Christophe’s words ring hollow in this article. I took a look at the current share buyback program, which gives you a sense of how much short term stock price mania is steering the ship at ASML. From 2022-2025, ASML spent ~ €6.3 billion on buybacks, with 80% of that activity happening only in 2025.
The current buyback program is targeting a €12 billion spend over three years, with €1.4 billion already out the door in 2026. That accounts for 1.79 million repurchased shares. ASML says it wants to ultimately allocate 2 million repurchased shares to employees. If I do the arithmetic based on the average weighted share price from ASML’s publicly available data, it’ll cost about another €1 billion to fully fund the employee shares.
That means €9.6 billion is going out the door over the next three years to boost the stock price by deleting shares from the market.
That’s cash that could be put toward investments in plant, equipment, research, technical debt resolution, supply chain improvements, you name it. Instead, we’re told we need to shed employees, cut spending, and pretend that quality will somehow not be affected.
I’ll say it as plainly as I can: ASML’s strategy on its own public-facing website is to loot the company and hand free cash over to shareholders. How does this have anything to do with serving customers and addressing the global supply chain?
If you want to see for yourself, the data is available here: https://www.asml.com/en/investors/why-invest-in-asml/share-buyback