1.29.25
Sales in the fourth quarter were €9.3B, above the guided midpoint of €9.0B. Full year sales were €28.3B, also above the guided midpoint. The company is guiding for €7.5B to €8.0B worth of sales in the first quarter of 2025 and for total sales in all of 2025 between €30B and €35B. Turning to the memory customers in their business, system sales to these customers was €2.775B in the quarter, which is the highest-ever level, beating the prior record from two quarters ago. I wrote a long entry on what may be behind this, which I won’t reprint here. I’ll summarize the trend with three points.
First, lithography intensity is increasing such that spending pullbacks from memory downturns do not dominate the trend over time. Second, China’s entry into both the DRAM and NAND segments has added two new customers (CXMT and YMTC) who buy a lot of photo tools. And third, I think we are starting to see real spending from the big three DRAM companies as they accelerate their investments in advanced nodes to support strong demand for DDR5 and HBM. The last three quarters have been the three highest ASML has ever had in terms of sales to memory customers. Bookings to memory customers nearly doubled sequentially to €2.76B. That is up from €1.5B worth of memory bookings in each of the last two quarters. Put this together and I believe the capital investment in photo capacity that will cause the next memory glut is underway. Tools with revenue recognition in Q4 of 2024 are producing wafer outs that are starting to come out of fabs now (late January of 2025.) This output will ramp as the year progresses.
On to the conference call. The company expects demand from memory customers to continue to be strong, similar to 2024. HBM is driving aggressive capacity additions for some customers. Outside HBM, there is “nothing spectacular” in the memory recovery, but it will still be “strong.” This is all that was discussed related to memory during the Q&A.
- Smooth Hughes (no MU position)