ASML Holding N.V. (NASDAQ:ASML) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

ASML Holding N.V. (NASDAQ:ASML) Q4 2025 Earnings Call Transcript January 28, 2026

ASML Holding N.V. misses on earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $8.78 EPS, expectations were $9.01.

Monique Mols: Good morning, everyone, good afternoon, depending on where you are, maybe even good night. Welcome to the Q4 full year 2025 financial results press conference. You may not see that when you’re dialing in online and you’re watching us online, but we are actually in a different location than we were last year. Today, we host the press conference in our training center in the ASML Academy, and that is located at the Brainport Industries campus in Eindhoven. And this is actually the place where we plan our expansion in the Netherlands. So we thought it would be a good idea to invite everyone here in the room to see what our new location is going to look like. There’s nothing there to see yet, but this is where we are planning our expansion.

And Christophe will talk more about that later in the presentation. My name is Monique Mols, I’m Head of Media Relations. So welcome to you all. I’m really happy to see that there are people in the room and people online. For those online, if you have a question later on, you can fill out the form on the website and we will take your question from here. If you’re in the room, my colleague, Mark will walk around with a microphone and pick up your question. Sorry. So this is our annual results. Forward-looking statements for those who like it. So again, we are here at the Academy. We have several of those training centers all around the world. Here, we have quite a big center where, on average, 400 employees come here every day to get a training.

So they actually work on the machines that our customers have in their fabs. And every year, we have about 26,500 people coming here to train. So this is a very important location for us. And we’re very happy that we can host a press conference here today. With that, I’m not the only one who’s going to talk to you today, of course, I have Christophe Fouquet; and our CFO, Roger Dassen, and they will talk you through the numbers, through the developments and everything that’s happening at ASML. So I would like to invite on stage, Christophe Fouquet.

Christophe Fouquet: Thank you very much, Monique. So Roger will be the one doing the good numbers later on. As you have noticed, we finished the year very, very, very strong with a record quarter record year, record booking. And this is basically a sign of the direction this industry is taking. We are very happy, of course, with the walk, the ASML team has done, being able to execute on such a big quarter in Q4 and also prepare us basically for 2026. So a lot of good news today. And again, Roger will get into the number. I’d like to say that we welcome also that clarification. In the course of 2025, you have seen that sometimes the business was still a bit uncertain. The last 3 months have really clarified basically at least the horizon for 2026 and most probably a bit beyond that.

So before we go into the numbers, I’d like to provide you some context about what’s happening in the industry, what is driving basically this type of news today. And of course, the very first thing is AI. You have been hearing about AI already for a couple of years. You have heard major, major announcement about AI infrastructure. I think from the very beginning in ASML, we have been a believer that AI will be a big thing. And this is true because as with semi before, any major application moving forward will not only use semiconductor, but it will also use AI. And I put a few examples of those applications on this slide. It’s pretty much everything you can think about when it comes to technology, when it comes to the future of society, this will all rely on AI.

Q&A Session

If you look at the opportunity, this has been said also before, this will drive basically advanced technology, advanced logic, advanced DRAM. This will also basically drive the entire data infrastructure. And the effect AI can have on the overall GDP is pretty big. In fact, if you look at the U.S., even in 2025, AI was counting for a very large part of the growth, and we expect that basically to be applied to the entire worldwide GDP. So the opportunity is there. What was a bit, I would say, frustrating for us for a while is that where we heard all those news, we heard about all those investments, but basically, this was not yet translating into capacity addition at our customer. I think what the last 3 months have done is change that. We have seen our customer basically moving forward.

They start to really believe in the sustainability of the AI demand. That’s true for memory, that’s true for logic. And as a result, they started to invest. They started to plan for capacity. And of course, this will drive demand for our product at ASML. And when you look at the demand for our product, what’s interesting with AI is that this basically touch on all products. Of course, AI is going to require very advanced chips, and this is going to drive EUV, for example. So this year will be a big year for EUV, Roger will talk about that. It’s going to drive advanced inspection tool. But at the same time, AI needs a lot of data generation, a lot of sensor, and this will be still created by the use of more mature technology such as DUV. So AI will have also this effect basically to really drive our entire product portfolio in the coming years.

This is a bit of a summary of what our customers have told us. So I talked already about the fact that they are more confident that AI is here to last, and therefore, they are going to invest. I think, in fact, for a lot of our customers in 2026, capacity will mean market share. So we will see them very eager to get the capacity as quickly as possible. There’s a few more good news when it comes to AI, AI also drive very advanced technology. This drive an increased use of EUV. And one of the things we’ve been talking in 2025 quite a bit is the fact basically that we have seen the number of layers of EUV increasing basically at our key customer. And this means practically that the overall litho intensity is going up, which means basically more use of our advanced lithography tool.

