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🇳🇱 $ASML - Why Dutch Tech Dominates the AI Chip Boom (US EU Stocks) 🇪🇺
Recorded: March 24, 2026 Duration: 0:56:49Space Recording
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good afternoon everyone, welcome back to the Wolf EU. I'm your host, Eva, Evertronic,
and my lovely co-host, Alex. Alex Tutik, how are you today?
Good morning. Good morning. I'm doing well. How about you?
Awesome. Yeah, it's been a busy morning here. A couple of headlines that we can definitely
go over. But more importantly, we've got a few more guests arriving as well, a little
bit late. It's all good. It's going to be exciting it's our last week here at wolf eu and our last two shows and
i'm just going to invite a few more people on stage here to apologize for the uh late comments
here um yeah we have some very exciting um topics to cover today we're going to cover the Netherlands or the Dutch market. How do you feel about that?
Yeah.
So, um, the Dutch has been pretty important in the whole, uh,
semiconductor situation in Europe.
Um, they are starting now to, uh, push towards turning
semiconductor, the whole industry to, um, more of a structural...
How can you put it?
They want to build up the infrastructure, essentially.
So that means factories, getting engineers,
housing to those engineers, roads to the factories, the whole shebang.
And thanks to the Dutch, all 27 EU member states signed on to the semiconductor coalition.
And they're trying to move away now from gaining 20% of the market share and they're
focusing more on resilience and independence and kind of that direction.
And I think that ties in a little bit to what we have talked about in earlier shows
about how data independence and sovereignty is going to be maybe one of those more future
topics that will be more and more important.
So yeah, it's going to be quite an interesting show and many topics to
cover. Over to you. Yeah, more importantly, I think on top of all of this, there's been a lot
of heat and talk around the Dutch government been wrestling with controversial tax as well,
taxing the unrealized capital gains, more importantly, at 36%. what a shocker this is what they call
box 3 which is their version of capital gains tax I would say and that's
obviously triggering like a full-blown tax revolts amongst the the citizens
then and obviously are forcing like a political u-turn within weeks right so
we'd love to introduce on stage a couple of speakers we have a couple of familiar
faces and some new people.
Mads, welcome back on to Wolf EU. How are you doing today?
I'm doing great. Thank you.
Looking forward to this. This is really interesting also.
This is politically wise. So yeah, looking forward.
Absolutely. I know you love tech as well.
So we can definitely cover all things outside of the Dutch market and love tech as well so we can definitely cover all things uh outside
of the dutch market in tech as well um sandeep welcome back onto the show how are you doing
hello everybody it's good to be back uh it's an interesting time to be considering equities
because there has been a little bit of a boom in the equity space given that uh the markets seem
to be a little bit preemptive in that they're thinking that this whole kerfuffle in the Middle
East won't go any further or deeper at least as far as the United States is concerned it will
become more of a regional uh friction which is fine. Apparently, the markets think that's enough. That's okay. That's
acceptable. And one of the key beneficiaries have been tech stocks. And Dutch companies
such as ASML, ASM International, and Bessie, BE Semiconductor, are looking pretty good
right now.
Exciting. Yeah, the ASML is definitely the talk of the town for today's show. I want
to also welcome back another long-term guest of ours here.
Hevy Moe, always lovely to have you here.
Hey, it was a little bit spontaneous, but glad to be here.
The Dutch have some great companies.
As neighbors to my country of Germany, I know a bit about them.
I absolutely love that, yes.
And I would love to welcome new onto the stage Nico
welcome if you want to give yourself a little intro. Yes good afternoon this is Nico Inbert
speaking from the Netherlands nice to be here and of course we love to talk about Dutch stocks
but there's more in the Netherlands and if you have any any questions, we operate a Dutch investor website called De Aandelhouder in plain English, Shareholder.
And we got a big community in the Netherlands and Belgium, the Dutch speaking Belgian people, for whom we are covering the Dutch stocks and also international stocks.
And also my colleague is here, Jordi Boeving,
and he's truly the expert on technology stocks.
Fantastic.
Yes, I would love to introduce you to Jordi, of course.
Welcome.
Yes, thank you so much for the invitation
and great to be here live from the Netherlands,
like my colleague Nico said.
My name is Jordi and I've been covering the semiconductor industry quite intensively
and we actually at the Andoha were in touch with all these companies as well.
So ASML, ASM, B Semiconductor, we actually, Nico and I, we did an interview with the
B Semiconductor Industry CEO recently.
So yeah, great to contribute and always great to discuss companies like ASML, ASM and B Semiconductor Industry CEO recently. So yeah, great to contribute
and always great to discuss companies
like ASML, ASM and B Semiconductor.
So yeah, thanks for having us.
Awesome.
