ASML Holding
Every leading-edge logic and memory fab on earth has to buy one company's lithography machines. That is a toll booth on compute itself — and the market still prices it like a cyclical.
Order visibility has extended past 2028 while the shares trade near the low end of their five-year valuation range.
There are very few businesses where you can point to a single physical constraint on an entire industry and say, with confidence, that one company controls it. Extreme ultraviolet lithography is one of them. If you want to print transistors at 3nm and below, at volume, you buy an EUV scanner. There is one seller.
The interesting part is not the monopoly. It is the shape of the monopoly. ASML does not sell a consumable that customers can substitute; it sells a machine that takes years to install, requires its own engineers to calibrate, and then generates a service annuity for a decade. Roughly three-quarters of the installed base revenue is recurring, and that base grows every time a fab is built anywhere in the world.
Why the market misprices it
The rest of the ASML Holding thesis
Includes the risks we think matter, the numbers we check each quarter, and the exact conditions under which we would sell.
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