2026, we expect, as you understand, as the number will show an improvement of the business, a significant growth especially on the advanced tool, EUV as said before, will be a big year. And again, on the midterm, we expect that to continue. Long term, we stick basically to what we have told the market already several times, which is what we share basically at our Capital Market Day in November 2024. We still expect for 2030 revenue between EUR 44 billion and EUR 60 billion with a gross margin of 56% to 60%. Going a bit now to the effect of AI in the market. So this graph is showing a bit what AI will do. What you see here basically is the growth of the different segment of semiconductor. At the bottom, you see the historical growth of memory logic, which is about 6%, 7% year-on-year.

6%, 7% year-on-year is pretty great already. There are many, many industries that will wish to see this kind of number. But what you see with AI is that when we look at advanced logic, when we looked at advanced memory the growth on those segments is going to be more than 20% year-on-year for the foreseeable future. And this is really what is going to drive basically more demand on lithography. Why is that? So we’ve talked in the past a lot about Moore’s low, of course. And Moore’s Law is law that say that every couple of years, we need to double the number of transistors per chips. And that law has been true for many, many years for PC for mobile application. Now when you look at AI and this started to happen in 2010, the curve is far more aggressive.

When you look at the most advanced AI product today, NVIDIA products, for example, the request is not to grow 2x every 2 years, but in the last few years to grow 16x every 2 years. So you see a major acceleration basically of the need for silicon. And of course, we provide that in 2 different ways. We provide that with scaling by making transistors small. We can put more transistor per chips. And this has been a good way basically to provide more transistor and follow Moore’s law for many, many years, but that’s not enough anymore. And if you cannot put enough transistor per unit of area per chips, then the only option will be to make more wafers. And that’s a bit what we see happening with AI. So the most advanced AI application are going to drive up volume.

And this is why when we look at DRAM customer today, when we look at logic customer today, they are building mega fabs. Some of them are talking about hyper-cycle because they have to be able basically to also provide this volume to the market. So just to illustrate that, I pick one example, and I picked it from NVIDIA because all of you are, of course, very much aware of what’s happening there. Today, on the black wall system, you need about 2.5 wafers to create the product. If you look at 2027 on the revenue product, this number will go up to 10 wafers. So to provide the same product to their customer, NVIDIA will need 4x more wafer than today. And this is one of the reason why, again, we will see capacity extension driven again by this type of application.

That’s what you see here. And this is again, I would say, a bit of a new dynamic we have in our market AI by this acceleration of the need for performance of power reduction is going to drive both volume and technology a lot harder than any technology before. So what does it mean for technology, EUV is key. 2026 is going to be a good year for EUV. We are looking at more shipments. And this, despite the fact that we have increased the productivity of our tool by more than 40%. So we’re going to ship a lot of capacity for EUV this year. If you look at it historically, we have already been having quite a bit of capacity. So the capacity headed of EUV in the last few years have been in average 25% year-on-year growth, which is quite significant.

So we have seen all our customers basically already adopting this, it was logic first, then DRAM, but we expect basically to see that even more moving forward. Then we have High NA, and High NA, of course, is not going to be the tool that provide the capacity of EUV in 2026, ’27, but that’s the tool that will enable our customers to shift to even more advanced technology around ’28-’29, that’s important for DRAM. That’s important for logic. And that’s important for AI because as I said before, AI is going to be looking for more advanced chips with low power consumption and High NA is going to play into that very strongly. So good progress on High NA in the last few months. Our customers are still qualifying the tools. This takes a bit of time.

The results are good. This year is going to be used to prepare a bit for insertion. And again, if we look at 2027, ’28, we are going to see the first product being manufactured using some High NA system. Deep UV remains very important. As I said, it’s not all about advanced semiconductor. As you know, a lot of technology still require Deep UV. So we continue to drive the road map both on Immersion, where we have launched our 2150, which basically give us sub-nanometer accuracy and more than 300 wafer per hour. Productivity is important. Productivity, of course, a way to get capacity. So we continue to drive that on immersion, I think the example of the NXT:870B, which is a KrF system is even more spectacular because there we have been capable to achieve more than 400 wafer per hour.

And that tool today is creating a lot of interest at our customer because productivity, again, is capacity. We talked also last quarter about us starting to help our customer with what we call 3D integration. So I told you, when you cannot put all the transistor in one ship, you just make more chips and bring them together with 3D integration. We have our first system, the TWINSCAN XT:260 that was shipped last quarter, lot of interest from our customer. For us, this is the first product looking at this new market opportunity, and we will continue to work with our customers basically to define more product moving forward to support them also on that segment. A few words on metrology and inspection. So we don’t talk always about metrology inspection.

But when you drive technology, yield become very, very important, and yield can be improved by doing more maturity and more inspection. So in 2025, we have seen our metrology inspection business growing up by almost 30%, which is a major growth number. It has to with need for more metrology in spectrum, it has also do with the quality of our product in optical metrology for overlay, but also in e-beam. And one of the products where we have seen quite some progress in 2025 is multi-beam. Multi-beam is going to provide e-beam inspection at higher speed and most probably in the next, I would say, a couple of years really enable our customer to move this technology to high-volume manufacturing. So a lot of good progress there as well. You all heard about Mistral, I say back in the end of the summer when we announced our collaboration but also our investment in Mistral.

