‘We know what we’ll be doing for the next ten years’

Martin van den Brink is paging through the previous Bits&Chips ASML special as his visitor is ushered in. He leafs to the interview he gave for that issue. ‘Let’s see what I said last time,’ he grins once the handshakes are over, and he reads off a few arresting pull quotes: ‘‘The source is not a pretty story and it won’t become one anytime soon’, ‘Cymer has great ideas about LPP, but the execution is very disappointing’, ‘EUV will remain a challenge for the next decade’. And not a word of it wrong,’ he says triumphantly.

We encounter the company’s president and CTO – technology, strategy, marketing: what doesn’t he do? – in excellent spirits. But not for the reason we’d expected, our conversation soon makes evident. Van den Brink doesn’t want to crow too loudly about the fact that his customers are now openly announcing plans to incorporate ASML’s EUV scanners into their production processes – a painful ten years later than the company had intended, but nonetheless a giant leap compared to the situation two or three years ago.