Philips missed an opportunity by not producing chips itself, with ASML as a subsidiary. This is what outgoing CEO of ASML Martin van den Brink says in the BNR podcast De Technoloog. ‘Philips could have successfully continued a number of activities independently. That did not happen or did not happen sufficiently.’
The critical comments from the outgoing CEO came in his last days at the Veldhoven company. He did not think carefully about his departure, Van den Brink admits in his exclusive farewell interview with BNR. ‘I think it’s good to make room for others. I don’t necessarily have to stop tomorrow, but there are a lot of people ready.’ During his time at ASML he saw its origins forty years ago, its split from Philips and its breakthrough as a global player in the field of chip machines. He is also behind the major development with the latest generation of chip machines that work on the basis of ultraviolet light, the EUV machines.
After the ASML department was created on April 1, 1984, Philips definitively distanced itself from the division by setting it up on its own two feet. The company did this partly because it noticed that it could not produce both chip machines and chips. The split was based on market conditions at the time. “You cannot sell your equipment to your competitor,” was the argument according to Van den Brink.
‘Nobody could have imagined that we would become one of the largest companies in Europe and the largest company in the Netherlands’
According to the outgoing CEO, Philips has made mistakes in this regard. ‘Philips could have successfully continued a number of activities independently. That did not happen or did not happen sufficiently.’ For example, he points out that a company like Samsung only started producing chips at a later date. ‘Samsung only started after that time and that company has remained successful in semiconductors.’
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Despite the monster profits that the company is currently making, it was not written in the stars that ASML had to become a success. ‘No one could have imagined that we would become one of the largest companies in Europe and the largest company in the Netherlands. Especially if you applied for a job at the largest company in the Netherlands at the time, because that was still Philips at the time, Van den Brink remembers. In the 1980s, when the company was just set up as part of Philips, “things could go wrong in many ways,” he emphasizes.
Future
The company was growing rapidly, but it was far from certain whether it could lead to success. ‘Experimentation is complicated, takes a long time and you try to take major steps as pragmatically as possible.’ This was done partly on the basis of Moore’s Law. Based on this, the chip machines should be able to develop twice as many circuits on a chip every two years.
Also read | Chip machine maker ASML receives fewer orders, ‘a disappointment’
The future for ASML? In any case, it should not look like Philips’, says the outgoing CEO. If ASML becomes ‘the Philips of this century’, then ‘that means an insufficiently prosperous future’, he says. This is partly due to the specific expertise that ASML has, one of the few in the world. ‘We are less broad than Philips.’
You can hear the entire exclusive farewell interview with Van den Brink in the BNR podcast De Technoloog.
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