> I am proud that ASML has been able to grow a technologist like Christophe into the CEO position
So he is/was a techy. Nice.
So he is/was a techy. Nice.
So, not sure how techie was he in regard of the company duties.
That said I do wonder how much marketing a monopolist needs.
Marketing in this context means figuring out what the customer will buy, and making sure that the engineers build that.
It is very easy in this industry to build the wrong thing. Even the customer does not necessarily know what they will want or need in a few years.
A lot of the time it can mean predicting the future integration scheme, and deducing the future pain points from that. As you say, it's a very technical role, and you cannot succeed without a deep understanding of the entire process flow.
It's also a no-brainer to transition to strategic leadership, because that's basically what you've been doing the whole time.
You do not want to screw up deals with this kind of kit. The price tag of a single order can be nine digits, and it needs to be kept BSL4 clean, from first baseplate, to final install.
I heard about our company selling a whole line of steppers to a Korean company. They had to be flown out in special 747s, because BSL4, and installed on site.
Then, the customer's company went belly up.
They cut the power to the fab (Maybe like this?[0]).
Instant junkyard.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3Uy9wsfkok
[EDIT] Corrected "BL5" to "BSL4" -Still probably inappropriate
Basically, it means "Full bunny suit."[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0bMN9xh9hM
[EDIT] I was wrong. I should have said "BSL4", (my friend exaggerates), but the deal is that it is done under the highest clean room conditions. (I was never in that part of the company. I was in the optical part).
ASML seems unlike most other companies I've heard of, since every single sale is a significant chunk of the netherlands' gnp, and they have to inform the government every single time they ship something.
Are they crippling their competitors or gimping their market somehow?
Why the accusation? What do you know?
This later thread asks the right question and gets some good answers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38486689
The clearest example of why they are not a monopolist is that the Chinese haven't been able to copy the technology - ASML has zero monopoly power over China and China in theory has the motivation and resources to copy, but hasn't so far. Because the technology is fundamentally hard - not because of backroom tricks.
Tbf I wasn’t aware that it was an accusation. They acquired a monopoly position through hard work and risky investments, not through anticompetitive behavior.
And ok they’re not strictly a monopoly because there are other litho makers but if you need the precision of an ASML EUV then there’s no other vendor. Isn’t that kind of the definition of being a monopolist?
Reasons for lack of it, are orthogonal to the term.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
> Are they crippling their competitors or gimping their market somehow?
Anticompetitive behaviour and monopoly are separate. You can have the 2nd one without the first one.
(1) Ph.D. in physics (~9 grueling years), then - if you're sufficiently awesome - ~23 years working your way up in industry to become the CEO at ASML at age 50.
(2) B.S. in Computer Science (4-5 years), then get a FAANG or near-equivalent job and start raking in the money.
And if you're extra-ambitions...you might note that every single one of Forbes current 11-youngest-billionaires either inherited the big bucks, or raked it in by founding software/crypto firms. Zero of 'em went anywhere near "uber-difficult engineering technology" stuff, like semiconductor manufacturing.
That's not exactly something to be proud of in life or someone to look up to. Charles Ponzi, Andrew Tate, and the dozens of other influencers also became quite wealthy by finding legal ways to part desperate people of their money.
>Zero of 'em went anywhere near "uber-difficult engineering technology" stuff, like semiconductor manufacturing.
And yet thank God we have no shortage of people who take the difficult path to working on the cutting edge technology to move humanity and the world forward instead of choosing the easy way of moving buffers around to push ads to people for big money, because we can't have a world where everybody is a webdev(satirized well by South Park).