Thank you so much for joining us
very last minute here today, this morning.
And yeah, please do give them all a follow.
And I'm sure you fellow listeners in the audience
have a ton of questions for our guests today.
Please do post them down below. There's a little chat bubble on the bottom right corner. You can post your
questions there for our guests today. I guess just to kick things off, we can do a little backdrop
as well. And I guess a real question for some, most people have been asking me, been getting a
couple of messages in my inbox. When you look at the Netherlands from a market perspective right
now, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
And sort of what are you watching most closely?
And this is a question for the floor.
Any takers first?
Nico, do you want to go first?
Yes, of course, of course.
Well, the Netherlands is,
I think we are a trading society.
As you look at our position in Europe, we got a really big port, Rotterdam.
I think it's almost a big port in the world.
So we got a lot of companies who handled transportation from things arriving in Rotterdam and then go on through Europe.
That's one thing.
It's a very open society.
I think the Dutch people are quite good at speaking English,
so we have to because we're an international country.
We need to do a lot of national trade.
And I think the best thing right now in the Netherlands is the position of ASML, which is astounding.
If you look at the international tech society, there's only a few companies in Europe who are really competing with the big American and the big Asian companies.
American and the big Asian companies.
And I think ASML is truly one of its kind.
There's actually no other company who can make similar machines.
They used to be a little bit of competition from Japan.
Nikon and I guess, what's the other one?
It was another company.
But that's, I'm sorry?
A Canon? Yeah, yes, yeah, that's what I mean. But that's... I'm sorry? Canon?
Yeah, that's what I mean.
But that's long gone.
And in the EUV business, there's actually only one company.
So they have a big position in the Netherlands as well.
If you look at the region Eindhoven, where they're situated,
that you see that they're expanding rapidly.
If I speak with people out of that region, then because
some time ago there was a rumor that ASML would leave the Netherlands and that they would go to
the US or to France because they have a French CEO. But if you look at what's happening around
Eindhoven, then you see they are really expanding there to buy it up all the ground all the the the
soul they can get they'll um they're actually building like four or five new uh campuses
and they're hiring a lot of people so they're really want to expand in the netherlands and then
to hold their their base here so yeah very exciting great backdrop there thank you so much i see a hand
up there heavy emote go for it yeah you just mentioned that there were rumors that asml might
leave for the us or other nations i think those weren't rumors and they were bargaining with the
country because they weren't happy with the support the government was giving them as the biggest employer in the country.
Yeah, yeah.
So I think they were probably ready to leave,
but managed to leverage their position to build all these campuses
and get all the subsidies from the government.
I mean, it's understandable.
It's a one-of-a-kind company and definitely like one of the crown jewels um europe has yes i think
that's exactly what it is they they they need the support from the government because they need the
infra structure around eindhoven to to expand more roads more more more houses for the people who
who work there and i actually once was like i think that this is maybe five six years ago when
we we went to asml for a visit and they said, well, the biggest problem they faced was that they, because they attract a lot of international people, that they weren't in an environment where they can do all kinds of stuff
with cultural events and so on and so on.
And that's the reason why they are sponsoring PSV Eindhoven
in the Champions League, because they wanted to give more things
around work for their people.
Yeah, really interesting there.
And how the government wanted to almost backfire,
shoot themselves in the foot with the capital gains.
It just didn't make sense to me.
So it was a very quick turnaround.
What are your thoughts on this tax that they were going to impose?
Well, they wanted to tax 36%.
And I think the biggest problem was that they wanted to tax 36%. And I think the biggest problem was that they wanted to tax unrealized gains, which is kind of unheard of. I don't think there's another country where they're doing that.
ago, then the biggest party in the Netherlands, which also has the Minister of Finance, he
said, well, this is not good and we're going to change it.
We're going to be coming up with another plan.
But that other plan was hardly any different.
So it's still out there.
It's not a law yet, but they have to put it through the second charmer, actually the first charmer, which is gold.
So it's not a law yet, but it's something which is really worrying because it went on international.
Even Elon Musk tweeted about it.
And it's not good for the Dutch people, but it's also not good for the companies
who attract highly skilled workers, because those people think, well, if I go to the Netherlands,
I have to give one turn to everything I own. I have to give to the government and I'm not gonna
work there. I also speak with companies like Optiver IMC, who are trading companies on the
like Optiver IMC who are trading companies on the exchanges and they have difficulties
attracting people to come to the Netherlands because of this.
Yeah, I think we're also facing a slightly similar issue here in the UK where the tax
for corporation is, they were thinking about increasing it, but that would only just drive
far more businesses out of the country or look elsewhere.
We definitely have spoken about it
on our other shows in the past.
And I think that's definitely something to consider
very carefully from the Dutch government.
Mads, I see your hand up there.