The rationale there was to get AI in ASML and to get the very best people, the very best competence in ASML in order to be able to first strengthen our core competencies, read putting AI in our product, support the connected market, to offer some of those capability to our customers and also create new opportunity basically moving forward. That’s a project we are going to talk more about in ’26, in ’27. We are making great progress with Mistral, our partner. Our teams are working very, very closely together to basically execute on each one of those points. Going a bit into some of the other things we are very, very proud of at ASML. This is our engagement in the community. We have been spending, I would say, both the time, talent, money in order to work together with the community on a few very important topics.

The first one is mobility. Well, we are here today. As you know, this is also close to our next campus, which I will explain in a minute. We plan to have a groundbreaking this year in a few months. We want to continue basically to work with the Brainport community to improve the infrastructure because we are very much aware also that as we grow, we can sometimes create more headache, and it’s very important to address that. So we have major investment there also, of course, through the Beethoven program. Affordable housing, there’s been quite some press in 2025 about some of the progress we have done there. This is ongoing now for a few years. This remains very, very important, and we will continue to invest. You see the number there. I don’t need to stress it to basically create more housing.

We also understand that this is a broader challenge across the Netherlands, and we definitely want to do our part helping the community here. Culture. So we are very proud to be one of the, I would say, initial partner for the future Rijksmuseum here in Eindhoven. We love the city of Eindhoven. We love this place. But sometimes we feel that if we can bring a bit more culture, a bit more activity, I think this will help people to enjoy it even more to attract even more people moving forward. That’s why we stay very committed to the PSV Football Club, as you know. But this we thought was a very, very nice initiative from the city of Eindhoven and we really wanted to be there. Finally, education, you know that we have a long-standing relationship with the TU University here in Eindhoven that could extend that to many other university across the Netherlands.

This is key. We want to develop tenant that will be able to work in semiconductor moving forward, and we will continue to do that, of course, very strongly. One last word. We need to continue to grow. I will come back to some of the other announcement we had today about our focus on innovation and engineering. At the same time, we see more demand for our product. And therefore, our footprint needs to continue to grow because we need to invest in customer service. We need to invest in manufacturing. We need to invest in space. So last year, we opened 2 major sites, one in Korea, one in the U.S., and that intends to support basically our activity here. The big event in 2026 will be the groundbreaking of the big campus, which is our second big campus in the community.

We’ll do that mostly in May, June, and I’m sure you will be invited to join us with the idea that we can already start moving people as early as in 2028. So this will be very good for our people. It will be very good also to debottleneck a bit the campus in Eindhoven, of course. And this is a project, as you know, that is very, very important for ASML. This is my update. I will come back in a bit to talk a bit about the action we are taking on our engineering team to strengthen our innovation. In the meantime, I’ll give a chance to Roger to give us those very nice numbers. Thank you.

R.J.M. Dassen: Thank you, Christophe. And good morning, good afternoon, everyone. So indeed, I will present the financials for ’25 and the outlook. Christophe said it, clearly, Q4 2025, a record quarter by any standard. It was a record quarter in terms of sales. It was a record quarter in terms of order intake. It was a record quarter in terms of cash flow generation. On the back of all the good developments that Christophe just shared with you. So I won’t call them out here, but just looking at the quarter, it’s pretty clear that it was indeed a very strong quarter. If we look at 2025, and if we look at the total business for ASML, we ended the year with EUR 32.7 billion in net revenue, 52.8% gross margin. And you see the key elements in here, a net income of EUR 9.6 billion and an EPS earnings per share of close to EUR 25 per ordinary share.

All in all, a very, very strong year in which we also paid back and returned quite some money to our shareholders. And also, we’re able to do the participation in Mistral that Christophe just alluded to. Very clearly, EUV was the main driver behind it. And you will see it in the pie chart that I will share with you in a moment. It will clarify that it is particularly the leading technology that really contributed to the growth. So both immersion, but first and foremost, also EUV. So EUV grew 39% in comparison to — in comparison to last year to 2024, a mix of both more tools, significantly higher sales price of the tools because most of the tools that we sold, most of the low NA tools that we sold in 2025 were 3,800 tools, which, as you know, saw an increase in productivity from 160 wafers per hour to 220 wafers per hour and of course, a commensurate increase in the sales price.

And obviously, we also had the recognition of a number of EXE tools, High NA tools. So it’s in that combination that really EUV was the big driver of growth for us this year. Big moment indeed, and Christophe showed it as well, the revenue recognition of the first 5200B really big moment for us because that is the high-volume manufacturing tool on High NA and the fact that we were able to not just chip it but also get it installed and get accepted by the customer and the customer and really looking at putting that tool into high-volume manufacturing for its leading nodes is a very significant moment for the company. Deep UV went down a bit, decreased 6%. If you look at the geographies, you would see that most of the decline would come from — would actually come from China.

