CLike in poker, in the business world, excitement often betrays a difficult situation, a worse game than expected. Visibly distracted, an employee of the Dutch company ASML confused Tuesday with Wednesday and published the company’s quarterly results a day earlier than expected, Tuesday October 15. This “human error” would have remained among stock market anecdotes if the information had been consistent with market expectations. Alas, the revenue forecasts for 2025 are catastrophic. Furious, investors sold en masse, causing a loss of 65 billion euros in market capitalization in two days. A record that recalls the sad days of the bursting of the Internet and telecoms bubbles, more than twenty years ago.
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It must be said that ASML is not an ordinary company. Despite its disappointment, its market valuation of 250 billion euros still represents a quarter of the Netherlands’ GDP, twice as much as the oil company Shell. Born in the fold of the Philips empire, the company has developed, after decades of research, a revolutionary technology for etching chips by “extreme ultraviolet” lithography with a precision of a few nanometers.
As it is the only one in the world to know how to manufacture these machines, it can sell them for more than 350 million euros each to clients like the Taiwanese TSMC and the South Korean Samsung, the only global producers of these high-end chips essential to computers and smartphones. As such, it is an advanced barometer of the health of global electronics. And, at the start of autumn, the needle suddenly swings to “bad weather”.
Gloomy forecasts for 2025
Because the comfortable position of the monopoly does not protect against the vagaries of a market as cyclical as that of semiconductors. The impromptu press release of Tuesday October 15 indicates that its order book for the third quarter only reached 2.6 billion euros. Half as much as analysts expected. And its forecasts are gloomy for 2025. The cause is the slowdown in the market, which is reflected in particular by the downward revision of investments at Intel or Samsung, and therefore the purchase of new machines.
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And, as misfortune never comes alone, the American and Dutch authorities have banned the export of sensitive material to China. Result: sales in this country will go from 50% in 2024 to 20% in 2025. As recognized by the boss of ASML, the Frenchman Christophe Fouquet, the current craze for artificial intelligence masks the weakness of the rest of the big companies. chip markets, notably telephony and automobiles. Technology Europe, which relies on very few large groups, is not about to catch up.