We love your perspective.
Yeah, so first of all, on the tax issue,
I think it's something that we need to look out for,
for Europe, that it's a sign
of the weakness that there is in Europe, that we need to be cautious about investing in Europe.
For my fund's perspective, one of the reasons we've been cautious about Europe is geopolitics.
cautious about Europe is geopolitics. It feels like European businesses are trapped in between.
They are dependent on the Chinese market, like ASML has had a large portion or a large exposure
to the Chinese market. But the U.S. wants something different and European companies just seem weak in between there.
So, yeah, we've been cautious.
I think maybe what we're seeing now in the war in the Gulf could lead to closer ties between U and Europe, because I think the European energy dependency will
force Europe to do the trade deal with the United States.
And that could actually create some stability for businesses and investors that we know
this is what we can adhere to and what's going to be going on in the future.
And revenue coming from, going to,
revenue to China or from China
is something that we need to be careful about,
but other stuff we can rely on
that's going to be going forward in the future.
So what we've invested in Holland is the name Sandeep talked about.
We have ASML, we have ASM, and we have BASI semiconductor.
ASML is kind of the development over the past 15 years.
The more slower we've been compressing more and more transistors on the chips.
And we're getting to the end of that.
And the industry is going more three-dimensional on the chips.
And that's where ASM comes in and BASI as well.
ASM is edge and deposit.
And once you need to build
sort of the columns on the chip higher,
then that will benefit ASM.
And BASY is hybrid bonding
where you can build chips on top of each other
and is the leader in doing that in a flexible, advanced way.
So I think they're probably good investments.
And then just a last observation, we've been looking at trying to find more exposure for
optical connects.
And actually, there is a couple of European businesses.
And when you look at them, they haven't done quite as much as other hub sectors
within the chip sector, maybe from the States or elsewhere.
And I think maybe that's because many investors have been a little bit wary
of investing in European chip companies just because of the geopolitical uncertainty, what
will happen to their China revenue? Will they be able to benefit from the build out that is
occurring in the States right now? And what will the conditions be for that?
So I think now could be a really good time
to look for European chip stocks.
I think that's a great shout-out.
Just for some of the listeners,
the ASM is basically one of the sole manufacturers
of extreme ultraviolet EUV lithography machines.
So they obviously advance in the semiconductor on,
basically, they're one of the advanced semiconductors on the planet
for all you devices that you use,
from Apple's M-series chips to NVIDIA's AI accelerators.
This all requires ASML's technology, basically.
So in a nutshell, obviously, the company recorded record revenue in 2025
with 32.7 billion euros, I believe.
And they have a massive backlog.
I think we briefly spoke about that as well,
something like 38.8 billion euros in backlog.
And the CEO, Christophe, they guided 2026 revenue to 34 to even 39 billion euros with gross margins of 51 to 53%.
So something to think about.
I think you mentioned some things about the risk with China.
I think China accounted for like 20% of the 2025 sales.
That's due to the further export restrictions from obviously Washington and that hit revenue
directly there. So the company announced about 1,700 job cuts from the Netherlands and the US
and the stock basically reached all-time high around that 13, 12 euro during February,
late February before pulling back here but still maintained a buy
and HeavyMote would love your perspective on that
I wanted to circle back to
to ASML and a few things
I wanted to comment
it was mentioned that they
are having some
I would say maybe headwinds
as chips can't really get too much
more smaller I mean we are getting to like
one or two nanometers like physically you can't get much much smaller but i think what's missed
is that um just getting smaller is not really um what drives the revenue growth and for me it's
also a lot of efficiency efficiency gains which have not been realized. These machines, the new
EUV ones, have been
optimized for getting smaller
and challenging the
laws of physics. But if you compare
them to the throughput that the
let's say lesser tech
machines, ASML does in
DOV, what they
can do, the throughput is a lot
bigger, a lot higher. and that's a very big
lever that asmr can sell with incremental machines um i think that's that is a little uh forgotten
but besides that of course um the the chip design is evolving and we're trying to stack more things
on top of each other and other other players will benefit from that.
Personally, the only chip manufacturer or shovel business I look at is ASML
because it's the one with the least disruption threat, in my opinion,
and it's just such a technical space that it's difficult to understand really in depth from a perspective of an analyst and not somebody that's really deep in the technicals.
Really interesting there. Jordi, what are your thoughts? I know you recently was at ASML, I believe. I saw a picture about four days ago or so.
about four days ago or so.
Yes, it was last summer actually.
ASML invited me to come and see all the fireworks in Valdhoven.
So that was an amazing experience.
Maybe in addition to heavy mode investments,
what's also underappreciated, I would say,
with at least investors looking at ASML,
it's the revenue which the company gains
from servicing and from upgrades. basically the installed base of all the machines, because all the machines they sold, basically all of them, they're still functional till today.
