“We’re not investing in the hundreds of millions in India right now, but we’re bullish on India because the country remains one of the world’s most fast-developing economies,” ASML chief executive officer Christophe Fouquet told Mint in an interview on the sidelines of Semicon India 2025 on Tuesday.
“As a result, while we had already set-up an India entity before, we’re now bringing more executives and see an opportunity now to have more engineers work closely with India’s semiconductor companies in order to have a more robust presence in the Asia semiconductor supply chain,” Fouquet added.
Over the last few years, ASML, which was spun out of the Dutch electronics firm Philips in 1984, has sprung on to the centre stage, as it is the sole company that can use ultraviolet or low-frequency light to etch integrated circuits onto silicon wafers. It has become essential to top chip manufacturing firms, including Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd.
Fouquet said the company’s push for a larger presence in India will scale up in line with the industry itself. As more chip testing and packaging factories come up and India’s chip fabs go live, ASML will establish a larger presence for its core technologies.
While ASML had already set up an India entity a few years ago, this is the first time it is scaling up in the country. The move comes as India itself is pitching to set up a holistic semiconductor supply chain, including indigenization of semiconductor components, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi also touched upon in his keynote at the conference on Tuesday.
Having greater control and presence in Asia is of utmost importance for ASML, which is Europe’s largest tech company with a market cap of $293 billion as of Tuesday. In the wake of the US’s trade war and associated pressures on the semiconductor supply chain and critical technologies, ASML said in a statement that its annual performance this fiscal year would be hit by the restrictions in selling advanced technologies to China.
After Taiwan, China is one of the largest markets for semiconductor supply chain specialists such as ASML. The company, which follows a January-December financial reporting cycle, earned EUR 28.3 billion last year, up 2.5%. This was significantly slower than 2023, when it had posted net revenue increase of 30%. For this year, the company has projected a 6% revenue rise to EUR 30 billion on the back of diversifying its presence across markets and product segments. India, incidentally, is one such bets of the firm, albeit in early stages.
ASML’s growth and importance is, however, not tied solely to these revenues. The company is the sole supplier of patented machinery and technologies for extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV), a process that enables firms such as TSMC to build cutting-edge, 3 nanometer, or even smaller, chips. The latter, are critical to trillion-dollar industries, such as smartphones and laptops.
“EUV is only one of the products that we offer, which is quite advanced and will likely be associated with India at a later stage, once the industry in the country builds up. For now, we’ll be focusing on building a larger team, gradually investing more in the overall chip supply chain, and seeing what we can offer as the industry gradually scales up,” Fouquet added.
The scale-up of India’s chip industry is in process. The prime minister said India’s second-generation chip incentives plan with India Semiconductor Mission is currently under evaluation, and the first trial assemblies of chips from the first outsourced semiconductor assembly and testing (Osat) facilities have started from Tata Semiconductor, Micron, CG Semi and Keynes—four of the ten government-backed projects.
“For us, having a larger presence in the Asia supply chain is important in order to showcase the best of our products. Going forward, we remain in conversation with the industry, and will look forward to bringing more of our chip supply chain here. However, we currently do not have plans to set up engineering and machine manufacturing here,” Fouquet said.
India looks to capture a larger share of the world’s semiconductor industry currently estimated at $600 billion, as per Gartner. Ajit Manocha, president of global chip industry body Semi, said the global semiconductor supply chain is set to scale up to $1.3 billion by 2030, a time in which India will seek to capture a larger share.
Fouquet concurred with the optimism around India’s chip plans. Its chip thrust “will grow and accelerate in time, as more of the country’s chip plants, as well as government initiatives, come alive,” he said.
