Thread

ASML says it sold 'absolutely nothing' in Europe in 2026

402 points · 900 comments · MC995

ramshanker · 1790428677 · focus · HN ↗
Happy to hear India got mentioned by the same executive during that conversation. We are just started buying from them. I went to Semicon India 2026, held in delhi last week. The energy was amazing. Really pleasant. all big names including ASML.
1. roenxi · 1790431375 · focus · HN ↗
  It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory. The little flashes of news as they start settling in to more interesting and high tech industries. Whatever good or evil comes out of their growing geopolitical power at least that is another billion people with a clear enough path to wealth and prosperity.
  1. soulofmischief · 1790431967 · focus · HN ↗
    [dead]
    brookst · 1790432454 · focus · HN ↗
    Is it evenly distributed in China or the US?
    soulofmischief · 1790476496 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    brookst · 1790521245 · focus · HN ↗
    Yes. You implied that the caste system was somehow unique to India. Reality is that every country has its own way of sorting wealth to the most favored.
    soulofmischief · 1790529720 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    kryogen1c · 1790432485 · focus · HN ↗
    I think you mean all systems by design do not distribute wealth and prosperity evenly. Thats actually not a thing.
    soulofmischief · 1790476478 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    irishcoffee · 1790432861 · focus · HN ↗
    I don’t understand why people replying to you are defending a caste system like it’s an ok thing. This site blows my mind sometimes.
    anon291 · 1790433933 · focus · HN ↗
    I'm from what would have been considered a low caste in India. The moment people mention India, people bring up the caste system as if it's the cause of every issue there or as if other countries don't have similar problems. Unequal wealth distributions are common. While it makes sense for Indian nationals to want their government to do better than other countries and eliminate social inequality (a feat no other country has ever accomplished), outside observers comparing ought to benchmark countries against one another fairly. All countries have social inequality. If India were to eliminate social inequality it would become superior to most countries on the planet. That seems to me a utopian dream, but I understand why someone living there might want that.
    For the rest of us, I think we need to be reasonable in our assessments, especially when the other country under discussion is China.
    blackoil · 1790470932 · focus · HN ↗
    Toxic Nationalism.
    soulofmischief · 1790476719 · focus · HN ↗
    What's funny is how many of them jumped to compare India to the US or China... two very corrupt nations each with their own wealth distribution problems... as if that has any bearing at all on India and its caste system. "Hey, I beat my wife, but so does my neighbor! At least I do it with style!"
    All I see is cultural and national biases coming out. I simply did not comment on China's own economic and democratic issues, but everyone assumed I either was ignorant or am playing favorites.
    roenxi · 1790432933 · focus · HN ↗
    I remember when China was poor and everyone was talking about how their communal society guarenteed poverty. Then they started getting wealthy and the story became their communal society was what allowed them to be wealthy. The US is similarly either propelled by or crippled by their individualism depending on whether they've had a good year or not. India will no doubt be similar.
    IMO the evidence suggests it is mostly tax policy and whether people are allowed to start and run businesses. Culture is important insofar as it affects those areas of policy. Getting wealthy is literally as simple as being able to create new wealth and keep it, plus lots of time. People don't choose to stay poor unless someone with a gun forces them to be poor.
    soulofmischief · 1790476401 · focus · HN ↗
    - China has nothing to do with India's cast system, so this is a straw man that attempts to replace the argument with something you're more ready to defend; however, I was talking about India and it's caste system, not China. China also has extreme issues and their people live under oppression, just like in India and the US.
    - As another commenter has noted, modern China is Communist only in name.
    - Your analysis of how simple creating new wealth is, or how people only stay poor when a "gun forces them to" makes it painfully obvious that you and I grew up in different wealth classes. It's not that simple to acquire wealth, and poverty is a massive feedback loop. Wealth compounds, and so does poverty. This is the nature of capitalism.
    Aromasin · 1790432948 · focus · HN ↗
    You could say the same of the aristocracy of Europe over the last few hundred years, but that has effedtively crumbled. There's remnants of "old money" families that were upper-class, but for the most part the merchant class took control of the system that held them down. It took many generations, but the blue blooded dynasties are a dying breed.
