⚠ The China Export-Control ViseHigh threat

The gravest external threat to ASML's monopoly is not a competitor but a government policy: the export controls that forbid it from selling its most advanced machines to China. Under pressure from the United States, the Dutch government has barred ASML from shipping EUV to China entirely¹, and has progressively restricted even the older DUV machines. This matters because China has been a huge market — 36% of ASML's sales in 2024 and 29% in 2025², as Chinese chipmakers rushed to buy every machine they were still permitted before the door closed further — and that revenue is now shrinking under the tightening rules: 15.9% of sales in the first half of 2026, down 22% on a year earlier³.

The threat cuts two ways. In the near term, it removes a large, willing buyer from ASML's addressable market, and the rules could tighten further, or China could retaliate against ASML's business there. In the long term, by cutting China off, the controls give Beijing the strongest possible incentive — and it is spending nationally on the attempt — to build a domestic lithography industry that could, one distant day, both supply China's own needs and challenge ASML at the mature end. ASML did not choose this; it is caught between two superpowers, its commercial interests subordinated to national-security policy it cannot control. The monopoly on the machines is intact, but the freedom to sell them is not the company's own, and China is the sharpest edge of that constraint.