
ASML Buys Stake in Carl Zeiss Unit for $1.1B - mmastrac
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-11-03/asml-buys-stake-in-carl-zeiss-unit-for-1-1-billion-in-euv-step
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smilekzs
Background: This is all about EUVL, a technology for making chips with smaller
features.

See:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11241963](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11241963)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841278](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12841278)

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ChuckMcM
I don't know if I could stand the tension of working in a company where
quarterly shipments were single digit units of product is considered a banner
year :-) Makes for a really odd revenue stream. Someone builds a new fab, woo-
hoo!, then 2 years of nothing.

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tormeh
It gets better when you consider that Intel et al. depend on them.

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agumonkey
I'm realizing how what I thought was just a refined consumer/prosumer company
for photography, is involved in many different fields of deep science. And for
a while now.

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frostburg
It's kinda of a side business (cine lenses, too), but "refined consumer /
prosumer" would be Fuji o Leica. Not many lens-makers are more "pro oriented"
than CZ, maybe Rodenstock and Schneider-Kreuznach.

~~~
rplst8
I'm not sure about Leica, but Fujifilm is not in the "refined consumer /
prosumer" category either. Neither is Canon, Nikon, or even Olympus for that
matter. AFAIK they all make high performance optics that are used in
manufacturing, lithography, or machine vision in some capacity or another.

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frostburg
Leica (well, same parent company, I think that the structure is a bit complex)
also makes microscopy equipment, but I'm talking about their lens lineup
intended for photography. Leica makes very good things that are not very
practical or realistically priced. Fuji makes good prosumer cameras and
lenses, but they don't have wide professional adoption for ecosystem /
features considerations.

~~~
rplst8
Again, I think you are wrong. Fujifilm makes extremely high quality
professional lenses that are used on medium and large format cameras. Or at
least did fairly recently. They've also announced a new medium format digital
system with lenses to match. I have the Fuji "prosumer" X series system, and I
can tell you that their lenses are very, very high quality - besting most of
the Nikon and Canon offerings with metal construction and in some cases
weather sealing.

~~~
frostburg
They stopped making those a few years ago. Their current offerings (the fuji x
system) are good for people that like nice cameras but don't need to make a
living with them (like me - when I shoot digitally I use a Sony A7r, but I
wouldn't have picked that for actual work and could also have gone Fuji, but
at the time they had only the 16mp first gen x-trans sensor), most of the
lenses are good, but they don't have the coverage of the expansive Nikon or
Canon ecosystems, mirrorless tracking autofocus is still lagging behind pro
dslr bodies (I don't even use autofocus, but again, I don't generally have to
get paid), etc. In the end a 2012 D800e outperforms a brand new X-T2 in image
quality in most scenarios, despite the Fuji having better lenses (and you can
always natively mount superior Otus or Apo-Sonnar lenses on the Nikon).

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uxcn
This may seem like an odd question, but strategically, why acquire the stake
(aside from dividends)?

As I understand, ASML already depends on Carl Zeiss. I would guess ASML will
depend more heavily on them with EUVL over the next decade, but I honestly
haven't done the research.

Is this going to give them more control over production? Does it somehow
reduce their costs?

