Philippa Kaur

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It has been an inhospitable winter in Boston. Following the resignation of Claudine Gay as president of Harvard University on January 2nd, her interim replacement said he could not recall “a period of comparable tension” at the institution. Ms Gay was ousted after a plagiarism scandal erupted over her academic work. But her position had been precarious for months; some donors were upset that she seemed to tolerate students’ antisemitic outbursts. For conservatives, Ms Gay, who was Harvard’s first black and second female president, was also a symbol of liberal elites’ fixation on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).The ostensibly hard-headed sorts who attend Harvard’s management school, and that school’s ties to harder-headed corporate America, might be expected to insulate it from wider campus convulsions. Not quite. Businesses too are facing a DEI reckoning. As a consequence, Harvard Business School (HBS) is facing pressure on two fronts.Students at HBS are the holders of the winning tickets in the lottery of American capitalism. On average, they arrive with five years of work experience, nearly half of them from prestigious consulting or financial firms. Two years studying for the 115-year-old institution’s MBA degree all but guarantees a comfortable professional perch. Some do much better still. The fortunes of HBS alumni have helped build its reputation and, thanks to their generous donations, stock its coffers (combined with annual income from MBA tuition fees, executive education, a publishing business and online courses, in 2022 the school made $966m in revenue).After the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a police officer in May 2020 HBS underwent a self-examination typical of other American institutions at the time. “What we could agree on is that the experience of black students at the school, as they reported upon graduation, was not quite the same as white students’. There was a deficit,” says Robert Kaplan, a faculty member involved in the review. HBS’s approach to DEI has since resembled that of corporate America—and of the rest of Harvard. In 2021 it hired a chief diversity-and-inclusion officer and tried to increase the diversity of the student body and faculty.Bringing DEI into the business-school classroom has been more controversial. Compared with the rest of the university, HBS faculty are probably less woke. The pressure for more DEI came mostly from students, recounts a professor. And if the aim of management education is even partly to simulate the challenges faced by grown-up executives, it is hard to imagine a curriculum ignoring such issues entirely. America’s demography is changing, and so are workers’ expectations about what their workplace ought to look like. The current backlash against DEI policies requires bosses to be far more thoughtful about how they approach them. It is requiring the same of business schools. Easier said than done.MBA students at HBS are taught using the “case method”. Classes ask students to put themselves in the shoes of bosses facing a specific problem. Since 2020 students have complained that those shoes do not fit. The result has been a significant increase in the ethnic and gender diversity of the case “protagonists”. But, as one faculty member notes, “the idea that you would be studying a chief financial officer doing a discounted-cashflow model, substitute a white man for a black woman, and then high-five all around is ridiculous.”HBS made a course called “inclusion” compulsory for first-year MBA students in the academic year of 2021-22. A version of it, which focused heavily on race and gender, had previously been optional; “We heard from the students that you’re teaching the course to the people that don’t need it,” says a faculty member with knowledge of the course. Many students and staff felt the new course lacked rigour and, partly because it was taught to a single group of 1,000 people, discouraged discussion.Echoing worries about free speech on other campuses, professors whisper that conservative and religious students feel less able to speak up more generally. The view is supported by the results of a student survey shown to faculty last year. Shortly after the attacks on Israel on October 7th and beginning of the war in Gaza, Bill Ackman’s comments about the war and Harvard’s campus politics caused some HBS students to lobby the school to disinvite the billionaire investor (and HBS graduate) from appearing on campus as a “protagonist” in a case about his hedge fund.As in boardrooms, HBS’s thinking on DEI is in flux. The inclusion course was first redesigned, to less damning reviews, then shelved. In June 2023 Francesca Gino, one of its architects, was put on unpaid administrative leave after accusations of fraud in her work (she has filed a lawsuit against Harvard University challenging her dismissal and alleging gender-based discrimination.) In the end, Mr Ackman did visit. Like America Inc, HBS is learning to walk the DEI tightrope—the hard way. ■ More

