Source: company website, April 2018

Our customers include all of the world's leading chipmakers, like Intel, Samsung and TSMC, who use our product portfolio to manufacture a wide range of semiconductor chips.

Our key technologies
The heart of ASML’s product portfolio is the semiconductor lithography system. The system works with a light source, which generates ultraviolet light. This light is projected through a blueprint (usually referred to as mask or reticle) of a geometric chip pattern. Optics reduce and focus the pattern onto a thin slice of silicon (the wafer) that is coated with a light-sensitive chemical. The light interacts with the chemical, effectively printing the pattern onto the wafer. When unwanted silicon is etched away, a three-dimensional structure is revealed. This process is repeated dozens of times, layer upon layer, ultimately creating a grid of hundreds of chips on a single silicon wafer.

Our lithography system is a combination of high-tech hardware and advanced software, affording exact control over the shape and size of the chip patterns it creates. But to create today’s most advanced chips, the patterns and their margins for error are so small that it is no longer sufficient to look at the lithography system in isolation. That is why we enhance system performance and reliability with predictive algorithms (which optimize the blueprint of a chip for lithography) and with metrology (which measure and correct the chip manufacturing process on our systems in real-time). We call the integration of these optimizations for chip manufacturing ’Holistic Lithography’.

Source: company website, April 2018

ASML aims to pay an annual dividend that will be stable or growing over time. Annually, the Board of Management will, upon prior approval from the Supervisory Board, submit a proposal to the Annual General Meeting of shareholders with respect to the amount of dividend to be declared with respect to the prior year. The dividend proposal in any given year will be subject to the availability of distributable profits or retained earnings and may be affected by, among other factors, the Board of Management's views on our potential future liquidity requirements, including for investments in production capacity, the funding of our R&D programs and for acquisition opportunities that may arise from time to time; and by future changes in applicable income tax and corporate laws. Accordingly, it may be decided to propose not to pay a dividend or to pay a lower dividend with respect to any particular year in the future.