By Toby Sterling and Nathan Vifflin
AMSTERDAM, April 22 (Reuters) – Top computer chip equipment maker ASML will not be a bottleneck for the industry, as it was early in the decade, its CEO said on Wednesday, pointing to recent investments in capacity and productivity improvements.
Being a bottleneck “is something we will avoid by all possible means; it is essential to maintaining our current position,” CEO Christophe Fouquet told investors at the company’s annual general meeting in the Dutch city of Veldhoven.
His comments came after ASML’s first-quarter results last week showed the company is continuing to benefit from surging demand for AI chips and related memory chip shortages. That has prompted top customers including TSMC, which manufactures Nvidia’s chips, to expand capacity.
Asked what could threaten ASML’s position as the dominant supplier of lithography machines, which use light to print chip circuitry, Fouquet said the biggest risk would be failing to deliver equipment on time.
“Customers will be strongly tempted to look at other suppliers and potentially at alternatives to our technology; we have seen that in the past,” he said. He noted that startups including Substrate, xLight, and Lace are “ideas, not competition today, I want to make that clear.”
Asked about proposed U.S. legislation to further restrict ASML’s exports to China, forecast to make up 20% of ASML’s sales this year, CFO Roger Dassen said it was too early to guess how that will turn out.
“If for whatever reason there were to be further limitations for one part of the world, the need for capacity remains, particularly in a world that is currently being characterized by undersupply,” he said.
He said capacity lost in one region will mean “someone else has to raise their hand and say, you know, I’m going to build more capacity than I originally planned to.”
“I’m pretty sure that policymakers are also considering that element.”
(Reporting by Toby Sterling and Nathan Vifflin, Editing by Louise Heavens and Keith Weir)
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