Bank of America cut BE Semiconductor Industries to neutral and nearly halved its price target, saying the share price does not reflect the threat of ASML entering hybrid bonding, the market Besi depends on for growth. Besi has also been approached by two American rivals, one of which has owned 9% of it since last year.
Bank of America has cut BE Semiconductor Industries to neutral and nearly halved its price target, because another Dutch company might enter its market. Besi makes the machines that bond chip surfaces directly to each other. ASML has said in public that it is looking at the same technology.
The threat is “” until ASML’s plans are clearer, analysts led by Didier Scemama wrote, as Bloomberg reported. Besi fell as much as 6.4% on Tuesday. Neither company responded immediately to requests for comment.
Hybrid bonding joins two chip surfaces directly, with no metal bumps in between, which moves heat out better.
For Besi it is the whole investment case.
The company told investors in August it could ship more than 2,000 of the tools by 2030 in an optimistic scenario. Its 2025 annual report put cumulative orders above 150. Bernstein expects three of every four hybrid bonders shipped in 2028 to be Besi’s.
The shares were the worst performer in the Stoxx 600 last quarter.
They have fallen about 40% from a June peak and are still up 45% this year. ASML shipped its first advanced packaging product last year, and its chief executive Christophe Fouquet said in April that it continues to look at supporting customers in hybrid bonding. ASML is $300B from a trillion.
Yields are the reason there is an opening at all.
Manufacturers struggle to produce working chips consistently at the accuracy needed to stack logic or memory, Bank of America said, which is the kind of precision ASML sells. The analysts are not assuming it takes significant market share.
Besi is also a target rather than only a competitor.
Reuters reported in March that Lam Research and Applied Materials had approached it and that it had hired Morgan Stanley, with talks starting in mid-2025, pausing over tensions between Washington and Brussels and then resuming. Applied Materials has held 9% since April 2025. Any bid would need clearance in The Hague, where semiconductors have sat inside the investment screening law since 2023.
Besi said in March that it was committed to remaining independent.
The government blocked an American buyer of a Dutch cloud provider in May, which established that the regime applies whoever the money belongs to, and six more technologies come inside the law in January.