SUSS MicroTec

01 SUSS owns the toll every HBM layer pays before the dies are joined

---

Before an HBM die can be stacked, its native 700 to 775 micron wafer has to be ground thin enough to reveal the through-silicon vias, the vertical channels each layer uses to talk to the one above it. A wafer that thin cracks under its own handling. It is glued face-down to a rigid carrier, ground, etched and metallized, and only then is the carrier peeled or laser-ablated back off, a cycle called temporary bond and debond. That step happens once per layer that needs thinning, whichever technology eventually joins the finished stack together.

The consensus read on advanced packaging is that hybrid bonding is coming, that it welds dies together with direct copper contact and no solder, and that every firm selling a tool for the old way of joining chips is in decline. That read is right for the makers of the joining step, the thermocompression-bonder incumbents hybrid bonding is built to replace. It is wrong for SUSS. SUSS does not join dies; it prepares them. Hybrid bonding replaces the weld; it does not remove the thinning the weld sits on top of.

The house map classes this step a chokepoint, and one whose grip is tightening. It is the toll booth on a road two rival armies are fighting to control. Hanmi, ASMPT, Besi and EV Group race to own the final-joining battlefield, hybrid bonding or thermocompression or mass reflow; SUSS collects the toll everyone pays to get onto that road at all, before anyone has picked a side. The one open question in that classification names the fault line this note argues: whether the hybrid-bonding transition at 16 to 20 layers reshapes who owns the moat underneath it.

02 Frick cut guidance twice in 2025 and delivered a record year anyway

---

Burkhardt Frick has run SUSS since 11 September 2023, and 2025 tested him. Order intake fell 16.4 percent year over year to €354.3 million even as revenue grew on backlog conversion; in equipment, the order book leads and revenue lags. Frick cut margin guidance twice: first on 28 July 2025, gross margin to 37 to 39 percent and EBIT margin to 13 to 15 percent, then on 27 October 2025 on Q3 preliminary figures that missed hard, 33.1 percent gross margin against a 38.1 percent consensus. Sales guidance was never touched either time, and FY2025 sales of €503.2 million beat the original range.

On the 30 March 2026 call Frick named the cause himself: many customers, he said, are “placing orders later and ordering different solutions compared to the peak of the first AI waves, when demand for temporary bonders and debonders was particularly high.” He was blunter about the credibility cost: “as we saw last year, where we had to go in and correct twice our guidance. This is something we don’t want to repeat.” Two cuts and a record year in the same twelve months is an unusual combination; SUSS’s own materials call the cause multi-causal.

03 Q1 2026 put a record order book against a trough margin

---

Q1 2026, reported 7 May, delivered the reversal in the order book: intake of €149.3 million, a record, up 69.5 percent year over year; order book €330.1 million, up 23.7 percent in the quarter. The EBIT margin, though, was 4.3 percent, against 18.0 percent in the same quarter a year earlier, still below the low end of FY2026’s 8 to 10 percent guided range. Order intake leads, revenue lags on backlog conversion, and the margin trails both.

Order intake has turned; revenue and margin have not caught up

The same call carried the more important fact. Asked directly about SK Hynix qualification, Frick said the orders meant SUSS is now “in all 3 major memory makers,” and, pressed on whether that meant repeat business, drew the line himself: “we are not talking volume orders here, but at least we have our hardware placed now in the most recent HBM R&D line.” That is a toehold, and Frick was explicit it is not yet share. It is a toehold at the one memory maker the market had already priced as a closed door.

04 The margin trough is fixed-cost, and Q1 was the last quarter carrying the worst of it

---

COO Thomas Rohe put a number on part of the why: the new Zhubei, Taiwan site was running at roughly 70 percent utilization as of the March call, still absorbing double rent against the old Hsinchu-area sites it replaces, though Q1 2026 is flagged as the last quarter carrying that specific drag. The path back to the guided floor is backlog conversion and the Zhubei ramp, not a new pricing cycle.