And they're still getting extra revenue from that by doing upgrades, by making the machines better, by improving them, by sending engineers over.
And this has actually became a bigger chunk
of the revenue for asml over the years it's very interesting for the business model because there's
higher profit margins it's still growing quite fast and especially if you see the sales growth
now this is a interesting growth driver towards the future too so it's not just about selling
the machines it's also the revenue part from maintaining the machines, from upgrading machines, which is something which should deserve, in my opinion, some more intention.
I love that. Alex, do you have any questions you would love to answer?
Well, I think someone earlier brought up the China situation. I think that's pretty interesting, especially with Nexperia, who creates or makes over 100 billion of these discrete semiconductors per year, which is essentially basic building blocks for everything like cars and appliances.
everything like cars and appliances.
And what happened over the situation is that at least 40% of the global transistors and
diode supply became a national security issue.
And thanks to the situation, over 960 million was lost in production from, was the impact
production from was the impact for Honda.
for Honda.
So yeah, I'm a little interested in how this may create incentives in Europe in this sector.
So I don't know if anybody has anything to say about that, but that's something I found
That's something I found kind of interesting regarding the topic.
kind of interesting regarding the topic.
Interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So the actual commodities and materials around that for sure,
surrounding making the chips.
I think we also experienced, I don't know about you,
but I'm working in media.
And certainly those hard drives are getting way,
way more expensive than I paid for about a year ago even in such a short period.
Yeah. it's absolutely
insane the cost for storage I'm talking about SSDs just any hard drive really your bog standard one
not on the market it's just comparison the price about a year to two ago it's insane Sandeep would
love your thoughts on other tickers I know you had a couple you wanted to talk about as well some other Dutch tickers I
had on my list was Adyen, A-D-Y-E-N, there's ING as well which is also a major Dutch bank and we
had Shell obviously with the whole oil and gas and then Philips as well. Yeah so Adyen is what
definitely can be considered hardware adjacent or semiconductor adjacent in that they basically have an ai driven
checkout layer that uses transaction data to reduce fraud and friction in real time
so there it is the it is a dutch company and it does quite well uh ing on the other
ing is well out there in relevance to the semiconductor sector but I will say that uh ING has become sort
of like this leading voice in uh research or bank-led research or bank-led research summaries
on what the sector is looking like so ING think if I'm not mistaken is this research desk and i've been following them for quite some time
on this uh on them on what they claim is the other recent advancements but i would uh preface it
since we had a little bit of discussion about the china china thing is that when we say national
security we it is no longer a question of whether a country is being invaded or this country is in
danger of being attacked militarily we're now talking about uh the loss of economic the loss of
economic potential rather instead so what asml sits on is uh is a a mode that is quite expensive
to breach in that it says that I manufacture these machines that
manufacture semiconductor chips so everybody wants a semi conductor juice and that is true
for Bessie and ASM International as well so uh the problem that ensues is that while the company
has this interestingly huge while all these companies put together, the Dutch semiconductor complex together, have this unassailable mode.
In terms of geopolitics, it's no longer acceptable because it becomes a trigger or leverage again to be employed against other countries to bend them to your will for any number of reasons.
It may be reasons related to, shall we say, allegations of IP theft, which China is no stranger to.
And Chinese industries are no stranger to.
But if you take a look at it from another country, let us say, again, I do throw in the India angle in all my conversations,
because I would say that if you are saying China is like this, there is another similar sized country uh just south of it which is also a
potential market and which is a growing market of course so uh but if you take a look at india which
has strong ip protection asml obviously does not have an incentive to sort of co-develop lithography
machines with let us an indian entity because then there would mean ip sharing so the mode weakens
as an Indian entity because then there would be IP sharing.
So the moat weakens.
And the leverage of economic security, etc.,
or geopolitical security, economic security, blah, blah, blah,
sort of weakens.
So this is an uncomfortable situation in which every country
wants to be independent in the way they approach
their existence upon this planet.
But if there are certain things that are lying in only one place
and they are applying these kinds of levers for any and all reason,
as we have seen in this current administration, for example,
then the argument to have similar complexes being set up in other countries
with independent IP, sovereign IP will increase.
So ASML will always have this long-term outlook that is always going to be a little bit cloudy
because at a certain point, it becomes important to break away rather than sign into this global
complex or rather sign into this global industrial complex behind semiconductors, wherein it is not
actually global. It actually lies within a certain select set of countries only so this is always going to
exist uh for now asml does well but even when we talk about asml we remember that the 20 market
share that they had was not from the sale of current generation euv machines it basically
came from duv machines and first generation euv machines if you want to
put it that way to china which they started to prompt which some reports suggest they promptly
started to reverse engineer and create their own version of thereof again it becomes important for
example even if it's china or it's india or maybe at some point of time in the future Japan
will say the same thing and the United States might make the same claim also if you continue
to think about it as a as an evolution of what security actually means so with the collapse of
the global what should be frankly should be consigned to the dustbin of history is this global rules-based economic order.
