ASML Holding NV (NASDAQ:ASML), Europe’s largest semiconductor equipment supplier, reported their second quarter earnings today. Caroline Hyde reported on how the company has fared and what is the outlook for the third quarter on Bloomberg Television’s “Countdown.”
Hyde considers that the second quarter sales were pretty much as expected, though ASML Holding NV (NASDAQ:ASML) beat the estimates in terms of their gross margins. ASML Holding NV (NASDAQ:ASML) reported their second quarter net income as 399 million euro ($540 million), which is well above the estimate of 350 million euro ($473 million).
With the third quarter sales estimated at about 1.4 billion euro ($1.89 billion), Hyde stated: “My worry is that the third quarter. Looking like gross margin of about 42%, that means the profitability is deteriorating slightly into the third quarter. And also their sales are going to slow down ever so slowly in the third quarter also”.
Many analysts thought that ASML Holding NV (NASDAQ:ASML) a producer of equipment chip manufacturing will gain some ground in the second half of the year. But instead it seems like their sales may slow down a little bit as the chip makers like Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC) and Samsung are delaying their orders.
Hyde reports that the main reason for the delay in orders is that the chip makers are currently not in need of the kind of upgraded equipment that ASML Holding NV (NASDAQ:ASML) provides. The companies making chips are not sure on when they will need to upgrade to the more powerful and smaller chips, which ASML Holding currently has the equipment to make. But ASML Holding NV (NASDAQ:ASML) has already made huge investments into these equipment. Unfortunately the orders are not coming in as thick or fast as expected as the chip makers are not upgrading quite as quickly.
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