So that’s where most of the decline on Deep UV was immersion is still quite strong, particularly on the dry side, it was lower than it was in 2024. But there, the step into the 3D integration market with the introduction of the 260, obviously was another big moment, application very strong. Christophe alluded to it a 20% increase right there with the need for more process control for our customers at the leading nodes. And finally, very, very strong 26% increase in our installed base business, both on the back of service, our installed base and EUV is obviously growing. Therefore, you see a continuous step up of our service revenue from EUV, but also increased appetite in EUV in upgrades. I’ll come back to that later. This gives you some breakdowns and I won’t call them out at all.

But I think if you look at technology, it’s interesting to see that the leading technologies, so both EUV and immersion combined give you 90% of our systems revenue. And I think that really talks volumes, I think, about the shift that Christophe is also talking about the shift to more and more leading nodes, clearly represented here in the share of technology. In terms of end use, you see — we see memory at 34%, logic at 66%. You see memory actually declining a little bit in terms of percentage. We actually see that flip in 2026. So in 2026, you will see that memory becomes more and more important. In terms of regions, a lot to be said there, but I think China is still very, very big, but smaller than it was last time, both in terms of percentage of system sales and also in absolute numbers, you see a bit of a decline in the China market.

We expect that decline to continue. As we said, we expect the China business for this year to be around 20% of our total sales. So here it was 33% of total — of system sales was 29% in terms of total sales, we expect the 29 percentage number to go down to approximately 20% this year. This gives you the net sales by end use over the years. I won’t spend too much time on it. Just one fun fact. If you look at the installed base business at EUR 8.2 billion, that comes pretty close to the total revenue for ASML in 2017. That just tells you how unbelievably rapidly the company grew. And the fact that we have such a big number in terms of installed base business, obviously, also provides a lot of resilience for the company. So therefore, it’s an important number for us to focus on and to continue to increase.

This gives you the business over the years. So if you just — if you take the 4 year — so the 4-year increase from 2021 to 2025, you would see that the company has grown 75% at the top line. You also see that R&D increases from 2.5 to 4.7, which, of course, was absolutely critical in getting us prepared for all the beautiful products that we’re currently shipping to our customers. But I think it’s also fair to acknowledge that this increase in R&D number has also driven some organizational complexity that Christophe will talk about after my contribution. So this gives you the overview. And as you see earnings per share an interesting number, round it 25, 25 by 25 is something that you might easily recall on a go-forward basis. In terms of return to shareholders, if we look at dividend, the total dividend that we proposed to the AGM for the year EUR 7.50, this quarter, we’ll do EUR 1.60 per ordinary share as an interim dividend in Q1.

And therefore, if the AGM accepts our proposal, we would have a final dividend of EUR 2.70, and that’s a significant increase over last year. In terms of share buyback, we did not complete the full program of share buyback. As you see here, EUR 7.6 billion out of the total program of EUR 12 billion. We did announce a new program, EUR 12 billion over a 3-year period. In terms of outlook for the quarter, we expect net revenue between EUR 8.2 billion and EUR 8.9 billion with a gross margin between 51% and 53%. Look again at the installed base management sales, 2.4. So last quarter, 2.1 goes up to 2.4. What it really tells you is that the appetite from customers when it comes to upgrades is very, very high, because in the client that Christophe was describing, but customers really have a lot of appetite to increase their capacity as quickly as they can.

Of course, on the one hand, they will try and complete their fab billing as soon as they can, such that they can new tools in. But in the meantime, once these fabs are still in construction, the fastest way to get extra capacity is really to make sure that the tools are squeezed to the maximum and therefore, to put as much upgrades on the tool as possible. And that’s — that’s what you see here, and that really contributes to very, very strong installed base sales going up again this quarter. So the gross margin, 51% to 53% R&D and SG&A costs nicely under troll. For the full year, EUR 34 billion to EUR 39 billion, really on the back of all the developments that Christophe talked about. So the real steam engine behind this growth is once again EUV.

So we once again expect the EUV business to go up significantly this year. We also expect the installed base business to go up this year, and it will go a little bit at the detriment of the non-EUV business. We expect that to be about flattish. So non-EUV business is expected to flattish from ’25 to ’26. With us moving parts for the leading nodes, so for the big customers, both in memory and advanced logic, we actually expect the Deep UV business to go up a bit. As I mentioned, in China, we expect the China business will go down. Metrology and inspection, we expect to be quite strong. So those are more or less the moving parts within the non-EUV business. Again, for the full year, EUR 34 billion to EUR 39 billion, which at the midpoint after a growth of 16% in ’25.

At the midpoint, you would be looking at a 12% increase in this year with good potential as the bandwidth also suggests gross margin 51% to 53% and annualized effective tax rate of 17%. And that concludes my presentation. And as I mentioned, Christophe has a part for you on the streamlining of our engineering and innovation function.

