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The Dutch multinational has become the great technological reference in Europe
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Its market capitalization already exceeds the LVHM group: only Novo Nordisk (Ozempic) surpasses it in terms of large European companies
NVIDIA’s growth in recent months has been spectacular. The company surpassed Apple in market valuation – although it has now returned to third place – and was 5% away from surpassing Microsoft and becoming the most important in the world. Artificial intelligence has propelled it to this situation, but this technology has also encouraged other major players in the semiconductor industry. And among them is the great jewel in the European crown.
ASML at all-time highs. ASML Holding NV has become the second largest European company in the world. It has overtaken LVMH (Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy) in market capitalization for the first time after an 8.1% rise in its shares this week.
TSMC contributes to the rise. ASML’s notable rise in value came with the help of TSMC. This week it became known that the Taiwanese giant will receive its high-NA EV machine at the end of the year. It is the most powerful it has ever created, and each unit has a price of 350 million euros.
Only Ozempic is ahead. The Danish company Novo Nordisk, creator of Ozempic, is the only one that is ahead right now. Or rather, far ahead, because its current market valuation is $634.28 billion, compared to ASML’s $415.34 billion.
A prodigious decade. Yet the growth of ASML has been astonishing in the last ten years. In June 2014, its market capitalization was around $40.5 billion, and in this time the Dutch company has managed to become an absolute benchmark in the world of semiconductors. Its capitalization has increased tenfold, in fact.
And the thing promises. Although the last few weeks have been complicated and the first quarter results were modest, the forecasts are optimistic for analysts, who indicate that “significant” orders are expected in the coming quarters. TSMC’s intention to boost its 2nm photolithography in the second half of 2025 is, for example, a good sign that for ASML things can go just as well (or better) in the coming months.
Chips are the new oil. Big technology companies occupy the top five positions in the ranking of the largest companies in the world, but their growth has been spectacular in recent months. The voracity of the market for the semiconductor industry has boosted companies such as TSMC itself (10th in the world), Broadcom (11th, with even more astonishing growth), Samsung (24th), AMD (38th, well above a Intel which occupies the 113th position) or Qualcomm (48th).
In Xataka | ASML plans to manufacture lithography equipment with science fiction features: the Hyper-NA machine
