Upbeat ASML raises 2026 guidance again

Rising demand from chip makers eager to add production capacity has prompted key semiconductor manufacturing equipment firm ASML to once again increase its sales guidance for 2026.

Having initially pegged its expectations at around €36.5 billion, the market-leading lithography tool provider is now expecting sales to reach somewhere between €43 billion and €45 billion.

CEO Christophe Fouquet told investors digesting the latest update that the Netherlands-based company’s customers were now “aggressively” adding capacity to produce their most cutting-edge chip designs - with ASML able to respond to that increased demand through its own robust supply chain, much of which includes optics and photonics components.

EUV ramp

Those state-of-the-art chip designs rely on extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography equipment built around high-power drive lasers provided by key partner Trumpf, and ASML said it was now expecting to ship around 65 of its low-NA (numerical aperture) EUV tools this year.

That means sales revenues attributed to low-NA EUV tools will likely increase 45 per cent year-on-year, with demand fueled by deployments across both logic and memory chip production.

The ramp in EUV shipments over recent years also means that service revenues are rising, thanks to the much larger installed base - with ASML’s revenues from installed based management set to jump 30 per cent this year.

Looking ahead, the company is now expecting to increase its production of low-NA EUV tools by 30 per cent in 2027, with a similar rate of expansion possible the following year. If that turns out to be accurate, the company would be set to deliver around 110 of the tools in 2028.

“Customer demand remains very strong, with visibility now extending several years into the future,” said Fouquet. “We have responded effectively to the increasing demand and will continue investing to ensure our capacity and capabilities remain aligned with our customers’ needs.”

High-NA milestone at Intel

Meanwhile key customer Intel has hit a significant milestone with its deployment of ASML’s most advanced equipment, high-NA EUV tools, now being used to produce some of the US chip giant’s “Core Ultra Series 3” processors, also codenamed “Panther Lake”.

“The use of high-NA EUV to pattern specific layers of these products provides ASML and Intel Foundry with helpful data to further refine system setup, up time and manufacturing implementation,” noted ASML. “This paves the way towards broader adoption, utilizing the full capabilities of the technology.”

Naga Chandrasekaran, executive VP and general manager of Intel Foundry, added: “By qualifying the high-NA EUV process option on select Intel 18A product layers, our existing fleet of tools are providing customers with increased output, while we develop future options to achieve leading-edge performance, density and manufacturing flexibility on upcoming nodes.”

The milestone comes two years after Intel and ASML completed integration of the industry’s first commercial high-NA EUV lithography system at the company’s Hillsboro, Oregon, research and development site.

For the quarter ending June 30, Fouquet and his colleagues reported a net income of €2.9 billion on sales of €9.3 billion, with both figures up around 6 per cent on the March quarter.

The current quarter will show more evidence of the surge in demand, with sales revenues expected to land somewhere between €11 billion and €12 billion - compared with €7.5 billion for the equivalent quarter last year.

• Following the latest update ASML’s stock price has held steady at around $1800 on the Nasdaq, up 68 per cent since the start of the year and a rise of 150 per cent over the past 12 months. That represents a market capitalization of some $700 billion, comfortably making ASML Europe’s most valuable public company.