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Bloomberg
ASML Holding NV, Europe’s largest semiconductor equipment maker, forecast first-quarter sales well below analyst expectations, mainly due to a fire at a strategic supplier.
Shares fell as much as 4.9 percent to 134.50 euros at the market open. ASML Chief Executive Officer Peter Wennink said in Bloomberg TV interview that the mobile phone market “is not where I believe the biggest growth areas of the semiconductor market is,†saying he instead sees growth in server parks, cloud and data processing in the cloud.
The Veldhoven, Netherlands-based company predicts sales of 2.1 billion euros ($2.4 billion) for the first quarter, compared with an average analyst estimate of 2.73 billion euros. A fire at a key supplier of electronics components and modules, Prodrive, damaged inventory. ASML expects first-quarter sales to be adversely impacted by roughly 300 million euros.This should be largely recovered in the second quarter, with the remainder expected to be recovered in the second half of 2019, ASML said.
ASML forecasts a gross margin of about 40 percent in the first quarter of the year, trailing the average estimate for 47.3 percent.
Over Q4 there were five new orders for its latest lithography machines.