None of this is a China manufacturing story. SUSS’s entire production footprint sits in Germany and Zhubei, Taiwan; its China presence is a sales and service subsidiary only. The China exposure that does show up is demand-side: photomask order intake fell €43.5 million in FY2025, €31 million of it specifically attributed to lower orders from Chinese customers, a cyclicality risk rather than a supply-chain one, and one Frick flagged as partially reversing late in Q4 2025. The balance sheet carries no draw against the €115 million syndicated facility signed in February 2026, which management frames as a cyclicality buffer.

05 Layer count turns each HBM upgrade into more of the step SUSS sells

---

Layer count compounds the toll. A 16-hi HBM4 stack needs dies thinned to roughly 30 microns, down from about 50 microns at 12-hi, to fit under JEDEC’s 775-micron package-height ceiling. Every one of those sixteen layers gets its own bond-and-debond pass before final joining, hybrid or otherwise. More layers means more of the step SUSS sells, and the move from 12-hi to 16-hi to 20-hi makes that conversion into temp-bond volume roughly linear.

That linearity makes the growth this note underwrites mechanically plausible. What breaks it is not the growth rate of the step. It is SUSS’s share of that growth, and two things bite into it: Tokyo Electron’s SK Hynix lock and EV Group’s laser-debond lead. The next four sections take those in turn: who buys the step, who sells it, and the one chain of events that would cap SUSS’s share regardless.

06 All three memory makers buy the step, and SUSS holds most of two of them

---

The memory makers stacking on this node split SK Hynix 60 percent, Samsung 30 percent, Micron 10 percent (Mirae Asset Securities, 15 Jun 2026): that is who buys the output, not who sells the tools. On the tool side, Jefferies scopes SUSS’s position to its two core customers at roughly 55 percent of Samsung and Micron’s combined temporary-bond spend, real share counted against a narrower base than the whole HBM pie.

SUSS is strong at two of the three makers and holds only an R&D toehold at the largest, SK Hynix, where Tokyo Electron is entrenched. The single biggest pool of demand is the one where SUSS’s seat is thinnest, so the SK Hynix qualification, and the process SK Hynix ships at 16-hi, carry more weight than the headline share suggests.

07 Tokyo Electron leads the step and SUSS is the corroborated number two

---

SUSS’s share of the toll is a range, not a point. On HBM temporary bonding, Tokyo Electron is the broker consensus’s clear leader: Bernstein estimates 60 to 70 percent (6 Dec 2024), Jefferies a narrower c.50 percent (20 Sep 2024). SUSS is the clear number two, with broker estimates spanning 10 to 20 percent (Deutsche Bank, 11 Jul 2024) to 40 to 50 percent (Metzler Capital Markets, 28 Oct 2024); Berenberg (29 May 2024) puts it near 35 percent while naming SUSS the leader in the specialized temporary-bonding segment, a narrower cut than the whole pie.

EV Group belongs in neither column. Its famous 65 to 70 percent share figure describes a different market, wafer-to-wafer permanent bonding, where Bernstein (19 Nov 2025) is explicit that EVG’s footprint in high-volume HBM lines is smaller than TEL’s and SUSS’s. In the market that figure measures, the split runs EVG 60 to 70 percent, TEL a little over 20 percent, SUSS 10 percent (Bernstein, 13 Mar 2025), the same challenger share this note’s own map node carries for SUSS in hybrid bonding. Two markets, two scoreboards; conflating them is the easiest way to get SUSS’s real HBM position wrong.

The axes a process engineer screens a vendor on. TEL leads HBM temporary bonding outright; SUSS is a corroborated number two; EVG is a real incumbent in the adjacent permanent-bonding market, not this one, yet. Ranges above are broker estimates, not point figures.

