The Dutch company ASMLdedicated to the design and manufacture of extreme and deep ultraviolet lithography systems, essential for the manufacture of semiconductors for cutting-edge technology, is going to undertake an internal restructuring process that will lead to dismissal of approximately 1,700 of its employees.
At ASML they have made this decision after receiving feedback indicating that their level of internal bureaucracy is slowing down their pace of innovation. And they will do so despite the fact that demand for their chip manufacturing systems has managed to scale to record levels, and that their results can be described as excellent. But they have decided that the company has to behave in a more agile way, according to its CEO, Christophe Fouquet, and that they have 4% of their staff left over for this. Especially in management and support positions.
The layoffs will primarily affect ASML employees in the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent, those in the United States. The final objective, which as we have said is to make ASML work more agile, therefore involves eliminating layers of control that currently mean that engineers cannot focus completely on product development.
Apparently, as ASML’s operations increased, so did the complexity of its structure, and with this restructuring they seek to stop this trend and simplify the organization. This is the company’s first large-scale workforce reduction in years.
Among other things, in addition to the exits, ASML plans to reorganize its technology division so that engineers can work more closely with particular products and modules. Despite the layoffs, they also want to create new jobs, more in line with the new structure, in the areas of manufacturing, customer service and sales.
Looking to the future, the company plans to build a second campus in Eindhoven, a few kilometers from its headquarters, where it expects up to 20,000 of its employees to be working by 2028. The objective of this expansion is to increase their capacity to respond to the increase in demand they are experiencing, in addition to ensuring, thanks to the simplification of their structure with the structuring they have initiated, that an excess in levels and layers does not slow down their level of execution.
In the last quarter of 2025, ASML achieved revenues of €13.2 billion, almost double what was expected, due to increased demand for its most advanced lithography systems. Its total income in 2025 reached 32.7 billion euros, with forecasts for 2026 of between 34,000 and 39,000 million euros of income.
These forecasts reflect growing investment in AI infrastructure by chipmakers, including TSMC, Intel and Samsung. All rely solely on ASML technology for their next-generation chip production nodes. Its main client, despite the restrictions, is China, with 36% of its sales, which will foreseeably fall in the future until remaining at approximately one fifth of its total income due to the impossibility of selling its most advanced systems to the country due to the restrictions imposed.
