ASML’s revenue growth in the coming years will come not only from higher shipment volumes and more productive systems, but also from higher pricing. During its second-quarter earnings call, the Veldhoven-based company indicated that soaring average selling prices (ASPs) for AI semiconductors are increasing the economic value of its equipment, giving it greater scope to raise tool prices under its long-standing value-based pricing model.
“In the current environment, where there is a lot of value for customers for what we bring them, we believe the potential to capture a larger share of that value, or at least to capture our share of that larger value, gives you better pricing power. So those are the conversations that we’re currently having with customers,” CFO Roger Dassen said on the call. His comment follows a report from The Information that ASML was meeting resistance from TSMC in talks on price raises.
ASML’s management rejected the suggestion that raising immersion and/or low-NA EUV tool prices is intended to steer customers toward high-NA systems. CEO Christophe Fouquet emphasized that every new lithography generation is designed to reduce customers’ patterning costs. High-NA’s competitiveness depends on improving the platform’s maturity until it delivers a lower cost per pattern than low-NA EUV combined with immersion multi-patterning, not on artificially widening the price gap between the two technologies.