NERVOUS TRAVELLERS will break out in a cold sweat seeing pictures of a gaping hole in the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 MAX 9, blown out at 15,000 feet (4,600 metres) after the plane had taken off over Oregon on January 5th. Nervous investors will have the same reaction to share prices of Boeing and Spirit AeroSystems, a firm spun off by the planemaker in 2005 which manufactured the fuselage and the failed part, a plug in the airframe where some larger MAX models have an emergency exit. The two companies’ market value plunged by 8% and 11%, respectively, following the incident.Miraculously, no one was seriously injured; had the aircraft rapidly depressurised at a higher altitude the outcome could have been worse. The precise cause of the malfunction remains unclear. The plane, delivered to Alaska Airlines on November 11th, was brand new. Similar unused emergency exits have been installed on a previous version of the 737 without problems.Regulators around the world have grounded the entire fleet of MAX 9s with the same door-plug, pending inspections to ensure their airworthiness. Early indications suggested a one-off manufacturing problem originating at Spirit, noted Bernstein, a broker. But on January 8th United Airlines said that preliminary examinations had identified other planes with “installation issues” connected with the door, such as “bolts that needed additional tightening”.image: The EconomistThankfully for Boeing, its airline customers and their passengers, fastening the loose bolt should not be too difficult. The MAX 9, a larger version of Boeing’s short-haul workhorse, makes up just over 15% of all 737 MAXes in service, and an even smaller share of unfilled orders (see chart 1). Only four out of five of the existing MAX 9 fleet, or 171 aircraft in all, have the unused exits. The bigger problem for Boeing is that the episode reinforces the impression that it has lost its way.The descent of America’s once high-flying aerospace champion began in October 2018, when a 737 MAX crashed in Indonesia. Five months later the same model crashed in Ethiopia. Both disasters were linked to problems with flight-control software and led to the grounding of the entire 737 MAX fleet for 20 months while the software was fixed. Boeing paid around $20bn in fines and compensation. Critics alleged that the company was paying too much attention to returning money to shareholders and not enough to engineering. A new chief executive brought in at the start of 2020 to salvage Boeing’s image, Dave Calhoun, promised to return Boeing to its roots of technical excellence.The door drama is only the latest sign that Mr Calhoun’s task remains incomplete. Deliveries of the company’s long-haul 787 Dreamliner have been suspended several times in the past few years in light of quality-control problems. In April 2023 Boeing said it would have to fix the vertical stabilisers on 737s in production at Spirit and in storage. Although it was not a safety risk, the defect put another dent in Boeing’s reputation. Another knock came in August, when the company said it would need to correct improperly drilled holes in part of the pressurised cabin of 165 737 MAXes assembled by Spirit. Ironing out manufacturing niggles is one reason that deliveries of Boeing’s 777X, another long-haul jet, will begin only in 2025, six years behind schedule.The 777x delay alone has set the company back at least $8bn in extra costs. The close call over Oregon will pile on more costs still, by forcing it to spruce up production processes. Boeing has not turned an annual profit since 2018. It lags behind its European arch-rival, Airbus, in orders for short-haul jets, by 4,800 to 7,300. It is struggling to rehire skilled workers laid off during the covid-19 lull as it tries to increase production of the 737 MAX from 38 a month to 50 by 2025-26, in order to meet strong demand from airlines dealing with a surge in post-pandemic revenge flying.image: The EconomistSome of Boeing’s woes on Mr Calhoun’s watch were beyond his control. Soon after he took over at the start of 2020 covid sent the industry into a tailspin. Both Boeing and Airbus lost roughly half of their market value between March and autumn of that year. But whereas Airbus shares now trade at an all-time high, Boeing’s are worth half what they were at their peak in early 2019 (see chart 2). If the American planemaker is to soar again, Mr Calhoun will need not just to respond to problems but prevent any more of them. ■ More

TEN TIMES a second an object shaped like a thick pizza box and holding a silicon wafer takes off three times faster than a manned rocket. For a few milliseconds it moves at a constant speed before being halted abruptly with astonishing precision—within a single atom of its target. This is not a high-energy physics experiment. It is the latest lithography machine dreamed up by ASML, a manufacturer of chipmaking tools, to project nanoscopic chip patterns onto silicon wafers. On January 5th Intel, an American semiconductor giant, became the first proud owner of this technical marvel’s initial components for assembly at its factory in Oregon.image: The EconomistLike the outwardly unassuming machine, its Dutch maker is full of surprises. The company’s market value has quadrupled in the past five years, to €260bn ($285bn), making it Europe’s most valuable technology firm (see chart). Between 2012 and 2022 its sales and net profit both rose roughly four-fold, to €21bn and €6bn, respectively. In late 2023 ASML’s operating margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a hardware