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. 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.

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