James Xiao and the machinery behind the machines

In the photograph, James Xiao is holding a microphone outdoors, facing a gathering of UCT employees. There is a lectern, a courtyard and an audience in everyday work clothes. It is an ordinary enough setting for a chief executive’s visit. Yet it offers a useful place to begin understanding his new job: a business spread across facilities and countries, brought briefly within speaking distance.

The occasion was a visit to UCT Fluid Solutions in Israel. Xiao met employees, toured production and research facilities, and held a town hall. For someone arriving from a long career at Applied Materials, these encounters offered a close look at the organization he had begun leading in September 2025. The company’s work includes the subsystems and services that semiconductor manufacturing depends upon.

A microphone can carry a strategy across a courtyard. Making that strategy travel between engineering, production and a customer’s requirements is a more demanding exercise. That is the territory Xiao has chosen for his next act. He calls the effort UCT 3.0, giving an industrial transformation the tidy version number usually associated with software. The factories, naturally, require rather more than a download.

His appointment followed 19 years at Applied Materials. By the time he left, he had managed businesses concerned with the equipment used to make displays and semiconductors. At UCT, he moved to a company supplying the machinery behind that machinery. The shift makes his story a useful way into a part of technology that rarely arrives in a consumer’s shopping basket.

02An education in thin films, and in running a business

Xiao’s training began with applied physics at Dalian University of Technology. He also earned an MBA at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and completed executive leadership training at Stanford. The combination spans the technical and commercial sides of his eventual work: understanding a process, then taking responsibility for the organization that sells and supports it.

Before Applied Materials, he was president of Applied Films’ China branch, overseeing operations, sales and service. Those responsibilities put several versions of the same business in one office. Sales concerns what a customer expects; service confronts what happens after delivery; operations has to make the promises workable. His route upward passed through all three.

He entered Applied Materials through its acquisition of Applied Films in 2006. The ensuing career unfolded over nearly two decades, with a substantial stretch in display equipment. From February 2013, he led the Display CVD Products Division as managing director or vice president and general manager. He moved into leadership of the Display CVD & Equipment Product Group in May 2015.

From February 2017 to April 2023, he was corporate vice president and general manager of the Display Thin Film Group. A short assignment leading the Core Product Group within Display & Flexible Technology followed. In August 2023, his remit shifted to the Semiconductor Dielectric ALD Product Group and Metal Deposition Products/ALD business-unit operations. CVD means chemical vapor deposition; ALD means atomic layer deposition. His résumé has a considerable appetite for initials.

Read in sequence, those appointments describe a career built within operating businesses. Product groups, customer requirements and manufacturing responsibilities recur. The CEO title at UCT enlarged the scope, but the underlying questions would be familiar: what must be built, what customers need next, and how an organization can prepare to supply it.

03Changing sides of the customer relationship

UCT announced Xiao’s appointment on August 6, 2025, with a September 2 start date and a seat on the board. Clarence Granger, who had been serving as chief executive since March, stepped down from that role and remained non-executive chair at the transition. Xiao was joining an existing organization, with established customers and capabilities, rather than starting a business around a new invention.

The customer connection is unusually concrete. Applied Materials and Lam Research were UCT’s two largest revenue customers in fiscal 2025. Together, they accounted for 58.7 percent of revenue. Xiao’s former employer therefore sits inside the commercial landscape of his new job. His experience offers a perspective from the equipment maker’s side of that relationship; the concentration also makes customer execution consequential.

UCT’s Products business supplies assemblies and subsystems, including gas and chemical delivery systems, frames, fluid delivery systems and process modules. Its Services business cleans and recoats parts and performs contamination analysis. A chip’s public reputation may rest on performance benchmarks. The businesses supporting its manufacture have a less photogenic vocabulary, full of delivery systems, coatings and qualification procedures.