business and more than that of Apple, the world’s biggest maker of consumer electronics.Such stellar performance, which is set to shine brightly again when ASML reports quarterly results on January 24th, is now routine. The firm holds a monopoly on a key link in the world’s most critical supply chain: without its kit it is next to impossible to make cutting-edge chips that go into smartphones and data centres where artificial intelligence (AI) is trained. With global semiconductor sales forecast to double to $1.3trn by 2032, every big country and every big chipmaker wants ASML’s gear. The company has become so important in the Sino-American techno-tussle that, as it recently emerged, America’s government pressed ASML to cancel planned deliveries of even its older machines to China.Yet ASML’s spectacular success is also underpinned by two other, less obvious factors. The company has created a network of suppliers and technology partners that may be the closest thing Europe has to Silicon Valley. And its business model ingeniously combines hardware with software and data. These unsung elements of ASML’s success challenge the notion that the old continent is incapable of developing a successful digital platform.ASML’s complex machines perform a simple task. They project chip blueprints onto photosensitive silicon wafers. In 1986, when its first model was delivered, individual transistors measured micrometres and its kit was almost like a glorified photocopier, explains Marc Hijink, a Dutch journalist and author of “Focus—How ASML Conquered the Chip World”, a new book. Today, with transistors shrunk by a factor of a thousand, ASML lithography gear is possibly the most sophisticated equipment ever sold commercially.ASML and its partners pulled off this incredible shrinking trick with engineering that has a science-fiction ring to it. The process starts with powerful lasers incinerating droplets of molten tin, each no thicker than a fifth of a human hair and travelling at more than 250kph. This produces extremely short-wavelength light (extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, in the jargon) which is then reflected by a set of mirrors so smooth that the biggest imperfection is no bigger than the distance grass can grow in a millisecond. To make all this worth a chipmaker’s while—the latest model costs more than $300m—and expose enough chips, the object that holds the wafer, called a “table”, has to accelerate faster than a rocket and come to a stop at exactly the right spot.To get an idea of what it takes to build such a device, pay a visit to a nondescript factory in Neukölln, a neighbourhood of Berlin. This is where ASML makes, among other things, “mirror blocks”, the main part of a wafer table. These are sturdy pieces of a special ceramic material, a square 8cm thick and measuring about 50cm on each side. Some get polished, measured, repolished, remeasured and so on, for nearly a year—until they are exactly the right shape, including allowances for the fact that they will sag by a few nanometres once installed.The factory is emblematic of the company’s unusual network of suppliers. Although its owner, Berliner Glas, was acquired by ASML in 2020, it lives halfway between being an independent company and a unit of the Dutch parent. Something similar is true of the 800 or so mostly European firms that help put together ASML’s machines. ASML owns stakes in only a few of them. Yet their interdependence makes them act like a single organisation.ASML outsources over 90% of what it costs to build one of its marvels and directly employs less than half the estimated 100,000 people the feat requires. This is partly because of its history. When it was spun out of Philips, a Dutch electronics giant, in 1984, ASML seemed stillborn. Its idea to build a “silicon stepper”, the original name of the chip-copying machine, was promising. But it had not much else going for it, in particular no production lines. It instead relied on specialist suppliers, many of them also former Philips units, such as VDL, a contract manufacturer.The outsourcing is also a function of technology. The different parts of a lithography machine are so cutting-edge that doing it all could overwhelm one firm. “You have to decide where you add the most value and let others do the rest,” says a former ASML insider. Semiconductor economics, too, favours not doing everything yourself. The industry is prone to booms and busts, because demand moves up and down more quickly than chipmakers can install capacity. Prices rise and fall as shortages turn to gluts. Manufacturers of chipmaking gear are exposed to the same cycle. That makes owning all the assets risky; better to shift some risk to suppliers, who can limit it by catering to customers working to different business cycles.The required hyper-specialisation prevents the risk-reducing double sourcing that is prevalent in many other industries. ​​In the case of ASML, technical demands are so high and production volumes so low (it shipped 317 machines in 2022) that it would be uneconomical to manage several suppliers for a single part even if they could be found. For such crucial components as lasers and mirrors, which are made by Trumpf and Zeiss, two German firms, respectively, it is impossible. Wayne Allan, who is in charge of sourcing on ASML’s board, talks