Christophe Fouquet: Thank you, Roger. Good. Yes, I have one slide I want to share with you on the action we are taking basically to strengthen our innovation and engineering team. So I think that the net results of that, which is 1,700 people leaving the company, I think, has been picked up pretty clearly already this morning. What I want to do is to give you some background. And of course, you understand listening to our outlook, listening to the numbers. We are not doing that in any case because we are in trouble because we need to save money, et cetera, et cetera. Now the reason we are doing that is that we have been growing very fast. And this is also true for a technology team or innovation engine, and as you know, the technology team, the innovation engine of ASML has been the reason for our success.

It’s been true for many, many years, and this is still going to be true for many, many years to come. And as we have said in 2025, we want to continue to innovate more. This is why we engage in AI. This is why we engage in 3D integration. This is why we have a long road map on e-beam, and we believe that innovation will for many, many years to come, define our success. But when we listen to the feedback of many of our stakeholders, they have told us in the last few years that we’re not very agile in fact. And we are not, I would say, responsive enough. So our customer are pointing to the need for us on technology to be able to respond much faster to work on quality to work on new product. A very important feedback we got is from our whole engineers who told us Well, a lot of the time we spend in ASML is not anymore on innovation, right?

Because the organization has become so complex. We have so many people steering us in different direction that we have to spend a bigger part of our time just dealing with that. And this has been a very, very strong, and I would say, loud message from our people, and we felt the need basically to address that. Our supplier, if you talk to them, they also tell us the same, and therefore, we felt the need to move. So you heard about the number 1,700. I’d like to give you a bit more color to this number. If you look at our technology organization today, we have about 4,500 leaders, which is quite a bit. When we look at a future organization where we simplify our processes, where we reduce the number of steering access towards our engineers, we believe basically that we need about 1,500 leader to run this organization.

So it’s a 3,000 less leaders needed if we are successful in simplifying. So out of the 3,000 people that we don’t need basically to lead the team, we are going to create 1,400 engineering positions. So we’re going to add, in fact, some engineering bandwidth to work on existing product to work on future products. We want to, in fact, have out of this action, more engineers and less, I will say, leadership so that engineers can be fully enable to do their job. And as a result of that, if you do the math, we have 1,600 people out of the technology team that will not have a job in ASML anymore. Now the difference between the 1,600 and 1,700 is 100 people coming out of IT when we have a similar situation, similar feedback and where there, we believe that about 100 leading position are not needed.

So this is a bit the math, we want to really boost again our engineering capability, our innovation engine. We want to improve, I would say, the satisfaction of our engineers, our customer, our supplier. And of course, this come at the cost of a very difficult decision we had to make. We explained our employees this morning. This is most probably the most difficult decision the management team ever had to make in ASML. But we do it because we truly believe that this is the right thing to do for the company for our stakeholders, starting with our employees and to basically continue to be this great company moving forward. So that’s a bit more background. And with that, I think we’d like to take some questions from you. Thank you very much.

Monique Mols: Okay. Thank you. So we have some questions online, and we have some people here in the room and because you all came here, I think you should go first. So let’s ask some questions in the room first. Please state your name and your publication first, so everyone knows.

Sarah Jacob: I’m Sarah Jacob. I’m from Bloomberg News. Regarding the job cuts that you announced today, what kind of restructuring costs or charges can we expect from this?

R.J.M. Dassen: That’s obviously subject to the discussions that we’re having with the Work Council and first and foremost, union. So I cannot talk about that, but these costs in the grand scheme of ASML would not be considered material. Well, the finalization of number is very much subject to discussion, but not materially in our numbers.

Sarah Jacob: I got a question about — there’s a lot of talk about capacity expansion from your customers. We’ve seen a lot of announcements. But how much of those announcements or is related to real capacity expansion? And what part is CapEx inflation, so to speak, because the cost of a wafer is increasing. How sustainable is that? Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

Christophe Fouquet: Well, I think so, I talked about short and midterm. So I think that visibility we get from ASML is mostly for the next couple of years. And when we talk about capacity expansion, we talk about new systems. So that’s why we said that if we look at 2026, we expect ship quite a few more EUV tool. It’s also true with metrology with inspection. I think Roger was rightfully stressing the progress of our installed base business, which also include upgrades, and we will see also a lot of that. So I would say when you hear our customer talking about capacity expansion, this translate directly into need for more tools. And for a long time, we heard our customer’ customer, sometimes our customer, customer, customer talking about expansion, and this was still a bit far away from us.

In the last 3 months, if you have listened to TSMC, Samsung, Micron. Micron has been announcing groundbreaking almost every week for the last few weeks. There, you have a direct translation basically into shipment for us. And we have not said that in our talk, but also build up of capacity. So of course, a lot of that will affect positively, not only ASML, but the entire supply chain here in the region.

Monique Mols: Okay. Let’s turn to an online question and get back to you then. So a question from Financial Times. Please can you talk a bit more about how the AI memory shortage is driving your business? And to what extent those customers are being more aggressive in their capacity expansion than logic?

