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by bradknowles 1238 days ago
Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier.

The difference is that China didn't get the latest and greatest machines. Taiwan did, but not China.

But ASML definitely had sales people in China that were willing to do whatever it took to make the sale. Including giving hundreds of gigabytes of free pirate DVD rips to their prospective customers. Guess how long that took over the 2Mbps E-1 lines that the local offices in China had to get back to the HQ offices in Eindhoven, where those could then get out onto the public Internet? Guess who helped run that central mail system that was frequently flooded by all these DVD rips that were being sent by the sales people to their customers?
1 comments
tooltalk 1238 days ago
>> Note that China was actually one of the biggest customers for ASML, going back to 2006 and earlier.

Why would you make such an absurd comment about ASML's 2006 sales? or perhaps you mean to say 2016?

  2006
  Korea 1,085,497 13,730 662
  United States 931,971 740,036 24,262
  Taiwan 739,432 16,058 483
  Rest of Asia 470,915 937,107 1,282
  Europe 369,289 2,145,710 166,415
  Total 3,597,104 3,852,641 193,10

  2016
  Taiwan 2,140.3 2,815.9
  Korea 1,594.3 28.7
  United States 1,087.5 4,200.6
  China 758.2 2.6
  Singapore 245.6 0.8
  Japan 415.1 4.6
  Rest of Asia 26.7 2.8
  Netherlands 1.1 2,737.9
  EMEA 606.3 2.5
China's share in chips was a paltry low-single figure until few years ago -- less than 5% of global chip sales, according to SIA's report in 2022, and that also had a lot to do with foreign chip makers (eg, Samsung's Xi'an plant which opened in 2019 accounts for 40% of their entire DRAM production).
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bradknowles 1238 days ago
I know where the sales reps were, and where the customers were that they were selling to. Maybe those sales were to companies that weren't technically Chinese, even though they were operating in China. And so maybe the sales got reported for some other region.

China was huge business back then before 2006. Kept our E-1 lines quite flooded with all those pirated DVD images that they were sending by e-mail. But we did fix that problem. And I did get a nice little invited talk out of the work I did on their e-mail system.

And yes, I said 2006 and I meant 2006.

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