of “co-dependency”.The upshot is that ASML mostly limits itself to being the system’s architect. It decides who does what, defines the interfaces between the main parts of its machines (“modules”) and carries out research and development. This set-up makes it easier to test the pieces and transport the machines (shipping the latest model to Intel involved 250 crates and 13 containers). It also gives suppliers more freedom, including to experiment with novel technologies.It all works because ASML has cultivated a culture of trust and transparency while preserving elements of competition. Suppliers are not squeezed to the last penny. Quite the opposite: “We need them to stay healthy,” says Mr Allan. Information flows freely throughout the network, particularly between ASML, Trumpf and Zeiss. Engineering teams from different firms work together. Patents are shared, as are some financial data and, sometimes, profits. “At meetings you can’t tell who is from which firm,” reports a former Zeiss executive.At the same time, many suppliers compete with each other indirectly, for instance providing similar parts for different generations of ASML’s machines. If a supplier runs into trouble, ASML dispatches a rapid intervention force, sometimes even if such help is not welcome. As a last resort, ASML can buy a supplier, as it did with Berliner Glas.It is this loosely coupled structure that allowed ASML to outcompete more vertically integrated rivals, reckons Willy Shih of Harvard Business School. Nikon and Canon, two Japanese firms which once led the market for lithography machines, never managed to commercialise EUV kit. (Canon is trying to stage a return with “nanoimprint” lithography, which physically stamps chip designs onto wafers.)ASML is now entrenching this dominance by complementing its hardware with software and data. When real rockets take off, their trajectory is wobbly and needs to be smoothed out by a guidance computer, which collects data to predict and adapt their course. A wafer table in a lithography machine is similarly likely to miss the mark at first. The same is true of the rest of the device. It is only with the help of lots of data and machine learning, a type of AI, that they can be fine-tuned—and made more accurate. This is rapidly turning ASML into an AI platform.Once Intel gets all the modules for its new machine, it will take about two weeks to put the thing together. Adapting it to its new location will take a few months. Bits may have moved in transport, gravity may be slightly different in Oregon from the Netherlands and other kit nearby may create interference. Tests will collect data and trigger adjustments. “We have thousands of knobs we can turn to put it into a perfect state,” says Jos Benschop, who is in charge of technology at ASML.ASML also uses the data from one machine to turn the knobs of others. Of the roughly 5,500 devices it has sold since its founding 39 years ago, 95% are still in operation and many send data home to headquarters. That will make its products even better, leading to more chipmaking, which generates even more data—and so on, in a “flywheel” more typically associated with digital services such as internet search. Even if Canon, Nikon or a Chinese competitor finally managed to build EUV machines as powerful as ASML’s, it would not be able to catch up with the Dutch firm, argues Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, a firm of analysts. “It’s mathematically impossible, as long as ASML keeps collecting data from all the installed base.”If rivals cannot topple ASML, can anything? Maybe physics. Even with the best AI, you can’t shrink transistors for ever (certainly not in a commercially viable way). If technical requirements become too otherworldly the supplier network may unravel. Or maybe economics. Chipmakers may recoil at ASML’s data hunger, which extends to other linked devices in their factories. Some are pushing back against its digital expansion, insiders say.Then there is geopolitics. ASML’s share price dipped after news broke about the cancelled deliveries to China. The worry is less over lower sales; ASML cannot build its machines fast enough anyway. Of greater concern is the risk that strict export controls could in time push China to build its own chipmaking-gear industry. That could one day threaten ASML’s position at the centre of the sector. For the time being, though, the company’s network and its network effects remain indomitable. Who said Europe couldn’t do tech? ■Correction (9th January): An earlier version of this article stated that Jos Benschop is a board member at ASML. He is actually a vice-president at the company. Apologies.To stay on top of the biggest stories in business and technology, sign up to the Bottom Line, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter. More

