⚠ Even a Monopolist Can't Overreach ForeverLow threat

Pricing power is real and immense, but even a monopolist faces a long-run limit: press too hard, and you strengthen every incentive for customers and governments to fund an alternative. If ASML extracted the absolute maximum from its customers, it would sharpen their motivation — and their governments' — to support a rival, accelerate domestic-lithography efforts, or push research into technologies that need less of ASML's most expensive machines. The very customers who have no choice today have every reason to work toward having one tomorrow if the price of dependence grows too steep, and their pockets and patience are deep.

ASML appears to understand this, pricing to capture a rich but not ruinous share of the value it creates and investing in the long-term health of its customers and ecosystem rather than squeezing them to the last euro. But the tension is permanent: the monopoly's pricing power is bounded not by competition today but by the risk of creating competition tomorrow, and by the political reality that a company earning monopoly rents on a strategic technology invites intervention. The prices can keep rising as the machines grow more capable and valuable, and they have. But the ceiling, invisible and distant as it is, exists — set by the point at which the cost of depending on ASML would finally justify the enormous expense and effort of not depending on it. A wise monopolist prices below that line, and ASML, so far, has — even at ~€200M+ per EUV system and ~€350M for High-NA¹.