There are obvious signs of oversupply of chips, ASML is no longer a pastry, and investment institutions are shorting on a large scale

It is reported that the world's largest hedge fund -- Bridge Water Fund , Bet 10 USD 100 million short ASML This big photolithography factory , Bridge water did not give a reason , However, there are more and more signs of global chip oversupply , It should be that the investment institutions are bearish ASML The main reason is .

ASML Our main product is lithography machine , The customers of lithography machines are quite limited , One of the most advanced EUV Today, the lithography customers are left with TSMC 、 Samsung and Intel Three , Under such circumstances, it is decided that ASML The performance depends on these chip manufacturing enterprises .

In the past two years , Global chip demand is tight , In addition, due to the practice of the United States, Europe 、 China 、 Japan and other economies are worried about chip supply , They are expanding production capacity on a large scale , As a lithographic machine supplier ASML This ushered in a beautiful day , Lithography machines are in short supply 、 Prices soared , Even the price of second-hand lithography machines has skyrocketed 2 More than double ,2021 The results of the year show that ASML Our net profit soared by 60% .

But this year , Chip supply began to reverse , In the first quarter, famous apple analyst guomingpei first warned that there was an inventory of mobile phone chips , The inventory of RF chips is large , Then the oversupply of chips quickly spread to various industries .

In the near future , Media reports say that American chips, which almost monopolize the global analog chip market, also have serious inventory problems , Texas Instruments, the leader of analog chips, has recently significantly reduced its offer to Chinese customers , The price fell by more than 80% , And the biggest drop was nearly 90% , It can be seen that the oversupply of chips has been quite serious .

Facing the reality of oversupply of chips ,ASML Executives chose to ignore , They still say that the chip supply shortage will continue until next year , The reason may be to maintain ASML For the benefit of , because ASML Our products are too single , The direct consequence of the oversupply of chips will be that its lithography machines will be difficult to sell .

2019 Since, the global planned chip manufacturing projects have reached 86 individual , However, so far only 35 about , With the oversupply of chips , The rest 51 A chip manufacturing project is likely to be suspended , This will inevitably greatly reduce the demand for lithography machines .

as for EUV The lithography machine only has Intel、 TSMC and Samsung are the three major customers ,Intel In progress Intel 4 The process and equipment have been basically installed , Samsung and TSMC are still competing 3nm Mass production of technology and strive for more EUV lithography ,3nm Even more advanced technology investment is too high , Many customers can't afford such a high price , Only Intel And apple can afford the expensive OEM price .

But apple is in trouble now , Apple's main source of profit has become the service business and accessories business , Recently, Holland successfully forced apple to change App Store The policy of , Side loading is allowed , The Commission is almost halved , This will be a huge blow to its profits , Under such circumstances, it is doubtful whether Apple will aggressively adopt expensive advanced technology , Once Apple no longer aggressively adopts advanced technology , Then Samsung and TSMC may not have the power to expand their advanced process capacity .

All this has led investment institutions to ASML Performance concerns , And hedge funds are short ASML It also expresses its bad view with practical actions ASML The future of , In fact, in the first quarter of this year ASML The performance of the company fell sharply , Shipments are lower than expected , Revenue is down 19%、 The net profit is cut back .

It is worth noting that ASML Recently, I suddenly became enthusiastic about China , The reason may be that China's chip capacity expansion plan may maintain the previous expansion pace , Because China plans to 2025 Achieve chip self-sufficiency rate in 70%, and 2021 The year has only come to 36% about , The Chinese market still has great potential .