That vocabulary helps explain the appeal of Xiao’s background. A supplier must understand how its work fits into a customer’s equipment and production plans. UCT describes qualification as a process involving facility inspections and reviews of engineering, documentation, manufacturing and quality controls. The relationship therefore comes with requirements that extend well beyond agreeing on a purchase price. His move places years of product-group experience alongside responsibility for a supplier’s performance. It is a different seat at a closely connected table, with a new set of obligations attached.

04A strategy measured in square feet

In Austin, the strategy acquired a very literal footprint. On October 15, 2025, UCT marked the opening of a 176,600-square-foot site. The company described it as doubling its previous capacity, with expanded welding and ultra-high-purity capabilities and room for more than 500 employees. Those figures describe the facility, rather than a count of jobs already filled.

“Our customers are moving fast, and we’re moving with them,” Xiao said at the opening. The line is brief enough for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, but it also captures a supplier’s problem. Capacity needs to be available when a customer requires it. An impressive building becomes useful through the work that can be performed inside it.

Xiao’s early travels also took him to UCT teams in China, Malaysia and Singapore. His account emphasized the region’s facilities, talent and relationships with customers, governments and suppliers. In another account of visits to the Czech Republic and Israel, he returned to employees and customer partnerships. The itinerary gives geographic substance to the company he was learning to lead.

There is a human scale to those updates. They are populated by hosts, colleagues and conversations. Factory visits give a CEO an opportunity to see the people behind a capacity figure. The public record of Xiao’s early tenure repeatedly brings the story back to those meetings, even when the ambition he describes is expressed in the language of growth and innovation.

“Our customers are moving fast, and we’re moving with them.”

James Xiao / Austin facility opening

05What the version number has to deliver

By August 2026, Xiao was describing UCT 3.0 through three priorities: more global manufacturing capacity, stronger engineering and operating capabilities, and faster digital transformation. These are stated intentions, with execution still the relevant test. A plan can identify the work without settling how well the work will go.

The reported numbers provide one useful checkpoint. UCT’s revenue rose from $533.7 million in the first quarter of 2026 to $644.9 million in the second. On a GAAP basis, the company moved from a $17.9 million net loss to $8.7 million in net income. Second-quarter Products revenue was $572.7 million; Services contributed $72.2 million.

Those results belong to the company and its teams. They are a snapshot during Xiao’s tenure, rather than a measurement of one individual’s contribution. They do, however, give his strategy something sturdier than a slogan to stand beside: a period in which revenue increased and the reported bottom line changed direction.

In April, he had emphasized readiness for customers’ production increases and efficiency across UCT’s global footprint. By the second-quarter announcement, the emphasis included capacity, engineering and digital operations. Across both statements, the recurring ambition was to make UCT ready to respond as customers accelerated their technology plans. The details of readiness matter more than the elegance of its name.

06The next chapter still needs people

The leadership team was changing alongside the plan. Robert Wunar joined as chief operating officer in March 2026, bringing experience that included business-unit operations at Applied Materials. Michael Keogh became chief financial officer in August. Their appointments put additional operating and financial experience around Xiao as the organization pursued its next phase.

In September, Alexander Davern joined the board. His background included service as CFO, COO and CEO of National Instruments. Xiao linked the appointment to UCT 3.0 and the board’s strategic perspective. The connection is practical: a chief executive’s industrial plan operates within a company’s financial decisions, management structure and board oversight.

Xiao’s public manner at the transition offered a smaller clue about his approach. Responding to congratulations, he thanked friends, colleagues, customers and UCT employees, said he had enjoyed working with people at Applied, and looked forward to meeting his new colleagues. He ended with “Onwards and upwards from here.” It was an informal reply beneath a corporate announcement, with the emphasis firmly on people he had worked with and people he was about to meet.

His first chapter at UCT therefore has a recognizable shape: a change of employer, an international round of introductions, a manufacturing expansion and a plan beginning to meet reported results. The next scheduled checkpoint is October 27, 2026, when UCT plans to release third-quarter results. As of October 23, that remains ahead. Back in the courtyard photograph, the audience is listening. The durable part of the story will be what Xiao and those teams can build after the meeting ends.