ASML's Story: A Bookings Cliff, a Lowered Bar, and a Record Comeback

The story

Late 2023 into early 2024: steady as she goes

Q4 FY2023 revenue beat guidance (€7.2B versus a €6.7-7.1B range), and Q1 FY2024 landed exactly at the guided midpoint. The 2022 Investor Day's "€30-40B revenue by 2025" scenario still looked achievable, and earnings-call tone held a steady 7-8 out of 10.

Q3 FY2024: the bookings cliff

Just the second quarter under new CEO Christophe Fouquet (who succeeded Peter Wennink on April 24, 2024), net bookings collapsed from €5.57B to €2.6B, and management acknowledged that "relatively low order intake reflects a slower recovery in traditional end markets." The company cut its 2025 revenue scenario — originally set at €30-40B back in 2022 — down to the lower half of that range, €30-35B: a genuine guidance-scenario withdrawal, and the tone score for the quarter hit its series low of 2 out of 10.

The response: a longer horizon and more structured risk disclosure

A month later, in November 2024, ASML held a new Capital Markets Day and shifted investor attention to a much longer horizon: "€44-60B revenue by 2030." Its filings changed too — the FY2024 20-F (filed February 2025) added a new risk factor, "We face challenges to meet expected demand," absent from the FY2023 filing, and the FY2025 20-F introduced, for the first time, a consolidated "Overview of risk factors" summary page, adding "risks related to the use of artificial intelligence" as a distinct new item.

Late 2025: the script flips completely

Q4 FY2025 net bookings hit €13.2B, the highest of all 12 tracked quarters, and management called it "a record quarter by any measure." The tone score jumped to 9 out of 10, and both Q1 and Q2 FY2026 beat the top end of their guidance ranges. Guidance for Q3 FY2026, given on the Q2 FY2026 call, calls for €11-12B in revenue — more than double Q1 FY2024's €5.3B, just two years earlier.

Guidance scorecard

All 11 tracked quarters with confirmed results met or beat guidance — the only real blemish was the single guidance-scenario cut in Q3 FY2024. The pattern since then looks less like the company suddenly getting better at execution and more like a conservative bar, set once after the bookings cliff, being consistently cleared.

Source: each cited earnings call transcript's next-quarter guidance and the following quarter's 6-K reported results.

Timeline

• Oct 2023Q3 FY2023: steady performance, beating guidance.
• Apr 2024Christophe Fouquet becomes CEO, succeeding Peter Wennink.
• Oct 2024Q3 FY2024: net bookings collapse to €2.6B; 2025 revenue scenario cut to €30-35B; tone score hits a series-low 2/10.
• Nov 2024New Capital Markets Day sets a 2030 target (€44-60B); the FY2024 20-F adds a new "meet expected demand" risk factor.
• Feb 2026FY2025 20-F adds a consolidated risk-factor summary page and a new AI-specific risk factor.
• Jan 2026 (Q4 FY2025 call)Record €13.2B net bookings; tone score hits 9/10.
• 2026Two straight quarters meeting or beating guidance; Q3 FY2026 guidance implies revenue more than double early-2024 levels.

Our read

ASML's last three years trace a sharp dip and a full recovery: a genuine bookings collapse and guidance-scenario cut under a brand-new CEO, followed by 11 consecutive quarters of meeting or beating a bar that had been deliberately lowered. The recovery culminated in the best bookings quarter of the entire series. What keeps this from being a clean resolution is that management has already flagged a specific, concrete risk for the year ahead — a sharp expected decline in China revenue — that echoes the shape of the 2024 shock closely enough to be worth tracking quarter by quarter.

What we still don't know

• How reliable the Q3 FY2025 and Q1 FY2026 tone scores are is an open question — the earnings-call transcripts available for those two quarters were only about a quarter of the length of other quarters, meaning fuller prepared remarks weren't available to review.
• How the January 2026-announced restructuring (roughly 1,700 job cuts) was discussed on subsequent calls isn't covered here, since the earnings calls collected run only through Q2 FY2026.
• Whether the China revenue decline management flagged for 2026 actually materializes, and how large it turns out to be, requires the next several quarters of results.
• Q3 FY2026 actual results against the guided €11-12B hadn't been reported as of this writing.