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Is there no stopping ASML? After another record financial quarter, the lithography tool vendor now has 60 percent market share, according to unidentified market research firms quoted by Eric Meurice, ASML's President and CEO.
That is a rather large percentage and it would seem to be backed up by a whole host of last quarter facts and figures. ASML booked 95 systems in its 3Q06, taking the backlog to €2.1 billion, which equates to 151 systems. At the leading-edge, ASML has now shipped 28 immersion systems worldwide with 4 going to Japan. 15 of the tools are 1700i systems, all shipped in the past two quarters! A further 15 are actually in backlog. Oh...and two Alpha EUV tools were also shipped. Meurice reiterated that the market would require 70 immersion tools roughly within the next 18 months to enable the sub-50nm ramp. However, the company could only manage to ship 59 new lithography systems in the quarter, lower than many analysts expected, and ASML guided that the supply chain for critical components had been strained. Indeed, the backlog has been rising steadily and ASML guided that its book-to-ship targets of 6 months had in many respects become a realistic 9 months since the last quarter. However, it should be noted that ASML is stating that 74 percent of backlog systems do have a 6 month lead time. Currently, some analysts put ASML's total quarterly shipping capacity at 75 units, so there is room to ship more, but the realities look a lot different, especially when you consider that 69 percent of the backlog is for 193nm ArF platforms with 19 percent of that immersion. I also doubt whether many of these are refurbished systems! ASML's growth is currently being fuelled by key memory accounts both in Korea (Samsung & Hynix) and in the US by Micron via the IMFT JV with Intel. Meurice did give one piece of warning to the analysts in the form of over-heating in the NAND Flash market. That could bring unit shipments down over the next few quarters if things get ugly, but NAND would only affect them in revenue terms by about 15 percent. With 2007 looking like it will play-out like 2006, ASML is close to shipping capacity levels in a real world scenario. Perhaps it's not a coincidence that Carl Zeiss SMT just finished the expansion of its optics plant in Germany that is almost entirely dedicated to ASML's requirements! 
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