Applied Materials to Lift Besi Stake to About 20%

US chipmaking equipment maker Applied Materials plans to raise its stake in Dutch chip assembly specialist BE Semiconductor Industries (Besi) to about 20%. Applied announced the move after the US market close on 26 October in a release on GlobeNewswire, and Besi acknowledged it the next day.

The deal builds on a stake Applied first bought in April 2025. Neither company has given a price or the number of shares involved.

In brief

Applied Materials has agreed to buy more Besi shares, taking its stake to about 20%.
The share delivery must wait for a US antitrust review period to end.
No price or share count was given, and Applied says it will not go beyond about 20%.

How the purchase works

In a Form 8-K filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Applied says it “entered into an accelerated share purchase agreement” to acquire Besi shares. Combined with the shares it already holds, Applied would own approximately 20% of Besi’s outstanding shares.

The shares will not change hands straight away. Delivery is “subject to the expiration or termination of the applicable waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act of 1976”, the US law that lets competition regulators review large share purchases before they complete. The filing does not name the other party to the agreement.

Applied set clear limits on its plans. It says it has “no intention to increase its investment in Besi beyond approximately 20 percent, and Applied does not intend to seek board representation at Besi”. It describes the investment “as long term”.

Why Applied wants more of Besi

The two companies have worked together since 2020 on hybrid bonding. This is a way of stacking chips by joining them directly, copper to copper, instead of using tiny solder bumps. Shorter, denser connections between chips save power and improve performance, which matters for the large AI processors and memory stacks now in demand.

Applied says the partnership “was recently expanded with Besi joining Applied Materials’ EPIC Center as an Innovation Partner”. That is the research centre Applied opened in Sunnyvale earlier this month, where chipmakers and suppliers work on technology several generations ahead of production. Applied lists the joint work as covering 3D chip scaling, logic and memory integration, thermo-compression bonding, and new die-on-wafer, die-on-die and die-on-panel platforms.

“Applied Materials is adding to its investment in Besi as hybrid bonding technology and next-generation interconnect architectures become increasingly critical enablers of energy-efficient AI compute performance,” said Prabu Raja, president of Applied’s Semiconductor Products Group.

Besi chief executive Richard Blickman said: “We welcome Applied’s increased strategic investment as further confirmation of Besi’s hybrid bonding and wafer-level assembly strategy.” He added that it “highlights future areas of potential collaboration between the companies targeting next generation AI and photonics systems”.

Besi’s business is growing fast. Its third-quarter results, published on 22 October, showed revenue of €283.4 million, up 113.6% on a year earlier, and orders of €342.6 million, up 96.1%, “primarily due to increased orders for hybrid bonding, datacenter and AI related mainstream computing applications”.

A reversal of the 2025 position, and a ceiling at 20%

The most telling detail is how far Applied has moved since last year. When it announced the first stake in April 2025, Applied said it had “purchased 9 percent of the outstanding shares”, that the investment was “made through market-based transactions and is not subject to regulatory approvals”, and that it did not “have plans to purchase additional shares of Besi common stock”. Eighteen months later it is buying more, through a structured deal that this time needs a US antitrust waiting period to pass.

The new ceiling is also worth reading closely. A 20% holding is a common line in accounting, where an investor is usually presumed to have significant influence over a company. Applied has not said how it will account for the stake, and it is giving up a board seat, which limits its formal say. Even so, a near-fifth of the shares makes Applied by far the most important outside holder in a supplier whose technology it is building into its own systems.

The timing also fits a more crowded field. Research firm SemiAnalysis said this month that patent filings suggest ASML is building its own hybrid bonding tool, and named Besi as the company most exposed if it does. ASML has not announced such a product. A larger Applied stake ties Besi more tightly to the biggest US toolmaker at a time when chip packaging, including the interposers that link chips side by side, has become a bottleneck for AI hardware.

What is still missing is the cost. Without a price or share count, investors cannot yet judge what Applied is paying for its larger say.

What happens next

The shares will be delivered once the US waiting period ends or is cut short. Applied’s filing lists that review as the main risk to the purchase. Besi’s statement added no detail on the terms.