    Arguably India has the class system tied to the prevailing religion, but religion too has faded with modernity. Systems have a habit of breaking under strain and time.
    mitxela · 1790433657 · focus · HN ↗
    Isn't every country like that?
    anon291 · 1790433808 · focus · HN ↗
    I am a critic of Indias caste system but China has a state sanctioned caste system while the caste system is condensed by the Indian state and the state takes explicit (many think it over does it) steps to try to mitigate the effects of the caste system
    China on the other hand defined your government benefits and the jobs you may get based on where you were born. People born rurally have to fake documents to work illegally in cities.
    India has a ton of problems, but china is much worse when it comes to human rights. It's not even right to compare the two countries. India is a flawed somewhat liberal democracy (especially for the region of the world, India is a shining beacon on a hill surrounded by repressive regimes), while China is essentially a dictatorship
    rayiner · 1790462760 · focus · HN ↗
    China has a legal caste system in the form of birthplace registration and limits on internal migration.
    throw28273r · 1790577305 · focus · HN ↗
    People can still move and apply for residency in different provinces. Those from rural provinces also get more perks and handouts from the government.
    Does India's caste system work like that? Can a lower caste person apply to be in a higher caste?
  2. brazukadev · 1790432798 · focus · HN ↗
    > a little behind China on the same trajectory
    I'm hoping for India development but that is quite far from the truth yet.
  3. insaneirish · 1790436514 · focus · HN ↗
    > It's is heartening looking at a country like India and thinking that it only seems to be a little behind China on the same trajectory.
    Depends on what you mean by "a little behind". Reading Patrick McGee's "Apple in China" (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_in_China) made me think otherwise.
  4. malshe · 1790438907 · focus · HN ↗
    > a little behind China on the same trajectory
    In my opinion, India is around 30 years behind China. This is unlikely to change for several reasons. However, the primary reason is that no Indian government ever had a manufacturing policy that comes close to China's. The service economy is strong but employs a tiny percentage of the population.
    Most of Indian government spending is on welfare followed by endemic corruption. It leaves very little money for nation building.
    shash · 1790442941 · focus · HN ↗
    Thirty? Try more like 10, and that’s only for the advanced nodes. Everything else, we will have capacity coming online soon enough.
    Design, the gap is nonexistent in terms of talent deployed (though we have some way to go to have homegrown product companies). Which puts us roughly where Europe is.
    Also consider, a tiny percentage of the Indian population is a ridiculous number of people. Dwarfing pretty much any other country except China.
    Your last point on welfare and corruption is also false; 35% of government spend is on interest payments (which is kind of normal for most countries?) and 30% is on infrastructure and other capex. Defence is 8% and central welfare schemes plus co-sponsored schemes with the states are only 26%. The point being, while corruption is definitely a problem, it doesn’t significantly come out of the central budget. And welfare is smaller than infrastructure spending even if it’s quite significant (and it better be, in a country like this).
    Scoundreller · 1790471053 · focus · HN ↗
    For whatever reason, India had quite a lead on pharma manufacturing and still runs carries its own pretty well
    logicchains · 1790489375 · focus · HN ↗
    Indian GDP per capita is predicted to reach $13k (China's current level) around 2050, so closer to 20 years behind.
    Shaanie · 1790502673 · focus · HN ↗
    India will as far as I'm aware get hit pretty hard by climate change too, which will be an additional hurdle for them to clear.
  5. maxglute · 1790442664 · focus · HN ↗
    > another billion people with a clear enough path
    The opposite, all historical clear paths i.e. manufacturing/export led model is closed/closing (geopolitics + being automated away). Less clear service export also closing. The growth path that employs 100s of millions and 10s of millions are not available to Indian.
