Bank of America downgraded Besi on October 6 over a hybrid bonding machine ASML hasn’t announced. Besi makes equipment that joins two chip surfaces directly, copper to copper, with no solder bumps between them, and the BofA note says ASML’s public interest in the same market isn’t reflected in Besi’s share price. The stock fell as much as 6.4% on the day, and the bank cut its target by nearly half.

What ASML has actually said is thin. It shipped its first advanced packaging product last year, and CEO Christophe Fouquet said in April that the company continues to look at supporting customers in hybrid bonding. That is the whole evidence. Analysts, led by Didier Scemama, don’t assume ASML takes significant share; they argue the possibility remains an overhang until ASML’s plans are clearer. Finance isn’t my lane, and I won’t pretend to say what Besi shares are worth, but a price target nearly halved over a company that hasn’t named a product reads to me like a sentiment call.

The technical opening is yield. BofA says manufacturers struggle to consistently produce working stacked chips that meet the accuracy demands of hybrid bonding, and accuracy is what ASML sells. I made that case about lithography in my June piece on the chokepoint the industry runs through, and moving it down the line into packaging is a believable step. Believable is not the same as planned.

Besi’s own case needs a lot of stacking to go mainstream. In August it told investors it could ship more than 2,000 of these tools by 2030 in an optimistic scenario, against cumulative orders above 150 in its 2025 annual report, and Bernstein expects three of every four hybrid bonders shipped in 2028 to be Besi’s. That jump only happens if hybrid bonding spreads well past the places I have seen it so far. I wrote in August about Xiaomi’s Xring O3 and its hybrid-bonded all-big-core design, which was a phone chip making the claim. The heavier pull is memory and AI packaging: SK Hynix’s Indiana plant that won’t make memory is an HBM packaging plant, and TSMC’s CoWoS outsourcing shows how much of this work is capacity-bound before it is ever precision-bound.

What makes this more than an analyst note is that Besi is also a target. Reuters reported in March that Lam Research and Applied Materials had approached it, and Applied has held 9% since April 2025. Besi said in March it was committed to staying independent. Any bid would need clearance in The Hague, where the investment screening law has covered semiconductors since 2023, and the Dutch government blocked an American buyer of a Dutch cloud provider in May to show the regime applies to whoever owns the money. Six more technologies come under the law in January.

So the company at the center of hybrid bonding could end up squeezed between a Dutch champion that may or may not build a competing tool and an American buyer the Dutch government would have to approve.

Sources