We're going to have such deep
and uncomfortable questions
about what it really means
to have an independent or sovereign economy.
What about America or Trump recently?
I think it was this year, January sometime,
where Trump introduced the tariffs specifically to affect Netherlands.
It was a 10% tariff or so around January 17.
It was obviously related to the Greenland dispute.
And is that a threat, do you think, for doing business in Netherlands?
Or it's not really?
So I did make this point in an
earlier article on the leverage shares website i for all of you are listening please feel free
to visit the leverage shares.com website and see market insights uh my colleagues and i produce a
lot of content and uh think pieces if you will uh pretty much every single week at least two are
produced so please feel free to say i said that what I this is a point I made when it when it came to these tariffs for many many years America said
the reason why invest with us is because into us or believe in us is that we have all these checks
and balances that keep us from being going completely mental and what Trump basically said
is that it is actually untrue.
There are certain set of conditions under which there will be perfect alignment.
In fact, there was even a delay in the pronouncement of the tariffs being held invalid by the Supreme Court
precisely because there was some time being given for the US administration to come up with countermeasures to carry on with the tariff regime.
The deliberations were concluded about one and a half months ago, but they only delivered
their judgment on that a few weeks later.
So this is what I'm sort of saying that it basically, the Trump administration has pulled
the veil back and said that actually every country is now vulnerable,
even the United States with all its checks and balances.
So this is quite serious and it is something ASML will have to,
the management of ASML will have to figure out
as to how they can balance this risk.
Interesting.
Yeah, this is very, very critical for ASML.
It's a long-term effect.
It's a long-term outlook, but it's something to think about.
Okay, cool.
So I would love to take a question from Jordi there,
so you hand up and then we can go to Nico after.
Yeah, maybe in addition, back to the tariffs, right?
More specifically, because that was quite a big deal
for the whole semiconductor industry.
Actually, shares of ASML, other other companies saw their value decline quite significantly and that was actually not because
the worry was about the machines not being being able to be sold to the us or maybe with a premium
but it was more because of the worries that it caused for the end markets because for asml even though ai is obviously a huge
growth driver to the future the consumer electronic market so pcs laptops smartphones that's still a
significant percentage of wafer needs so capacity needs and of course with the tariff announcement
people got scared that the the worldwide supply chains of consumer electronics would get
distorted quite significantly which would in turn have an impact on supply chain companies like ASML
but for the tools itself it doesn't make any sense from the US perspective or Trump's perspective to
put a tariff on these machines or to do something with the import because
they got Intel and Intel wants to build advanced manufacturing on US soil to you know get the
supply chain back on the US ground to compete better with TSMC and they don't got a substitution
for ASML they don't have a they don't have an alternative So it doesn't make any sense to put an extra tariff on ASML machines, because then it's
the opposite of your goals of taking manufacturing back to your soil.
Yeah, absolutely.
Interesting there.
Thank you so much for sharing that.
Nico, I know you have to go.
Any last remarks?
Well, I'm sorry.
I usually have to go.
I mentioned it. And I want to thank you for inviting us.
And if people want to have some more information on Dutch stocks,
we're always available here and maybe we can do a separate one.
Once again, about other Dutch stocks, I must say that the most interesting
Dutch stocks are at the moment, indeed,ML, ASMI, and BayZ. But we also have
like IGN, which we sent out yesterday morning to our investor base as a buying opportunity.
And we also have like a big company like Groses, which is a proxy of Tencent in China. So if you
invest in the Netherlands in the Dutch stock index, if you invest in the Netherlands, in the Dutch Stock Index, you'll also invest in the biggest AI opportunity in China.
And with this, I would like to say hi to everybody
and have a lot of fun there.
Bye-bye.
Absolutely.
Please do give all of our speakers here a follow.
They've been absolutely incredible
and really great posts from each of their accounts
if you want to follow closely there.
Yeah, some very interesting names for sure. Did you want to elaborate more onto that, Jordi? I know you might be looking at other
things. Do you have any other exciting things you're looking at in the market trending?
Well, right now, and I think someone else pointed it out earlier as well, is that the next big thing
right now, at least if you ask investors in the technology sector it's definitely optoelectronics
and photonics because investors realize that you know it's all about data centers it's about this
massive investment wave in ai compute and if you look at data centers today and you look at data
centers in the future communication of the data will happen more and more based on light so optical connections instead
of the the traditional copper wiring and the data centers so what you actually see is that a lot of
companies in the opto-electronic supply chain are doing very well on the stock market a good example
is Lumentum this year coherent where also Nvidia took a two billion stake because they want to secure the supply chain.