    Reality is even PRC with most favorable conditions still left behind ~400m people because there's only so many opportunities. It's one thing to have ~1B who made it supporting ~400m who didn't vs India trending towards 1.7 B... and if they end up with 500m that makes it, and 1.2B that doesn't, then things may get very ugly in terms of governance. Now that 500m middle/upper class is large enough that India will in aggregate "make it" as geopolitical power, as in climb the tech tree, but due to sheer population and opportunities that looks now foreclosed, most of Indian's statistically, simply, won't. And when numerator/denominator of haves/have not too skewed, there's nothing haves can do (redistribute) even if they wanted to, which lbh, they won't. IMO this pretty much baked in dynamic for India for next few generations, unless we discover abundance.
  6. gosub100 · 1790458974 · focus · HN ↗
    with generations of parents forcing thier children to either be doctors or engineers, I would have expected India to lead the world in both of those categories.
  7. rayiner · 1790461083 · focus · HN ↗
    India is more than a little behind China. Which is depressing, considering that the two countries were equal in GDP per capita as recently as 1990: <a href="https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/from-1960-to-1990-india-and-china-were-at-par-how-did-it-then-overtake-us" rel="nofollow">https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/from-1960-to-1990-india...
    pixelatedindex · 1790468361 · focus · HN ↗
    They kinda did that to themselves, but it's slowly changing. My partner's iPhone 16 is made in India. They really do lack waste management infrastructure though, and it's pretty crucial for this type of manufacturing. They should also borrow the regional concentration of industries that China has done, it really does make things more efficient.
    dlisboa · 1790472165 · focus · HN ↗
    You can't just "borrow" some of the things from China without China politics. Regional concentration there is directly tied with their hukou system. No democratic government is able to implement that system without collapsing.
    Most of China development is sui generis and not replicable elsewhere.
    Terr_ · 1790493424 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    logicchains · 1790501469 · focus · HN ↗
    You're mixing up Hong Kong and Singapore; Singapore is the one with the massive sovereign wealth fund and subsidized housing.
    Terr_ · 1790524360 · focus · HN ↗
    > You're mixing up Hong Kong and Singapore;
    I lived there, Mister Confidently-Incorrect!
    It sounds like you're saw Singapore Fun Facts once, and in your mind it permanently excluded any other place from having similar features.
    * Like I said, Hong Kong does have a significant sovereign wealth fund that ranks in the top 10. [0]. It doesn't stop mattering just because Singapore runs a bigger one.
    * Here's a article from 2021 with a nice stacked-graph showing 45% public housing [1], close to the half I mentioned.
    [0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
    [1] <a href="https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/249172" rel="nofollow">https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/249172
    usrnm · 1790499078 · focus · HN ↗
    China is very much repeating the history of Japan, and while we can argue how democratic Japan was in the second half of the XX century it definitely wasn't totalitarian.
    christkv · 1790503307 · focus · HN ↗
    Its part Japanese and Koreas model and part British Empire Mercantilism.
    dv_dt · 1790501761 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think the important part is actually one for one replication of the system in China. I think the key parts to deliver progress are diversity of investment decisions, competitiveness in markets, and stable long term goals & fiscal support.
    It's too easy to get tied up in political labels, when any hybrid of public and private support for those helps growth. At this point, I really don't think any political system guarantees the development outcomes, there are examples of all labels which fail one to all of those progress factors.
    roenxi · 1790473953 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    thenthenthen · 1790487228 · focus · HN ↗
    This happens ‘naturally’ but in China’s case I would say the majority is planned, see Shenzhen were 90%(?) of the worlds electronics are coming from. The basically send the engineering corps there, flattened the land with explosives and build a special economic zone.
    roenxi · 1790498549 · focus · HN ↗
    [delayed]
    thenthenthen · 1790506845 · focus · HN ↗
    Its a pretty complex topic. There are some hints in the book Extrastatecraft by Keller Easterling, also the Great Leap Forward by Rem Koolhaas and a dozen more urbanism books. But these only highlight specific aspects, of which there are still many to be talked about.
    thenthenthen · 1790510469 · focus · HN ↗
    The success is also not equally distributed. Living in factory campusses is very brutal etc.