TEN TIMES a second an object shaped like a thick pizza box and holding a silicon wafer takes off three times faster than a manned rocket. For a few milliseconds it moves at a constant speed before being halted abruptly with astonishing precision—within a single atom of its target. This is not a high-energy physics experiment. It is the latest lithography machine dreamed up by ASML, a manufacturer of chipmaking tools, to project nanoscopic chip patterns onto silicon wafers. On January 5th Intel, an American semiconductor giant, became the first proud owner of this technical marvel’s initial components for assembly at its factory in Oregon.image: The EconomistLike the outwardly unassuming machine, its Dutch maker is full of surprises. The company’s market value has quadrupled in the past five years, to €260bn ($285bn), making it Europe’s most valuable technology firm (see chart 1). Between 2012 and 2022 its revenues and net income both rose roughly four-fold, to €21bn and €6bn, respectively. At the end of 2023 ASML’s operating margin exceeded 34%, staggering for a hardware business and more than that of Apple, the world’s biggest maker of consumer electronics (see chart 2).Such stellar performance, which is likely to shine even more brightly when ASML reports quarterly results on January 24th, is now routine. The firm holds a monopoly on a key link in the world’s most critical supply chain: without its kit it is next to impossible to make cutting-edge computer processors, such as those that go into smartphones and data centres where artificial intelligence (AI) is trained. With global semiconductor sales forecast to double to $1.3trn by 2032, every big country and every big chipmaker wants ASML’s gear. The company has become so important in the Sino-American techno-tussle that, as it emerged at the start of the year, President Joe Biden’s administration pressed ASML to cancel planned deliveries of even its older machines to China.image: The EconomistYet ASML’s spectacular success is also underpinned by two other, less obvious factors. The company has created a network of suppliers and technology partners that may be the closest thing Europe has to Silicon Valley. And its business model ingeniously combines hardware with software and data. These unsung elements of ASML’s success challenge the notion that the old continent is incapable of developing a successful digital platform.ASML’s complex machines perform a simple task. They project the blueprints of computer chips onto photosensitive silicon wafers. In 1986, when its first model was delivered, individual transistors measured micrometres and the company’s kit was almost like a glorified photocopier, explains Marc Hijink, a Dutch journalist and author of “Focus—How ASML Conquered the Chip World”, a new book. Today, with transistors shrunk by a factor of a thousand, ASML lithography gear is possibly the most sophisticated equipment ever sold commercially.ASML and its partners pulled off this incredible shrinking trick with engineering that has a science-fiction ring to it. The process starts with powerful lasers incinerating droplets of molten tin, each no thicker than a fifth of a human hair and travelling at more than 250km per hour. This produces extremely short-wavelength light (extreme ultraviolet, or EUV, in the jargon) which is then reflected by a set of mirrors so smooth that the biggest imperfection is no bigger than the distance grass can grow in a millisecond. To make all this worth a chipmaker’s while—the latest model costs more than $300m—and expose enough chips, the object that holds the wafer, called a “table”, has to accelerate faster than a rocket and come to a stop at exactly the right spot.To get an idea of what it takes to build such a device, pay a visit to a nondescript factory in Neukölln, a neighbourhood of Berlin. This is where ASML makes, among other things, “mirror blocks”, the main part of a wafer table. These are sturdy pieces of a special ceramic material, a square 8cm thick and measuring about 50cm on each side. Some get polished, measured, repolished, remeasured and so on, for nearly a year—until they are exactly the right shape, including allowances for the fact that they will sag a few nanometers once installed.The factory is emblematic of the company’s unusual network of suppliers. Although its owner, Berliner Glas, was acquired by ASML in 2020, it lives halfway between being an independent company and a unit of the Dutch parent. Something similar is true of the 800 or so mostly European firms that help put together ASML’s machines. ASML only owns stakes in a few of them. Yet their interdependence makes them act like a single organisation.ASML outsources over 90% of what it costs to build one of its engineering marvels and directly employs fewer than half the estimated 100,000 people the feat requires. This is partly owing to history. When the company was spun out of Philips, a Dutch electronics giant, in 1984, ASML seemed stillborn. Its idea to build a “silicon stepper”, the original name of the chip-copying machine, was promising. But it had not much else going for it, in particular no production lines. It instead relied on specialist suppliers, many of them also former Philips units, such as VDL, a contract manufacturer.Outsourcing is also a function of technology. The different parts of a lithography machine are so cutting-edge that doing it all could easily overwhelm any single company. “You have to decide where you add the most value and let others do the rest,” explains a former ASML insider. Semiconductor economics likewise favours not doing everything yourself. The chip industry is prone to booms and busts, because demand moves up and down much more quickly than manufacturers can install capacity. Prices rise and fall as shortages turn to gluts. Makers of chipmaking gear are exposed to