And there's also another interesting, it's not a Dutch company, unfortunately,
but it's a German semiconductor equipment manufacturing company.
It's called Eichstron.
And they actually sell the machines for the deposition of the wafers
which are being used for these new infrastructures.
So that company is also done
very well so up to electronics photonics also the semiconductor has quite some exposure in that
growth market but that seems to be the next area where investors are getting really excited and
that's something we see every day now if you look at the share prices. Yeah, very exciting. I think I had another name similar to Data Center,
although not quite Dutch directly,
but they do have very strong Dutch history of listing.
It's RELX, Public Limited Company.
They're in the data analytics and sort of decision tools
for grouping and spanning scientific publishing.
So more on the legal side for information and risk analytics and exhibition.
So they're obviously predominantly UK,
but they do have a long history with the Dutch listing on there.
So that could be something to watch out for,
for the AI and data on a different angle there
for you guys to have a look and research into,
which does bring me, I do have to read a quick legal disclaimer.
Nothing on this show is professional financial advice.
As always, this is purely for your educational purposes
and for you guys to do your own research.
An investor should always carefully consider a fund's investment,
objective risk charges and expenses before investing.
A fund's prospectus and summary prospectus contain all this information,
especially from the income shares, ETPs, and from leveraged shares.
And to obtain a fund's prospectus and key information document, please visit their website at incomeshares.com.
And a fund's prospectus and key information document should always be read carefully before investing.
Having said that, I know you published a few papers there, Sandeep,
so I pinned that up in the post there for you in the nest. And I've also pinned Alex's post as well.
So Alex, I don't know if you want to share a little bit of what you wrote there as well.
Yeah, so it was essentially what we covered earlier regarding how much impact China has on the
overall market. I think it kind of ties into some of the things we mentioned earlier regarding
Europe's push to work together to um focus on the infrastructure regarding um you know factories
housing engineers and all of that and this new sort of ship acts 2.0 is uh looking to come
into legislation within the first half of this year and I believe tax credits is also going to
be quite important because there's something that Europe doesn't have and America does have
so that's a little overview of what I just shared interesting there yeah that that's something new
you know trying to entice you know businesses to businesses to open up more shop in Europe.
That would be great for development on this side of the water.
Sandeep, did you want to finish going through some of the stuff you were looking at?
So, yeah, I mean, let's see.
We did talk about ING, which does great research on the semiconductor section.
Again, ING which does great research on the semiconductor section again uh it is
in the ING thing does that so add uh Adrian you already mentioned uh NXP just did come up and
it's gonna have its problems with the its Chinese principle and then Scott in this tug of war between
its Chinese principle and the Dutch government over questions of national security which I said
is going to
become a recurring theme going forward actually for the semiconductor sector as long as they remain
concentrated uh if you take a look at ASM International lamb research and now we're going
a little bit outside of Europe we're going to the US the lamb research does some similar work also
which is an interesting way to look which is an interesting alternative if you're
already invested into asm International for Bay Bay Z there is of course AMAT applied materials
which does some similar work on actually owns nine percent of busy and it's rumored that it
is looking to make a full takeover so like we were saying earlier the United States is trying
to shore up manufacturing and
sort of sovereignty or IP sovereignty even at the expense of other companies countries that are
sorry not companies countries that are more or less aligned with the United States as it is
anyways so this is probably going to get some work this is probably going to happen in the future so other than that let's see yeah uh
some things to remember is that uh memory prices are expected to spike up to 50 by mid 2026
whereas a demand for AI memory outstrips supply so uh this is going to be pretty important when
you're talking about HBM uh AS asm international and besie are key to
bonding the memory layers and layers of memory hardware together i've not i haven't been an
engineer in a long time so i don't know what they're called anymore but apparently they're
very important so it is something to look forward to i think there is an uh an incentive for basie
and asm international to make a little bit more money on this because of the increased demand for memory.
So this is something to look forward to as well.
Outside of that, yeah, I mean, yeah, that's basically it.
It's a small universe for sure,
but it's quite interesting
and it should be central to any investor,
any semiconductor or AI relevant investment
for a team, essentially.
Yeah, thank you for sharing.
Yeah, for Bessie, I'm just looking into this now myself.
They're in the hybrid bonding, the innovative tech
for combining the multiple materials and components.
For semiconductors, so very detailed stuff there.
Yeah, Heavy Moat,
are you looking at anything interesting
on the market aside from ASML these days?
Well, we have also heard
from our petrochemical conversation last week, right?
