|
During a conference call with financial analysts on Wednesday, 19th of April, ASML's Eric Maurice noted that in the last quarter it had secured its 7th Japanese customer. Considering that only a few years ago and after many years of trying it still didn't have any, this is a considerable feat!
ASML's Japanese customers include Sony, NEC, Fujitsu, Seiko Epson, Matsushita and Renasas, which represents a large percentage of major chip manufacturers in that country. After obtaining feedback from engineers at the company, we can confirm that the 7th new customer in Japan is Toshiba. This is a significant coup for ASML as Toshiba has been Nikon's largest customer in the lithography field for many years and was the only company to receive a beta immersion tool from Nikon last year. In fact Nikon's first production immersion tool shipment was also planned to go to Toshiba. ASML has not just received a single immersion tool order for evaluation but has received a multiple immersion tool order from Toshiba that should be shipped in the second half of 2006. Toshiba is aggressively expanding 300mm production of its NAND Flash facility and is also being very aggressive with half-pitch scaling requiring a early production adoption of 193nm ArF immersion tools for 60nm and below production. ASML has not only had an early lead in development tools but has shipped in the last few weeks the first Twin-scan 1700i volume production tool to Samsung, the largest NAND Flash producer. Another dynamic at play at ASML has been the ongoing work to reduce product assembly cycle-times and now its 1700i tool can be shipped within 6 to 9 months from the time of order placement. In fact the emphasis company executives placed on this during the analyst conference call suggested that 6 months for shipment of an immersion tool was more than possible. The drastic cycle-time reductions is therefore attracting customers that are desperate to continue aggressive scaling and ASML seems to be ahead of Nikon in that capability. This was something my contacts at Toshiba eluded too. I am also very cautious on company claims of gaining market share gains and tend to rely on independent market researcher's data, but ASML has gained market share over its two Japanese rivals in the last year and Maurice noted that in the last few quarters that gain has come at the expense of Canon. With the multiple tool order with Toshiba for immersion tools ASML's claims of market leadership at the leading edge DUV tool level looks less hyped than ever before.
|
Blogs 