    yorwba · 1790513194 · focus · HN ↗
    Guangdong had a pre-existing agglomeration of black-market capitalists because the proximity to Hong Kong made smuggling viable. From <a href="https://andrewbatson.com/2020/10/20/the-upcoming-westad-chen-book-on-chinas-long-1970s/" rel="nofollow">https://andrewbatson.com/2020/10/20/the-upcoming-westad-chen...:
    "One example we use is the No.3 Memory of Lenin Tractor Repair Factory in Zhuhai, which already in 1973 had started repairing tractors outside the plan. It would take tractors that needed to be repaired from other units, repair them on the side of the plan, and then get payment in kind. That payment in kind was then either bartered further within Guangdong, or smuggled downriver to Hong Kong. By 1973 this unit had a Hong Kong bank account. If this had been discovered at the central level, these people would have been shot."
    Turning Shenzhen from an off-limits border area into a special economic zone made it easy for those businesses to go legit and grow, but they were already waiting in the shadows to seize that opportunity.
    There are a few more SEZs <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_China#List_of_SEZs_and_open_coastal_cities" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin... but none did as well as Shenzhen, probably because of location factors.
    thenthenthen · 1790560267 · focus · HN ↗
    Nice reference, thanks! And yeas, for sure proximity to Hong Kong was a big part of this! It is a financial hub, was a production hub, smuggling, triads, international hub, tax haven, the list goes on.
    ANighRaisin · 1790474772 · focus · HN ↗
    The phones are not made in india. Their final assembly step is in India while the grand majority is in China.
    kennywinker · 1790495376 · focus · HN ↗
    “Made in” has no clean and clear meaning, because our world is so interconnected that everything of sufficient complexity is made from parts that are made from parts that are made in other places.
    The iPhones that are “made in india” contain sub-assemblies that are made in china, that contain chips that are made in taiwan, made of metals that were mined in africa, wrapped in plastics derived from middle east oil.
    servo_sausage · 1790508752 · focus · HN ↗
    In this case, the motivation to finish a product in India is mostly about tariff bypassing; with the final assembly being pretty minimal. Not quite putting the badge on, but close.
    A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product; for most Indian phone production, it's less than 1%. This is also a big reason why Indian export headlines are a bit silly; they never account for the increased import associated with the high value components.
    Unclear if this will change going forward; there are some companies doing a higher proportion of the value chain in India, and some big incentives... But to me it's unlikely.
    kennywinker · 1790526872 · focus · HN ↗
    > the motivation to finish a product in India is mostly about tariff bypassing
    I don’t think that’s the whole story. Apple started making phones in india in 2017, back when the tariff situation was merely a twinkle in epstein’s best friend’s eye. I think back then it was about general supply chain diversity, more than tariffs specifically.
    By 2024 they were making 36 million iPhones in India, you don’t get to that capacity if you start in november, after the election. Way I see it india was the backup system, and tariffs are the reason they switches hard to the backup system - not the reason they built the backup system in the first place.
    > A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product;
    I agree, that’s a useful metric, especially in this case. But it’s also not perfect. E.g. it’s easy to have a >50% made in USA product if all the parts are made in china but the last assembly step takes time. Labour in the US is more expensive, so 5-10min of clicking parts together can easily cost more than the parts themselves.
    radiator · 1790499982 · focus · HN ↗
    But it would be hard to keep up with a country which has grown its GDP by 50 times since 1990, like China did.
  8. kubb · 1790463586 · focus · HN ↗
    Hope they can solve the whole littering problem somehow.
2. maxglute · 1790441968 · focus · HN ↗
  TBH India going to sanctioned if they ever make meaningful inroad. Outsourcing some IV design to Bengaluru, Hyderabad, prune is not the same as if India wants to start stepping on leading edge fabrication money printing toes. But short/medium term, western semi projected to have 100,000s talent shortage so India probably best hope for western semi to stay staffed. VS PRC who is brrrting out enough talent for entire indigenous vertical semis supply chain.
3. jayanmn · 1790497578 · focus · HN ↗
  We are making progress but it is slow. Current govt is more for headline management.
  Govt do work as long as beneficiaries are good friends - tatas and adani for example. I cautiously optimistic

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