NASDAQ:UCTT) and Ambiq Micro (NYSE:AMBQ)

Ultra Clean (NASDAQ:UCTT) and Ambiq Micro (NYSE:AMBQ) are both technology companies, but which is the better investment? We will contrast the two businesses based on the strength of their profitability, earnings, valuation, risk, institutional ownership, dividends and analyst recommendations.

Earnings and Valuation

This table compares Ultra Clean and Ambiq Micro”s gross revenue, earnings per share (EPS) and valuation.

	Gross Revenue	Price/Sales Ratio	Net Income	Earnings Per Share	Price/Earnings Ratio
Ultra Clean	$2.20 billion	1.71	-$181.20 million	($0.52)	-161.45
Ambiq Micro	$72.51 million	19.27	-$36.46 million	($20.69)	-3.16

Ambiq Micro has lower revenue, but higher earnings than Ultra Clean. Ultra Clean is trading at a lower price-to-earnings ratio than Ambiq Micro, indicating that it is currently the more affordable of the two stocks.

Insider and Institutional Ownership

96.1% of Ultra Clean shares are held by institutional investors. 1.8% of Ultra Clean shares are held by insiders. Comparatively, 10.0% of Ambiq Micro shares are held by insiders. Strong institutional ownership is an indication that large money managers, endowments and hedge funds believe a company will outperform the market over the long term.

Profitability

This table compares Ultra Clean and Ambiq Micro’s net margins, return on equity and return on assets.

	Net Margins	Return on Equity	Return on Assets
Ultra Clean	-1.07%	6.99%	2.89%
Ambiq Micro	-46.86%	-45.10%	-16.29%

Analyst Recommendations

This is a summary of recent ratings for Ultra Clean and Ambiq Micro, as reported by MarketBeat.com.

	Sell Ratings	Hold Ratings	Buy Ratings	Strong Buy Ratings	Rating Score
Ultra Clean	1	0	5	1	2.86
Ambiq Micro	1	3	4	0	2.38

Ultra Clean presently has a consensus target price of $129.00, suggesting a potential upside of 53.65%. Ambiq Micro has a consensus target price of $71.83, suggesting a potential upside of 9.89%. Given Ultra Clean’s stronger consensus rating and higher probable upside, equities analysts clearly believe Ultra Clean is more favorable than Ambiq Micro.

Summary

Ultra Clean beats Ambiq Micro on 10 of the 14 factors compared between the two stocks.

About Ultra Clean

Ultra Clean Holdings, Inc. develops and supplies critical subsystems, components and parts, and ultra-high purity cleaning and analytical services for the semiconductor industry in the United States and internationally. The company provides ultra-clean valves, high purity connectors, industrial process connectors and valves, pneumatic actuators, manifolds and safety solutions, hoses, pressure gauges, and gas line and component heaters; chemical delivery modules that deliver gases and reactive chemicals in a liquid or gaseous form from a centralized subsystem to the reaction chamber; and gas delivery systems, such as weldments, filters, mass flow controllers, regulators, pressure transducers and valves, component heaters, and an integrated electronic and/or pneumatic control system. It also offers various industrial and automation production equipment; fluid delivery systems consist of one or more chemical delivery units, including PFA tubing, filters, flow controllers, regulators, component heaters, and an integrated electronic and/or pneumatic control system; precision robotic systems; top-plate assemblies; frame assemblies; process modules, a subsystem of semiconductor manufacturing tools that process integrated circuits onto wafers; and other high-level assemblies. In addition, the company provides tool chamber parts cleaning and coating services; micro-contamination analysis services for tool parts, wafers and depositions, chemicals, cleanroom materials, deionized water, and airborne molecular contamination; and analytical verification services for process tool chamber part cleaning. It primarily serves original equipment manufacturing customers in the semiconductor capital equipment and semiconductor integrated device manufacturing industries, as well as display, consumer, medical, energy, industrial, and research equipment industries. The company was founded in 1991 and is headquartered in Hayward, California.

About Ambiq Micro

Our mission is to enable intelligence (artificial intelligence (AI) and beyond) everywhere by delivering the lowest power semiconductor solutions. We are a pioneer and leading provider of ultra-low power semiconductor solutions designed to address the significant power consumption challenges of general purpose and AI compute – especially at the edge. Our customers rely on Ambiq to deliver AI compute closer to end users (edge environments) where power consumption challenges are the most severe. Our leading position is built upon our hardware and software innovations that deliver two to five times lower power consumption than traditional semiconductor designs. Our products power over 270 million devices today. We shipped more than 42 million units in 2024, and we estimate that over 40% of them ran AI algorithms. We seek to drive growth in AI adoption at the edge in the personal devices, medical/healthcare, industrial edge, and smart home and building markets and continue to set new standards in edge AI performance and power efficiency. Over time, we expect to integrate our ultra-low power technology into additional chip products that benefit from greater power efficiency, including high-performance compute applications such as AI data centers and automotive. AI is perhaps the most disruptive and revolutionary technology trend of recent history, estimated to represent $23 trillion of global annual spend by 2040, according to McKinsey. AI use cases continue to permeate our lives and improve our daily productivity by enabling us to interact with devices via voice and gestures, unlock our homes with facial recognition, track health accurately and intelligently, and hold clear calls amidst loud background noise. To date, a majority of AI compute has been deployed in data centers due to its large physical scale and the need for wall plug energy, as AI compute requires enormous and steady energy resources. At the edge, however, power limitations have been especially acute due to small device size and limited battery life. We believe this greatly constrains the potential of AI to improve our daily, on-the-go lives. Enabling AI at the edge – where the action takes place – with vastly improved power efficiency will allow faster real-time decision-making due to data proximity, greater data privacy, higher energy efficiency from reduced network usage, and less dependence on constant costly connections to the cloud. We believe new AI use cases will only be possible if edge devices are much more power efficient. Our proprietary Sub-threshold Power Optimized Technology (SPOT) platform is designed to fundamentally and cost-effectively reduce power consumption of battery- and wireline-powered devices alike. Depending on the application, devices incorporating SPOT demonstrate a two to five times reduction in power consumption compared to conventional integrated circuit designs. SPOT is a ground-breaking approach at the chip design level that incorporates sub- and near-threshold hardware without using expensive manufacturing processes. We provide a full-stack solution encompassing tightly integrated hardware and software. Our solutions include a diverse family of systems-on-chip (SoCs) and the software required to enable on-chip AI processing, general compute, sensing, security, storage, wireless connectivity, and advanced graphics. Our SoC solutions deliver compute at a very small fraction of the power consumed by our competitors’ products. Our ultra-low power SoCs serve a wide range of markets requiring on-device and real-time AI, including smartwatches and fitness trackers, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) glasses, smart rings, digital health monitors, security systems and access control, livestock tracking, crop monitoring, and factory automation. These devices increasingly offer on-chip AI-powered features such as speech recognition, domain-specific language models, image and video processing, and sensing, further straining power consumption, which our solutions are positioned to address. As global demand for our SoC solutions accelerates, our sales and marketing efforts are increasingly focused on our end customers in target geographies such as the United States, Europe, and Asia (ex-MainlandChina). We were incorporated in Delaware on January 20, 2010 under the name Cubiq Microchip, Inc., and in October 2012, changed our name to Ambiq Micro, Inc. Our principal executive offices are located in Austin, Texas.