Tech & AI
Besi orders jump 96% on AI packaging demand, beating forecasts; chip-equipment maker launches €100 million buyback
The Dutch maker of chip-assembly machines said hybrid-bonding orders have more than doubled this year, but guided fourth-quarter revenue roughly flat.
HedgeWeekly Tech & AI Desk ·
BE Semiconductor Industries (Besi), the Dutch maker of equipment that assembles and stacks chips, said on October 22 that third-quarter orders rose 96% from a year earlier to €342.6 million, ahead of the €298 million analysts expected, according to Visible Alpha data cited by Reuters. Orders were up 17% from the second quarter. Revenue more than doubled to €283.4 million and net income rose to €107.2 million.
The company said orders for hybrid-bonding systems have more than doubled so far this year compared with all of 2025. Hybrid bonding joins chips directly copper-to-copper without solder bumps, allowing tighter stacks for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), the fast memory used beside AI processors, and for chiplet designs. Besi cited demand from HBM, logic chiplets, co-packaged optics and edge AI. Gross margin was 65.2%, up 3 percentage points from a year earlier but slightly below the second quarter's 65.7%.
Besi guided fourth-quarter revenue broadly in line with the third quarter, within 5% either way, and said some customers had asked for deliveries to be timed with their production plans for the first half of 2027. LSEG data showed analysts had expected fourth-quarter revenue of €291.5 million. Chief executive Richard Blickman told Reuters the company does not see ASML as a hybrid-bonding rival, after a SemiAnalysis report last week suggested ASML may be developing a competing tool. Besi also announced a new €100 million share buyback running from October 27 to October 2027.
Why it matters: Besi is a leading listed supplier of advanced chip-packaging equipment, a bottleneck in AI hardware as makers stack more memory and logic together. Its shares have roughly halved from a June peak on worries about a possible ASML entry and the pace at which memory makers adopt hybrid bonding, so the order beat and the comments on ASML address two key bear arguments. Watch whether delayed deliveries turn into first-half 2027 revenue and whether HBM makers commit to hybrid bonding in their next generation.