Christophe Fouquet: I will start. I think that it’s difficult to say if logic or DRAM is the bottleneck for AI today. I will still pick mostly memory at this point of time. And the reason for that is that it comes to memory, the demand for high bandwidth memory, which is the AI memory is extremely high. But the demand for DDR memory, which is for mobile PC is also very high. And as a result, we have seen basically the price of DRAM going up significantly in the last few weeks. Therefore, there’s a need for capacity. And our memory customers are moving very aggressively. I mentioned a few examples. And the reason for that is when you have such a demand for capacity, capacity is also market share. And if we look at 2026, we know that the memory demand will be very, very tight because our customers are saying that publicly.

So there is a huge appetite and it started most probably end of last year for our DRAM customer to really build up capacity as quickly as possible. And that’s the dynamic we are in which, of course, has a major positive benefit for ASML.

Monique Mols: Okay. Thank you. Mark, in the room, I see some hands.

Unknown Analyst: So [indiscernible]. How does the stabilizing AI market influence the perspective of the amount of jobs you’re about growing in Eindhoven?

Christophe Fouquet: Well, so if you look at the big picture, so I mentioned again our long-term forecast as we establish it in November 2024, where we still see us going towards EUR 44 billion to EUR 60 billion revenue, which means that we see still need for more capacity. Even as we speak, this year, we will be adding jobs in manufacturing and customer service in order to support basically the need. So I will say the long-term trajectory is still a trajectory of growth. we take today a very specific action on a very, very focused part of the organization, which is the technology team and in fact, even focused specifically on the leadership of the technology team. But it doesn’t change fundamentally our growth trajectory and therefore, our commitment to people, but also as I’ve shown to footprint, et cetera, et cetera, the supply chain I could add to that.

And I think it’s very important to understand that even as a company grow and is very successful, there’s still a need once a while to make sure that some of the key elements of the company and for us, that’s the technology. Technology is really our heart. We have to make sure that we keep the heart in the best possible shape. And the action we are taking today is difficult, is painful. But the intention is to make sure that, that innovation engine keeps going so that as the market grow, we keep our very strong leadership position in the market.

Unknown Analyst: Mark [ NSA ]. I have 2 questions. One relating to the reorganization and the other one is to being prepared to this huge demand in new machines. First of all, the reorganization we refer to the technology team, does it mean that something changes within the internal structure as well regarding D&E or R&D? And the other question is when it comes to being prepared for this new up cycle, is your supply chain also prepared. So did you do some stockpiling there? Or is every — does everybody have to expand?

Christophe Fouquet: I’ll take the first one and leave you the second one. So I think the short answer to your first question is yes. I think that the transformation, the change in the organization will be mostly around D&E, not only but mostly around D&E. The leadership I was referring to is mostly within D&E. That’s also why Marco, our CTO, together with Jose are taking the lead also on that activity. But since innovation is the heart of the company, everything else is connected to that. And by improving the organization, the D&E organization, we also improve the interfaces with operation. We improve the interfaces with our customer, and we improve the interfaces with our supplier, right? So all the people who told us basically, you’ve got to do something better should benefit from that.

So a lot of the work will be focused on D&E. In fact, what we talk about today, I would say, practically doesn’t concern the very large majority of the team ASML, but the impact, I think, will go beyond D&E.

R.J.M. Dassen: Mark, on the capacity, what we’ve done, as you know, in the past couple of years is to put in what we call the long lead time items, which means that everything that takes, let’s say, longer than 12, 18 months to realize is in place in order to get to a much higher volume. So that means factory space, et cetera, et cetera. We’ve done that, and we’ve worked with our supply chain for them to do that as well. So what we’re doing now based on the very strong signals that we’re getting from our customers and also them indicating that they believe this development is sustainable. We’re now making sure that every quarter, we increase our move rate because as you will appreciate, you cannot move from 44 units in 2025 to 80 units in 2026 doesn’t work that way.

So you gradually need to crank up your move rate, and that’s exactly what we’re doing right now. We’re doing that. We have a very solid understanding also with our supply chain. They’re doing the same thing, and that will lead to a very, very meaningful increase in our capacity this year, but also moving forward.

Monique Mols: I’m going to go to one online and then get back to you. Could you share how ASML’s R&D spending is currently divided between EUV-related development and non-EUV technologies. This is a question from the Chemical Daily in Tokyo and we have a lot of people from Japan online watching us. So that’s really nice.

R.J.M. Dassen: The lion’s share of the R&D expense really is an EUV, right? Because on EUV, we have both High NA, we have the Low NA platform that where we still see a lot of potential to develop that. And we’re also working on what we call the high perform platform. So we have 3 very significant work streams in the D&E organization to focus on EUV. So without a doubt, EUV is the lion’s share of the development. But that said, we do have road maps for the other products as well. You heard us talk about the 260. You might have heard about the 870, which is a platform that really significantly increases the output capability in the drive business. So we’re working there as well. Lion’s share is really focused on EUV.