the same cycles. That makes keeping all the assets in-house risky; better to transfer some of that risk on to suppliers, who can in turn limit it by catering to customers who work to different business cycles.The required hyper-specialisation prevents the risk-reducing double sourcing that is prevalent in many other industries. ​​In the case of ASML, technical demands are so high and production volumes so low (it shipped 317 machines in 2022) that it would be uneconomical to manage several suppliers for a single part even if they could be found. For such crucial components as lasers and mirrors, which are made by Trumpf and Zeiss, two German firms, respectively, it is impossible. Wayne Allan, who is in charge of sourcing on ASML’s board, talks of “co-dependency”.The upshot is that ASML mostly limits itself to being the system’s architect. It decides who does what, defines the interfaces between the key parts of its machines, which it calls “modules”, and carries out research and development. This setup makes it easier to test the pieces and transport the machines (shipping the latest model to Intel involved 250 crates and 13 containers). It also gives suppliers more freedom, including to experiment with novel technologies.It all works because ASML has cultivated a culture of trust and transparency while preserving elements of competition. Suppliers are not squeezed to the last penny. Quite the opposite: “We need them to stay healthy,” says Mr Allan. Information flows freely throughout the network, particularly between ASML, Trumpf and Zeiss. Engineering teams from different firms work together, patents are shared, as is some financial data and, sometimes, profits. “At meetings you can’t tell who is from which firm,” reports a former Zeiss executive.At the same time, many suppliers compete with each other indirectly, for instance providing similar parts for different generations of ASML’s machines. If a supplier runs into trouble, ASML dispatches a rapid intervention force, sometimes even if such help is not welcome. As a last resort, ASML can buy a supplier, as was the case with Berliner Glas.It is this loosely coupled structure that allowed ASML to outcompete its more vertically integrated rivals, reckons Willy Shih of Harvard Business School. Nikon and Canon, two Japanese firms which once led the market for lithography machines, never managed to commercialise the more complex EUV kit. (Canon is trying to stage a return with “nanoimprint” lithography, which physically stamps chip designs onto wafers.)ASML is now entrenching this dominance by complementing its hardware with software and data. When real rockets take off, their trajectory is wobbly and needs to be smoothed out by a guidance computer, which collects data to predict and adapt their course. A wafer table in a lithography machine is similarly likely to miss the mark at first. The same is true of the rest of the device. It is only with the help of lots of data and machine learning, a type of AI, that they can be fine-tuned—and made more accurate. This is rapidly turning ASML into an AI platform.Once Intel has received all the modules for its new machine, it will take about two weeks to put the thing together. Adapting it to its new location will take several months. Bits may have moved in transport, gravity may be slightly different in Oregon than in Veldhoven and other machines nearby may create interference. Tests will collect reams of data and trigger adjustments. “We have thousands of knobs we can turn to put it into a perfect state,” says Jos Benschop, another ASML board member.ASML also uses the data from one machine to turn the knobs of others. Of the roughly 5,500 devices it has sold since its founding 39 years ago, 95% are still in operation and many send data home to headquarters. That will make its products even better, leading to more chipmaking, which generates even more data—and so on, in a “flywheel” more typically associated with digital services such as internet search. Even if Canon, Nikon or a Chinese competitor finally managed to build EUV machines as powerful as ASML’s, it would not be able to catch up with the Dutch firm, argues Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, a research firm. “It’s mathematically impossible, as long as ASML keeps collecting data from all the installed base.”If rivals cannot topple ASML, can anything? Physics is one potential hurdle. Even with the best AI, you cannot shrink transistors for ever (certainly not in a commercially viable way). If technical requirements become too otherworldly the supplier network may unravel. Economics is another. Chipmakers may recoil at ASML’s data hunger, which extends to other linked devices in their factories. Some have apparently started to push back against its digital expansion, insiders say.Then there is geopolitics. ASML’s share price dipped after news broke about the cancelled deliveries to China. The worry is less over lower sales; ASML cannot build its machines fast enough anyway. Of greater concern is the risk that strict export controls could in time push China to build its own chipmaking-gear industry. That could one day threaten ASML’s position at the centre of the industry. For the time being, though, the company’s network and its network effects remain indomitable. Who said Europe couldn’t do tech? ■ More