Brainport’s next test: diversify at home, scale in Asia

At EY BrainportConnect in Eindhoven, ASML’s Roger Dassen and Wayne Allan sketched a future in which Brainport’s success can no longer rest on one ecosystem alone. Their message was both reassuring and unsettling: the region remains indispensable to ASML, but staying competitive will require broader technological depth in Eindhoven and a larger operational footprint in Asia.

At the EY Eindhoven office, the title of the event sounded almost understated compared with the scale of the questions on the table: How can Brainport stay competitive? Yet that was exactly the point. In an increasingly volatile world, competitiveness is no longer a matter of simply doing more of what has worked so far. For Brainport, it means rethinking where growth comes from, how dependence is managed, and what kind of ecosystem Europe wants to be.

ASML board members Roger Dassen and Wayne Allan approached that challenge from different angles, but together they told one coherent story. Dassen’s concern was strategic and regional: Brainport cannot afford to lean too heavily on a single industrial success. Allan’s was operational and global: ASML cannot afford to keep too much of its footprint concentrated in Europe when 85% of its customers are in Asia. Two realities, closely connected.

The opportunity

Dassen began with the opportunity. For a semiconductor company, he said, this is a remarkable moment. AI has changed the scale of the market. What only recently still looked like another upswing in a famously cyclical industry has, in his view, become something much more structural. “They turned the corner in the second half of last year,” he said of ASML’s customers. Looking at their capital expenditure plans, he argued, chipmakers are no longer hesitating. They have, as he put it, “got religion.”

That conviction is now visible in the money flowing into the sector. Dassen pointed to enormous projected investments in AI infrastructure and data centers, and to ASML’s own growth trajectory. The company reported a 2024 business of €28 billion, moved to €33 billion in 2025, and now expects to end 2026 somewhere between €36 billion and €40 billion. Analysts, he noted, are already looking well beyond that for the years to come.

For Brainport, this should be good news. If ASML grows, much of the surrounding ecosystem grows with it. Dassen was generous in his praise for the region’s track record, calling it an ecosystem that works: a place where customers, suppliers, academia and government have learned to operate together. The strategic choices made in the 1990s, when Eindhoven deliberately focused on a limited number of ecosystems after Philips ran into trouble, have clearly paid off.

But that is only half the story.

The other half is that Brainport’s strength may also be its vulnerability. Dassen warned against flattering statistics about Dutch innovation and R&D spending. Strip out ASML and its surrounding ecosystem, he suggested, and the picture quickly becomes less impressive. “Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said. Europe’s investment levels in AI and technology lag dramatically behind those of the United States and China. In that light, Brainport’s success begins to look less like evidence of broad European strength and more like an exception.

Diversification

That is why Dassen’s central plea was for diversification. “It is absolutely critical that in addition to our ecosystem, there’s also one or two other ecosystems that we choose to play Champions League football in.” Brainport, in other words, needs a second act. Or perhaps several.

He did not define that second ecosystem too narrowly, but he was clear about the direction: technology. Semiconductor equipment alone is not enough. Europe lacks too many of the adjacent layers that make a full tech ecosystem powerful: hyperscalers, major smartphone or PC players, dominant AI companies, leading chip designers. “We need to have a richer ecosystem around technology,” he said later in the Q&A. Ten years from now, Brainport will only be truly successful, in his view, if it has used the strength of one ecosystem to build another.

That broader ecosystem matters for another reason: talent. Regions attract people not simply because one company is excellent, but because the surrounding opportunities are deep and varied. Silicon Valley is powerful not because it has one winner, Dassen argued, but because “all of the technology play is just there.” If Brainport wants to remain a magnet for international talent, it needs density, breadth and the policy climate to match.

Where Dassen focused on Brainport’s need to diversify, Allan focused on ASML’s need to rebalance.

Mismatch

His speech was more practical, but no less consequential. ASML, he said, has to remain sharp on quality, cost, cyclicality and resilience. The semiconductor industry can swing from uncertainty to aggressive growth in a matter of months. That means the company needs a supply chain that can move with it. It also means Brainport cannot be the only answer to every challenge.

Allan showed how lopsided ASML’s current position still is. Around 85% of its customers are in Asia. Europe accounts for just 5% of the installed base, the US about 10%. Yet procurement is almost the reverse: 85% of ASML’s procurement is still done in Europe, and only 5% in Asia.

That mismatch, he argued, is no longer sustainable. “We certainly have to have a much broader footprint in Asia.” Not only in the supply chain, but also in manufacturing. The logic is straightforward: mature, high-volume manufacturing and customer-facing activities need to be closer to customers. That lowers logistics costs, improves sustainability, reduces risk and strengthens resilience.

Not a retreat

Crucially, Allan framed this not as a retreat from Brainport, but as a way to preserve it. Europe, and especially the Eindhoven region, remains the place for new product development, EUV, rapid prototyping and the dense supplier relationships needed for innovation. “We don’t plan on shrinking our total footprint here,” he said. Even if Europe’s share of procurement falls, the overall footprint in the region can still grow as ASML expands.

Still, the implication was unmistakable: some activities will move. Mature manufacturing, lower-cost volume production, and parts of the supply chain will increasingly need to go to Asia. Allan said the company is already seeing what it hoped to find there: a stronger focus on cost and quality, plus meaningful savings. “We’re seeing a 20 to 30% cost reduction.”

That message comes with a second one, aimed directly at Brainport suppliers. ASML wants them to internationalize too. A broader footprint in Asia would not just help ASML; it would also give suppliers access to new customers and reduce unhealthy dependence on one dominant client. Allan was blunt on that point. A region that is too dependent on one company, or suppliers that rely too heavily on ASML alone, becomes fragile in downturns.

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The Q&A brought both themes together. Asked what success would look like for Brainport in ten years, Dassen repeated that the region must build at least one additional globally relevant ecosystem. Asked about people and skills, both men stressed that talent follows ecosystems, not isolated champions. And when the conversation turned back to Europe’s place in AI and semiconductors, Dassen underlined the urgency with a stark figure: in the past half year, ASML’s sales to Europe were “0%.”

That does not mean ASML is leaving. It means the world is changing faster than Europe is.

So Brainport’s challenge is not to hold on to the past formula, despite its success. It is to use that success as a platform for something broader: greater technological depth, greater global reach, less dependence, and a stronger position in the industries that will define the next decade.

The message from EY BrainportConnect was therefore both a warning and an invitation. Brainport still has extraordinary assets. But if it wants to remain competitive, it must do two things at once: diversify at home, and accept that part of the future will be built much closer to Asia.