Unknown Analyst: Folks, I had a question about the China business, which is going down quite dramatically. I’m wondering whether it’s also going down in absolute numbers? And if that’s the case, what’s driving that? Where it just still a backlog thing or whether something else is going on as well?

R.J.M. Dassen: Well, it is going down in absolute numbers as well, right? So if you do the math on the system sales, if you take the chart, you take the percentage and you apply it to the total system sales, you would see that actually it goes down in system sales, I think, something like EUR 850 million. But you can do the math yourself and verify whether I — whether my memory serves me well here, but it’s clearly going down from 24 to 25 and also at the 20% number that we indicated for this year, it will go down further. What’s going on there? Well, first of all, it’s normalizing, right? Because I think the reality is we should ask ourselves a question what was going on in previous years. What was going on in previous years is that over the COVID period, we build up a huge backlog because we — and in fact, we underserve the Chinese market during the COVID days.

As a result of that, a huge backlog has been built, and we have been executing on that backlog in the past couple of years. So at a certain point in time, we expect — we already expected China to normalize. Frankly, the very strong China sales still in 2025 surprised us a bit. But given all the dynamics that we’re looking at right now, we think 20% is probably the right number, which, by the way, still gives you at the midpoint close to EUR 7.5 billion of sales. So it’s not in any way falling off a cliff, right? But it is reduced in comparison to what it was last year. So it’s more normalization than that anything very spectacular is going on there.

Monique Mols: So a lot of interest in the room. So let’s go back to the room. Dan?

Unknown Analyst: Dan from [indiscernible]. I have 2 questions. The first one is you mentioned that the EUV business will grow quite rapidly this year. I was wondering what share of that will be High NA. I think you mentioned this is really a preparation year for the coming years for insertion. Just wondering how many machines do you plan to ship this year? And the second one is, do you have a progress update on Hypernet the year you’ll make a firm decision on it? And maybe on platform as well.

R.J.M. Dassen: I’ll take the first one, you take the second one. So on the — the other way around. So the vast share of the growth will clearly be in low NA, right? So because it all goes into high-volume manufacturing because there is such a big need for customers to grow there. So that’s where the lion’s share goes High-NA will just continue to go along the lines of what Christophe has described earlier on, which is the 3 phases, and we’re not yet in the high-volume manufacturing phase though as we did point out, the fact that one customer has accepted, signed off on the 5200B, our first high-volume manufacturing tool, of course, is an important step in that direction. But the lion’s share of the growth this year will be low NA.

Christophe Fouquet: Yes. On the Hyper NA before I go there, I need to take a bit of a step back. So we talk about low NA, we talk about High NA I think we talked about Hyper NA because we see that in the future, there may be a need for even a more advanced litho system. And we could end up in a war, I’m talking 10 years from now where the customer use basically each one of those 3 systems. Now this being said, when you look 10 years ahead, it’s very difficult to know exactly when this will happen. And in order to not have to answer that question today, what we did is develop a program, which we call high productivity platform. So Roger mentioned it as one of the key program in EUV, and that program basically consists in defining an EUV platform that will come to the market early next decade, and that will be able to support Low NA, this major productivity improvement.

We look at more than 400 wafer per hour. High NA, also with major improvement and potentially Hyper NA. So we’re designing a platform basically that we’ll be able to receive ultimately Low NA optic, High NA optic, hyper NA optic. This give us basically the full flexibility over time to decide exactly when and how we should introduce hyper NA. So the team has done a lot of work. So if you talk to our engineers, they tell you we could do it more, but there’s no need for it tomorrow. So what we will do is, again, just continue to prepare for it. If you follow a technical conference, there will be a presentation on that a SPA in a few weeks from now, so you get a bit more. But the key is to is to be prepared basically to serve the whole market with EUV and the high productivity platform program we have put in place and we’re executing on allow us to do that exactly.

Monique Mols: I have a question from online, and then I’ll ask to you, Toby. Maybe can do this quickly, but I think it’s a question that a lot of people ask themselves. This is from [indiscernible] Novel in France, you’re going to cut 1,700 jobs, but you say you want more engineers. Are you planning to hire in 2026 and beyond? And if so, do you have a figure? Will this offset the 1,700 job cuts? Or will ASML’s workforce ultimately decrease?

Christophe Fouquet: Yes. So I think 2 steps. So first, as I explained, we free practically about 3,000 people out of the action we take on the leadership in the technology team. And out of those 3,000 people, we already create 1,400 position. So that’s the first thing. The second thing I’ve said is that a lot of that is done to enable, I would say, the full potential of engineers. So our engineers tell us today, well, maybe we spend 20%, 30% of our time not doing engineering, but doing meetings, talking to many different managers, et cetera, et cetera. Well, if we take that away from them, we give them also more bandwidth for development. So we also expect basically that our engineering workforce will be able to create more moving forward for the same amount of people.