I mean, material prices are expected to go up
primarily because helium is not making it
past the street of Hormuz. And certain is not going is not making it past the
street of hormuz and certain other chemicals are also not making a pass the street of hormuz
so semiconductor prices in general are going to go up this is independent of asmls
work itself because once they've made the sale they they don't really have a piece of the pie
when it comes to the prices of components or manufacturing per se but uh
helium is important in the manufacturing of semiconductors a lot of rare earth elements
also i need to move move past the straight of hormones also and all of this is getting a little
jammed up right now so the price of the finished products are becoming higher and higher and uh
but that has little to do with what we're talking about right now.
The semiconductor sector will get a little bit expensive, they will absorb some of this
impact for a bit, but they will eventually pass it down to the customers. So let's see
how the sooner this mess in the Gulf ends, the better, actually.
Yeah, I agree. I think hopefully it would just be
a short-term geopolitical tension exposure there.
So yeah, HeavyMote would love your take
on what you're looking at.
Anything trending on your list as well,
aside from ASML?
Yeah, we are staying with Dutch companies.
What I generally like about the Dutch management teams
is that they are pretty straightforward.
They typically don't hide behind a lot of fancy words and just EBITDA and whatnot
or made up terms.
So a few companies that I generally like in the Netherlands,
of course, ASML, but too expensive for me at this point uh adyen is probably
the most interesting one right now which was already mentioned um but generally the whole
payments space is shot down nobody likes it so it's getting attractive um adyen has a very
interesting opportunity still with a long long tail to grow as they are basically not really competing, as most people say, with Stripe, in my opinion.
They are rather competing with traditional banks taking share from them in payment processing.
story where still i think 85 90 percent of uh of transactions are done through these legacy
providers that are not really equipped to handle digital first business models so that's a very
interesting one um then another smaller dutch company called nadab uh i think that's how
how you pronounce it um is a pretty good lead company um i missed that one and i also have some ethical things i don't like
basically just i don't want really to invest in the dairy industry and they have four products
basically everything they they do is try to get a monopoly or duopoly position in a market with attractive attributes basically asset light
and digital business models also so they have for example the number one monitoring software
solution for for dairy farms they also have some some security systems for for locking I think
some security systems for for locking i think so that's a a management team also with a pretty long
long uh long-term thinking so yeah that's those are three companies i like in netherlands
what i don't like as much as process which often gets talked about because they obviously had this
home run maybe like deal of the century with buying i think it
was like half of pros of tencent for like 20 million 20 years ago so probably like the best
irr or 20 years you could possibly come up with but besides process besides tencent i don't like
that track record of investing capital like all of the
food delivery businesses they bought at stupid prices and I mean that's not really their fault
but they bought Stack Overflow right before AI came and destroyed the business model I think I
saw a chart that Stack Overflow had like 99 decline in in traffic. Basically, if you don't know, if you're not a programmer,
people used to look on Stack Overflow
for solving problems regarding coding.
And now it's all AI.
So all the traffic dried up there.
And that was like, I think, a one or two billion dollar acquisition.
So generally...
Yeah, I was was just gonna ask you
what are your thoughts on this whole ai especially claude now like it's putting sass down the drain
and even developers yeah it's it's very uncertain um if we make a small detour to to sass and
software i think if you look at a software company you really need to differentiate
I think everything that's horizontal so think like Excel or uh or a Salesforce with very broad
application is in trouble because um they do a lot of things but they do them like yeah they do
them good enough but they have so many users that it's an enticing opportunity to attack those.
In the meantime, looking at vertical market software, that's a lot more attractive because you have smaller niches, smaller total addressable markets, and you're not as big of a target.
And you also have much deeper integrations with customer.
Usually you make these niche applications that is already tailored to your customer's needs.
So there really is, in my opinion, a, a much, um, much better mode for, um, for the AI age.
And also with the data, the proprietary data they have, um, yeah, data is something that I can't really replicate.
And right now we are coming out of a phase where so much data is public.
And I think companies are already and will even more so continue to guard their data
as a bigger part of their modes.
And yeah, all of these large language models like jet gpt and frat again whatever
they they can't really compete if they don't have the data so yeah that's that's going to be
interesting to see in a few years also if we look at something like coding uh seg overflow probably
was like the golden data mine that enabled um all of these lms to to get so good at coding assistance
and if now everything is going through the lms the question is how good the data will be and
if we maybe um yeah won't won't see as much of a growth in in quality once we just um
re refector the same data that's already gone through several LLMs,
not getting new proprietary data from actual people.
Really interesting there.
Jordi, I saw your hand up there.
Did you want to touch on things?
Just a small thing to add.
