The price would probably drop slightly if they made 10x more machines, but they would still end up earning more. And the world would be a better place, too.
So I am left wondering ... what is capping their output? What is the bottleneck?
To commit engineering to achieving 10x manufacture rate would probably require giving up the lead on next generation processes.
Personally, I think there must be an end to this. There are steps we are going to learn to more reliably replicate, and reliably reassemble. Machines won't become smaller, but other heavy industries have learned to do faster, de-skilled installations so semiconductors should eventually as well. However, I don't think we'll get the 'good for the world' benefit because by the time every country can make leading edge semis, some other critical, supply-restricted part will become what's contested.
On the absolute forefront, it has to be artisanal.
But we can learn to scale making the machines that were cutting edge two years ago.
Maybe ASML just doesn’t do this because they leave it to other companies? Either way, somebody should be the one that’s always two years behind but makes 2000 machines a year.
And of course, when you remove a bottleneck, you find another. But that other bottleneck will be wider.
And then, these machine are indeed more like physics experiments than a device. If you compare it with that, ASML is actually quite fast.
And the market knows all of this, hence their valuation.
Zeiss
And maybe not the cutting edge, but whatever was cutting edge 5 years ago.