So it means that as we go through this transformation, we get 1,400 more people, and we get a lot more of everyone else in the organization. How this will really play out. We don’t know, but we believe that this could fuel quite a few of our programs basically moving forward. So we will continue to hire people based on our need, and we do that today on operation. We’ll do that if we need to on D&E because we can afford it or so, let’s be honest. But we also expect that at least the next couple of years, the gain we could make by enabling our engineers to the full extent, will create a lot more bandwidth for us to develop.

Toby Sterling: This is Toby from Reuters, Toby Sterling. Ballpark question. The only thing that did better than ASML’s price in the past year is gold and silver. So I’m wondering if you guys can maybe say maybe not so much ASML, but how is this going to affect your industry? The rise in price for gold and precious metals?

Christophe Fouquet: Gold and Silver, I would say, our industry over whole I think it’s very small. I think it’s very, very small. I think from all the things we worry about — I tell you something, we worry a lot more about energy cost than gold or silver, because energy is, as we’ve discussed in the past, most probably, we love AI, we love the opportunity. I think Elon Musk say that also last week in Denver, but energy is most probably the one thing to watch to make sure that this industry keeps going. And now the good news for us is one way to reduce energy consumption is to move to more advanced chips because they reduce basically power consumption. . So that’s also an opportunity. But I think if there’s one thing this industry has to worry about as a whole is energy, cost and I would even say availability. Gold, silver, I say okay.

Toby Sterling: Paul here from [indiscernible]. Do you expect to max out on capacity this year? And if so, what will be the bottleneck?

R.J.M. Dassen: The question is not necessarily just for us whether we’re going to be maxed out. I mean, it will be a very busy year. That’s for sure. But I think in everyone trying to drive up capability, we also need to look at our customers. So I think everyone will be scrambling to get more capacity. . It starts with our customers because we can ship tools, but our customers also need to be in a position to receive them, and therefore, they need the fabs to be done. So I think that’s what’s going on. We will work extremely hard to get as much out as we can and as our customers are asking for it. But I think important factor will be when will our customers have their fabs ready to really receive those tools.

Monique Mols: We have 4 minutes left. So let’s go back to the room again.

Unknown Analyst: San Hilson of Dutch Publicans. About the reorganization, I was wondering if you could share some insight on how did you end up in the situation in the first place, why did you create so many leadership roles in the past months or years? And can you give us a time frame on when the reorganization will be executed?

Christophe Fouquet: Yes. It’s always a good question. And if you look at the growth of the company, I think at any point of time, you try to make the best decision for the company. And I think this has been down. But as any large company, you tend to have a side job over time with the belief that they really help, and I think to some extent, they do at the beginning because you strengthen certain axis, right? You strengthen, I don’t know, quality, you strengthen maybe the execution of part of the company. But there is a point of time where you add — if you had too many of different axes, then people get confused. And we started to get that signal, I would say, already for 2, 3 years. We spent quite some time because the next question could be, how do you know now that the next things would be better than the previous one, which is another very good question.

We didn’t want to rush in that, and we spend more than 12 months designing not in the board of management, but designing with the people that are working day after day in technology, but also in the sector because of the connection I talked about. So we spent more than 12 months working with those people to try to drive an organization that they believe will fit better what they need. And I think we need to make sure over time that we keep on scanning the organization so that if we made maybe some non-optimized move in the past, we can correct it. So I think it’s very normal in the company. What is not right is not to correct things if you feel they’re not helping you anymore.

R.J.M. Dassen: I think if you look in any rapidly growing organization, where do organizations grow? They grow because the number of competencies grow or products become far more complex. As a result of that, also the competencies that are necessary to get it done become more complex. 15 years ago, software, for instance, was not as important as it is today, just to call out one. So you see an expansion of capability and you need to see an expansion of a road map, many, many more products on the road map than we ever had before. The answer to something like that, that any rapidly growing organization does is a matrix organization where the competencies and the products meet each other. So that’s your answer. And that gives you scalability for a while.

But there is a point in time where a matrix organization, any matrix organization becomes so complex that you got to act. And I think that’s the journey that we’ve been on. That’s the thing that we’ve now concluded and hence the action that Christophe calls out. And I think the worst thing you can do is not recognize the issue and just continue to go on as you did before. In terms of timing, because that was your other question. I mean that completely depends on the negotiations that are currently going on with the unions, with the workers’ council, et cetera, but this will definitely be a number of months. From our vantage point, as soon as possible because we want to be able to provide clarity to everyone in the organization and get rid of the uncertainty at the personal level.

So that’s why we would like to push as soon as we can in the interest of the people that are affected.

Monique Mols: Okay. Our time is up. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you, everyone, online for watching. You can still send us your question. The media team is available for you. And for those in the room, nice you’re here. There’s coffee and we have some chats with some of you, and we look forward to seeing you next year. Thank you very much.

Christophe Fouquet: Thank you.

R.J.M. Dassen: Thank you.