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ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
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Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#82> ASML also announced a new share buyback programme of up to €12 billion, to be executed by 31 December 2028. Oh boy. This fills me with dread. I've never seen a company that starts doing buybacks not become a financialized hollow shell within a decade. Being an irreplaceable monopoly on the commanding heights of the digital economy makes this even worse.
I've never seen a company that ...
Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.
Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#83Given that they have around 44,000 employees in total and they surely aren't firing all of their managers, it would seem they have a lot of managers. The press release indicates most of the reduction is in IT, so internal operations, not Engineering/Product or Sales/Marketing.
Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#84> ASML also announced a new share buyback programme of up to €12 billion, to be executed by 31 December 2028. Oh boy. This fills me with dread. I've never seen a company that starts doing buybacks not become a financialized hollow shell within a decade. Being an irreplaceable monopoly on the commanding heights of the digital economy makes this even worse.
I've never seen a company that ... You have not seen Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft? Where are you looking? They all did tens of billions of share buybacks every year for many years now. Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.
I'm happy you made my point for me.
Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#85Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#86It's insane to me how the manager culture is. Somehow going from an engineer to a manager is a "promotion"? No, they are equals. Just different people doing different kinds of jobs. There should be two tracks and people should be able to choose. If engineers feel they have to become managers to grow their careers, all you are getting will just be unhappy engineers and bad managers.
I know it's ironic to say this about Intel, a notoriously management heavy company, but they did do the dual tracks which I always appreciated. A principal engineer was functionally on par with a senior manager, and a fellow with a VP. This meant that good engineers weren't forced into roles they weren't interested in, and why many stayed there 20+ years.
The issue is, even with two tracks, there's every chance that more people end up taking the management path because it's seen as an easy way to climb the ranks. Your success can be built from your teams success, rather than your own individual contribution.
Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a signal that the finance people are becoming more important to the company, but not necessarily a bad thing; it's effectively a more (tax) efficient form of dividends, which isn't very controversial. ASML is a fairly old company (40+ years), and they have been doing share buybacks since 2006: https://www.asml.com/en/investors/why-invest-in-asml/share-b...
Every time I can remember that the finance people have become more important to a company, it has led to the disappearance of the internal culture geared towards excellence that got a company to that point in the first place.
It’s largely true. I believe Steve Jobs had some talk about this phenomenon; basically, at some point, the scale of an organization means the product people make less of an impact than the sales / finance people, and they slowly take over.
Then over the span of a few decades, what’s left is a shallow organization without real innovation.
Intel and Boeing are good examples of this.
Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a mechanism to distribute profits to shareholders. Do you invest in companies that don't distribute profits - does this get you some kind of higher return?
From the company perspective, performing buyback when market is high is just throwing cash by the windows to over-priced shares. If they wanted to distribute cash, they could just use dividends
Three things:
1. From the perspective of shareholders, and for the moment ignoring taxes, buybacks and dividends are exactly economically equivalent. If a dividend happens, you get some cash. If a buyback happens, the value of your shares goes up. Crucially, the amount by which each share's price goes up is equal to what the per-share dividend would have been. It's a useful exercise to work this out and convince yourself that it's true.
2. Now let's stop ignoring taxes. If a dividend happens, you get taxed that year. If the value of your shares goes up, you don't get taxed that year. Instead, you get taxed whenever you sell, which might be later when you retire and are in a lower tax bracket, or after a period of some years when you get a lower capital gains tax rate.
3. Now let's think about the effect of dividends vs buybacks on the allocation of your portfolio as a shareholder. Neither changes the total value of your portfolio -- that was point number 1, plus just plain old conservation of dollars, modulo taxes -- but a dividend increases the proportion of your investment that's in cash, while a buyback keeps it constant. Let's say you auto-invest all dividends in the S&P 500 or equivalent index fund. Then dividends reduce your ownership stake in the company, while buybacks keep it constant.
For these reasons, most investors prefer (or ought to prefer) buybacks: they have the same economic effect as dividends but allow you to defer taxes to whenever is optimal for you. Also, and this is a smaller point, if a company does a dividend then you have to actively do something (that is, buy stock) in order to maintain the same proportion of your portfolio in that company. In other words, if you want 10% of your savings to be in X, and they do a dividend, then you have to take the cash and buy shares of X. The reason this is a smaller point is that at least in theory you can get your brokerage to do this for you automatically.
There are some nuances where point number 1 fails to hold: signaling, bad execution of the buybacks, and principal-agent conflicts. The big example of that final point is executive compensation tied to specific share prices. I'm not an expert in this area so I don't know, off the top of my head, if there's real evidence either way that this effect is very large, but it's one that people will bring up so everyone who thinks about this ought to know about it.
Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#89> ASML also announced a new share buyback programme of up to €12 billion, to be executed by 31 December 2028. Oh boy. This fills me with dread. I've never seen a company that starts doing buybacks not become a financialized hollow shell within a decade. Being an irreplaceable monopoly on the commanding heights of the digital economy makes this even worse.
I've never seen a company that ... You have not seen Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft? Where are you looking? They all did tens of billions of share buybacks every year for many years now. Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.
Has anyone in the last 10 years praised Google for anything, ever? They've been engaged in enshittification the entire time. Search is getting worse, Youtube is getting worse, Android is getting worse, Chrome is getting worse. They are indeed a hollow shell of the company that originally established themselves, but now that they have such a wide-ranging monopoly they can freely debase the value of their products to extract as much from customers as they can.
Re: ASML staffing changes could result in a net reduction of around 1700 positions
#90> ASML also announced a new share buyback programme of up to €12 billion, to be executed by 31 December 2028. Oh boy. This fills me with dread. I've never seen a company that starts doing buybacks not become a financialized hollow shell within a decade. Being an irreplaceable monopoly on the commanding heights of the digital economy makes this even worse.
I've never seen a company that ... You have not seen Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft? Where are you looking? They all did tens of billions of share buybacks every year for many years now. Example: Alphabet has started share buybacks in 2015 and increased those every year. $70B in 2025 alone. And they are firing on all cylinders product-wise.
What products ?
They lost battle for office software, they can't even exist in chat space, despise trying to make chat that sticks for 2 decades now, they squandered on video chat space and office space too.
IF Alphabet was actually efficient they should own office space, but 365 ate their office productivity and even the utter turd that is MS teams is beating them out on chat.
Even their search gets worse and only places where they actually have progress is AI.