ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of lithography machines with which the most advanced chips are manufactured, 5.33% fell on Wednesday in the stock market after reporting an order book of the first quarter of 2025 almost 1 billion euros below what was expected by the market. In the presentation of results of the first three months of the year, investors have confessed that they do not know how to quantify the impact of tariffs exactly and that is why “the margin planned for the second quarter of 2025 is greater than usual.” The fall of this Wednesday erases more than 10,000 million euros of stock market capitalization and leaves the company at its lowest level since November 2023.ASML predicted that if the demand for artificial intelligence (AI) continues strong and if its customers are able to increase the capacity according to its plans, the company will be able to reach the upper range of its total net sales guide by 2025, which ranges between 30,000 and 35,000 million euros. However, uncertainty with some of its clients could take it to the lower extreme of the range, they admitted. The market, in the face of commercial uncertainty, has opted for the less benevolent version. According to Citi, the orders of the first trimester “disappointed” and tariff uncertainty “is clearly cloudy” the perspectives. For his part, Simon Coles, from Barclays, said ASML would need between 3,000 million and 5,000 million euros in orders each quarter during the next three to five quarters to achieve the expectations of the consensus. “It seems manageable, but our concern is that two important clients do not make significant orders in the short term,” said these clients are giants such as TSMC or Intel. The requests for these first three months were for 3,940 million euros, while analysts waited on average 4,820 million euros, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. ASML is the only producer of the expensive lithography machines used by semiconductor companies to make advanced chips for various products, such as NVIDIA artificial intelligence processors. The company has taken advantage of the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), as technological giants project billions of dollars in data centers to boost this technology that, in turn, need chips that are only manufactured with ASML systems. The company projects revenues of between 44,000 million and 60,000 million euros in 2030. But the concern for a possible deceleration in the demand has intensified after the disappointing perspectives of some manufacturers and the warnings of the analysts, who see in the tariffs a clear wind against for the industry. “The recent tariff ads have increased uncertainty in the macroeconomic environment and the situation will continue to be dynamic for a while,” said ASML executive director, Christophe Fouquet, in the statement on Wednesday. Among the ways in which US tariffs can affect the business, ASML quoted additional barraine in the shipments of new systems or tools, or the fact that other countries (possibly China) “impose tariffs on the things that are sent from the United States”, according to the financial director Roger Dassen. Fouquet clarified that, so far, conversations with customers support their expectation that 2025 and 2026 are years of growth. EE UU has banned exports of advanced semiconductor technologies to China to curb the development of the domestic pekin chips industry, as a way to condition their military and AI capacities. ASML has never had permission to sell its extreme ultraviolet lithography machines (EUV) to China for US restrictions. The Dutch government also restricted exports of the second most sophisticated machines, the deep ultraviolet lithography systems by immersion (DUV), after the pressure of the Biden administration. The company EUV machines represented 1.2 billion euros of net orders in the quarter. Even so, China represented 27% of Net sales of less advanced systems in ASML, becoming the second largest market in the company during that period. Although it is the same contribution of the previous three months, it is a fall from the average of 41% it had in 2024, and the company already provides that sales to the Asian giant are reduced to 20% of the total income in 2025. Donald Trump tariffs promise to disrupt the semiconductor market. The actions of the chips manufacturers in general fell after Trump prohibited Nvidia on Tuesday to sell their H20 chip to China, in what they have called new rules to frustrate Beijing’s supercomputing capabilities. The shares of Silicon Valley giant fell 6% in the operations after the closing of Wall Street, after it was said that the restriction would cost 5.5 billion dollars. The results of the first quarter of ASML arrive two weeks after Trump announced tariffs to all exporters to the US of consumer demand and uncertainty about a large -scale commercial war. The analysts had warned that the measure would impact the demand for chips and, in turn, the Asml customer investment plans. Last week, the Trump administration exempted its so -called reciprocal tariffs to certain products such as smart mobiles, computers and machines used to manufacture semiconductors. But on Monday, the US trade department said it had begun to investigate the impact on the US national security of “semiconductor imports and semiconductor manufacturing equipment”, which was interpreted as a precursor signal to impose specific tariffs on this industry. (Tagstotranslate) Financial Markets (T) ASML (T) Semiconductors and Systems (T) NVIDIA CORPORATION (T) Bag
