◆ Inside the Latest Results (2025 & Q2 2026)

ASML's recent results read as a monopoly firing on every cylinder as the artificial-intelligence build-out drives demand to new highs. For the 2025 financial year, the company reported total net sales of €32.7 billion and net income of €9.6 billion¹, at a gross margin of 52.8% and earnings of €24.73 per share, throwing off €11 billion of free cash flow. It ended the year with an order backlog of around €38.8 billion, with commitments stretching through 2027² — a record book of business that underscored how much demand the AI era is pulling forward. The service business, Installed Base Management, contributed €8.2 billion and grew over 25%, the recurring, high-margin annuity compounding beneath the equipment sales.

The momentum accelerated through 2026. In the second quarter, ASML posted net sales of €9.3 billion — above the top of its guided range — with a gross margin of 54.0%, comfortably better than the 51–52% guided, and net income of €2.9 billion. The beat was driven partly by the installed-base business, which came in €300 million above expectations as customers, scrambling for capacity, paid for productivity-enhancing upgrades to squeeze more output from machines already in their fabs — a vivid illustration of the performance-upgrade dynamic at work. On the strength of surging AI-driven demand, ASML raised its full-year 2026 guidance for the second time, now expecting total net sales of €43–45 billion (up sharply from an earlier €36–40 billion) at a gross margin of 54–56%, and it guided the third quarter to €11–12 billion. These are not the numbers of a company merely holding its position; they are the numbers of a monopoly whose demand is inflecting upward as the world races to build AI.

Two honest footnotes belong in any reading of these results. First, ASML has stopped disclosing quarterly bookings, so the clearest real-time gauge of demand is gone; investors must now judge the cycle through shipments, guidance, and the installed-base trend, with a longer lag — a modest but real reduction in transparency at exactly the moment demand is most closely watched. Second, and more importantly, these are boom numbers, and booms are not the baseline. The extraordinary strength is real, but it rests heavily on the AI capital-spending cycle continuing at its recent pace, and the guidance raises that thrill the market on the way up are exactly what reverse on the way down. The moat ensures ASML captures essentially all of this demand — no rival takes a euro of it — but the level of demand is set by a cyclical, AI-concentrated industry, not by ASML. The latest results are a demonstration of how good this business is when the wind blows hard, which it now does; they are not a promise that the wind blows forever. Read them as proof of the monopoly's power and the AI era's pull — and as a reminder that the stock already prices in a great deal of their continuation.