Greetings, and welcome to the CULIC and SOPH 2018 Preliminary Second Fiscal Quarter Results Call. All participants will continue session during this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Joseph Elgendy, Director of Investor Relations And Strategic Initiatives, for Kulicke and Soffa. Joseph, you may begin.
Thank you, Hector. Welcome everyone to Kulicke and Soffa's second quarter 2018 conference call. Joining us on the call today are Fuzen Chen, President and Chief Executive Officer and Lester Wong, General Counsel And Interim Chief Financial In addition to historical statements, today's remarks will contain statements relating to future events and our future results, These statements are forward looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Our actual results financial condition may differ materially from what is indicated in those forward looking statements. For a complete discussion of the risks associated with Tula Kinsulka, that could affect future results and financial condition, please refer to our recent SEC filings, including the risk factors in the 10 K for the year ended September 30, 2017, as well as the disclaimers to our forward looking statements contained in our preliminary earnings release.
We want to remind investors that I would now like to turn the call over to Fuzen Chen for the business overview. Please go ahead, Fuzen.
Thanks, Joe. Yibo discussing this quarter's business overview. I wanted to share some specifics regarding our delayed filing. Following the end of the fiscal quarters, we learned of certain unauthorized transactions by a senior finance employee. We immediately initiated investigations for this transaction with the assistance of outside advisors.
In the court of these investigations, this was discovered, but certain warranty accrual in prior periods and have been accounted for incredibly, and the therefore needs stated. A lot of these mitigation is ongoing. At the present time, we believe certain amount that should be, should have been included in our reserves for future warranty expenses. Loss is paid now reserved, but expenses has incurred. We currently believe that this AO lost intentional.
However, considering the timing and scope of this review, more time is required to benefit our current understanding. At the scale year 2017 due to inconsistencies impacting our 1 year a quarter affecting both costs of results and the sale in general and administrative expenses. We do not currently the effect of this specific and identified adjustments to the maturity of the bus to the company. While this is an extremely critical issue, we are working closely with our external advisers and internal team to aggressively remediate and file as soon as possible. The company committed to attrition the issue identified and the reestablishing timely financial reporting as soon as possible.
One of the information I have just provided is the company's best estimate at this time. The investigation is not complete and the lending path of the restatement when finalized may be different, perhaps by a material amount. With that, I would like now to discuss our ongoing business process. From a very high level, it strike our delay filing. Our favorable end market alignment near term capital share gain opportunities and the long term potential within advanced packaging provides significant confidence in our ability to generate and deliver strong recurring cash flow well into the futures.
During the March quarters alone, we repurchased $21,500,000 of our stock in open market transactions. 18% more than was purchase during the entire 2017 fiscal year. Looking ahead, we foresee the ball winding projects to continue being the most effective way to interconnect the majority of semiconductor devices. From simple discrete and ARV applications through more complex memory and the FIP applications. Umulating this critical benefit with the high growth and despite from price sensitive application, such as center and the connected devices.
We expect bonding to continue to be a dynamic and a growing solution for the whole industry's needs. Furthermore, we have demonstrated a clear task to optimize this business so technical share gains in LED as well as enhancing recurring revenue opportunities within this size 4 market. Next, we get Westbound in where we also enjoyed our shore equipment operations. We have significant exposure to legacy and high growth automotive applications in addition to rather power storage and power control applications. Supporting sustainable energy and efficient energy distribution.
Lastly, we have developed a growing portfolio of advanced packaging tool, ready to serve the new capability need of next generation logic and the memory, supported by wafer level packaging, similar compression and the high accuracy is that fair. I would now like to turn back to our March quarter's performance. In the quarter, we were again able to reshape our guidance range with $241,800,000 of revenue, and currently, we anticipate net income to be approximately $36,000,000. Lending for the quarter increased 11.1 percent, 4% period in the prior year, driven by an increase in both our capital equipment and the upper market product and the service segment. Sequentially, capital equipment revenue improved by 3 point percent driven primarily by an increase in LED and the IC equipment, which more than offset the anti steady reduction from the December quarter when we recognized revenue from a sizable automotive related order.
Moving the wording, we continue to make ongoing capital investment in LED capacity for general writings and also memory driven by NAND Namely applications accounted for about 14% of our no longer shipment given the March quarters. Let me read in our upper market product and service segment outpaced capital equipment growth and increase by point 1 percent sequentially. We continue to make progress on further enhancing this recurring revenue business. I would now like to turn the call over to Lester Wong, who will cover this quarter's financial overview in greater detail. Lester
Thank you, Consent. My remarks today will refer to GAAP results. Based on our preliminary results, gross margins are anticipated to be in line with our previous expectations of slightly below 45%. Looking ahead to the remaining 2 quarters of fiscal 2018, we anticipate gross margins to improve to around 45%. Over the past year, we have driven a renewed focus on cost and supply change, which is increasing our competitiveness and margins in more price sensitive markets.
We're currently in a net income of approximately $7,000,000. This decrease was overwhelmingly due to increases to working We currently expect to maintain the existing quarterly operating model of $53,000,000 of fixed expenses from 5% to 7% of variable expenses tied to revenue. Regarding tax, all still evaluating the U. S. Tax reforms we currently expect to call.
I will now turn the discussion back over to Vincent for the June quarter's business outlook.
Thanks, Vanessa. Looking into a few quarters, we are targeting revenue to be between 255000000 to 217000000 and they are anticipating another very strong revenue year. Overall, show ICG unit growth combined with all products across America with nearly early fast growing end market. Including LED, Automotive Memory, 3d sensing and advanced packaging all provide us with additional confidence. Moreover, we continue with your company.
This has already bone fruit in the LED market and also has set the foundation for ongoing growth. In our recurring revenue business. We also have new opportunities among our growing advanced packaging portfolio. In addition, we recently initiated several new development efforts to further expand with overly and also our served market. We appreciate your ongoing support, and we look forward to sharing our progress we continue to execute I would now like to turn the call back over to Joe for closing comments.
Thank you, Susan. Before closing, we wanted to inform investors that we will be participating at several upcoming investor events in Santa Monica. Boston, Chicago, New York, and Toronto. Additional details on past and future events are available on our corporate website at investor. Kns.com.
Thank you all for the time today. As always, please feel free to follow-up directly with any questions. Hector, this concludes our call. Good day.
This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you.