But first of all, great to hear NADAP being pointed out here
because I thought it would be a stock which was quite under the radar
for more international investors but apparently it's known so that's that's
amazing to hear and now i would just like to point out in
addition to the names being discussed here that there's actually two more
technology stocks so to say which are also a bit unknown
the first one would be euronext it's more of a French company I would say than a
Dutch company but still it's it's it's a technology stock and if you look at the margin profile it's
probably one of the more interesting stocks and we actually have on the on the European markets
here as well and a second one which is a forgotten stock too it's Tom Tom which use it's a funny
story it's a very small company but they used to sell
the navigation systems which people use in the cars it's a long time ago but they used to be the
yeah the innovative player on that front but now they shifted more to being a software company so
more and more revenue is coming from software they actually got quite some data deals with US big tech companies like Amazon like
like Alphabet and other platforms so yeah it's been not a great investment the last couple years
but it's not that familiar stock internationally so maybe that was great to yeah adds to the other
names which were being discussed so but overall we still got quite some technology so that's that's great.
I love that I actually wonder whatever happened to TomTom I actually thought they died almost as a business because I was like everyone's got phones now we don't need a TomTom anymore
but it's great that to hear that they're shifting their business model for sure
and I think that's probably going to be the trend for most of these software companies
maybe perhaps a little bit more shift towards internet or things, IoT.
There was a name that was on my radar.
I don't think anyone's covered much.
It's N-DAP, N-E-D-A-P.
I thought that was a very interesting one.
They're a Dutch-based tech company focusing on technology for life
and digital twin solutions for connecting physical assets to software
across like the healthcare, retail, security and livestock.
So maybe a bit more of the core technologies,
including the Internet of Things, RFID, vision,
and obviously the AI and SaaS.
So depending what they have,
might be an interesting name there to watch.
And surprise, nobody's mentioned heineken
you guys are big beer drinkers i know uh food is probably not a big fan in some cases but i you
know i think they're good um diversity to have as well and that you guys can look into um i want to
thank everyone's time for sharing all the names and tickers we've spoken today please do give them
all a follow it's been absolutely fantastic having you all here.
Are there any other last interesting names
left on the radar?
Do you think we should touch on?
Well, regarding infrastructure,
coffee is obviously very important for engineers
and I've been long coffee since February
because, you know, it's taking off.
So that's what I can add.
I think coffee is the juice of life for most of us here.
And very good morning to you guys tuning in from the US.
Monitiv, always nice to see you peeping there in the audience.
Sandeep, do you have any last remarks here?
Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting part of the business.
It's quite basically uh the semiconductor sector
which europe does have a slight edge over the united states in terms of uh uh where it placed
in the ais uh in the into the ai zeitgeist if you will while the u.s owns the owns the llms
europe via the netherlands basically owns the means of production
and whoever controls the means of production as you know oh basically drives the narrative uh
the dutch could afford to make a little more noise about all of this but they aren't which is
to their credit i suppose so uh it's a good uh piece of the pie to invest into uh some of these names I did not know about
Tom Tom myself and that is an interesting thought to have as to whether Tom Tom can be considered
as being AI relevant or semiconductor relevant but okay so be it uh but the core the core ideas
are pretty good ASML ASM International and BESI, which might actually get acquired,
might be some interesting names to consider if you aren't already.
Awesome.
Thank everyone for their time.
Jordi, absolute pleasure having you here on WolfEU.
Hope you all enjoyed the show.
Yeah, if you guys want to come back to the show
and re-listen to some of this for research, make sure you retweet this space here and share that to your friends so you can come back and re-listen to all the tickers we've discussed today.
And coming up, we have our usual trading futures with the guys here in about 20 minutes or so, a half an hour.
And it's also a half an hour.
And then we have more Stocks on Talk later on tonight.
And then we have more stocks on talk later on tonight.
You can find out all of our entire schedule,
all the spaces we do here on Wolf Financial,
pinned on our profile.
Every week it changes with fantastic different guests.
And we will be hosting our very last Wolf EU show
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Join us for a very, very special all-stars show.
We brought some of your favorite people on the stage
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and for remaining and the market outlook for 2026 so a a lot of attention. We did have a massive show last Thursday as well.
And we love, you know, thank everyone for their support
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Any last thoughts, Alex?
A bit sad.
Sad? Yeah, no, I think it's going to be a good final episode.
It's been a whole lot of fun taking part in this project,
but I also can't wait to just sit and degen some Euro Futures in the morning again.
Even if I miss out just two days of the week, I go crazy.
I have to stay in the game.
So if you want more degen futures spaces, Alex Tutik is the one to follow.
I might have to co-host on that
show there for you guys if you're into futures we might have that on the show no i'm joking guys
thank you all so much for listening and uh yeah and we'll see you next time have a great day everyone
thank you so much everybody thank you for the invitation and goodbye everybody of course
