Why ASML isn’t going full-throttle on EUV this year

There are worse businesses to be in right now than EUV lithography. Last year, ASML’s revenue from EUV system sales increased almost 60 percent, to 4.5 billion euros, or 32 percent of total revenue. Next year, the Veldhoven-based equipment maker projects another 28 percent increase in EUV system revenue, to 5.8 billion euros. Yet, that number could have been higher – perhaps by close to another billion higher.

That must have something to do with corona, right? Even if ASML’s operational difficulties and disruptions in the supply chain have largely been smoothed out, there’s still a lot of uncertainty looming over end markets and the world economy as a whole. While the semiconductor industry may have floated through crisis-year 2020, you’d think that at some point, the appetite for the most advanced chips, and hence for the machines that are needed to manufacture them, must take a hit.