08 The thesis breaks only if SK Hynix skips the step and EV Group’s laser wins the rest

---

The kill chain has two links, and both have to hold. If SK Hynix’s mass-reflow process structurally needs fewer temporary bond and debond cycles per finished stack than the thermocompression flow Samsung and Micron use, a claim no public source quantifies; we flag the gap, and if EV Group’s laser-debond platform, which Kepler Cheuvreux (21 May 2025) calls a future wildcard that could take share from TEL and SUSS if its laser proves superior, wins at 16-hi HBM4 volumes, then the layer-count growth in our base case converts into someone else’s revenue, and the 2025 to 2026 margin trough was the market pricing SUSS correctly.

Three variables will tell us which way it breaks, in order of how soon we will know:

• SUSS’s own book-to-bill through H2 2026. The next hard read is the H1 2026 report, expected early-to-mid August. The tell is order intake converting into revenue; backlog alone proves nothing.
• Which final-joining process each memory maker ships at 16-hi. JEDEC’s thickness relief has already pushed hybrid bonding’s realistic debut to at least HBM4E, per TrendForce (7 Jul 2026), a delay that buys the temp-bond thesis time either way.
• Whether EV Group’s laser tools win a qualified design slot at Samsung, Micron or SK Hynix, beyond demo showcases. At that point the wildcard is a real threat.

What we cannot resolve from public sourcing is whether MR-MUF needs fewer bond and debond passes than TC-NCF at matched layer count, or whether EV Group’s purpose-built laser beats SUSS’s own dual mechanical and laser capability once both run at 16-hi volume. Either unknown, resolved the wrong way, caps SUSS’s addressable share whatever happens at SK Hynix.

09 At the mid-case exit, €79.80 asks for slower growth than management guides

---

SUSS’s live enterprise value is its market cap: €1.526 billion on 19.12 million shares, no material net debt (yfinance, 23 Jul 2026). Run the reverse-DCF the way the market prices the trade. Grow today’s EV forward at a 9.5 percent WACC, a reasonable small-cap German-listed semicap discount rate, over four years to 2030; €1.526 billion compounds to roughly €2.19 billion. Then ask what 2030 revenue, at management’s guided 20 to 22 percent EBIT margin, would justify that grown-up EV at a given exit multiple.

What the price asks for, worked once

At the mid-case multiple the market is asking SUSS to grow slightly slower than its own management has promised, not to deliver a miracle. The comps say the same thing:

The trailing-P/E column shows the trough trap: a 43 to 151 times spread across the set means none of these businesses trades near normalised earnings; it says nothing about whether SUSS is cheap or its peers dear. Forward P/E is the less-distorted read, and even there SUSS sits below every direct peer. Berenberg’s own analyst, Amelie Dueckelmann-Dublany, raised her target to €125 on 19 June 2026, arguing that market participants have not yet fully recognized the ongoing momentum; that most bullish sell-side read sits inside our chokepoint-holds ceiling, not above it. The note turns on the share SUSS captures; layer count already makes the growth rate plausible.

10 Four independent reads put fair value above spot, with only the bear leg below

---

Probability-weight the three and the fair value is €95, about 19 percent above spot, with the base case near €100. The distribution is two-sided: the bull pays 88 percent and the bear costs 50, so we watch and size a starter. The single driver is the share SUSS captures as layer count climbs.

Fair-value range: spot sits below every read but the bear leg

11 The market has already repriced the name hard

---

The stock has fallen from a €118 52-week high to €79.80, a violent derating driven by the two 2025 guidance cuts and the order-intake decline as the first AI-wave surge in temporary-bonder demand cooled and customers pushed orders later. It now trades below both the comps-implied band and the sell-side range, with only our own bear leg beneath it. The record Q1 2026 order book is the first sign the derating has found a floor, though the margin has not yet followed.

12 We tilt toward accumulate and would size a starter

---

SUSS sells the step every HBM stack has to cross, at a price that assumes it grows slower than its own management guides. We watch, tilting toward accumulate: a starter position, not a full one, until the H1 2026 report shows the margin closing, and not only the order book improving. The open question is whether SK Hynix’s process choice caps SUSS’s addressable share, beyond its supplier relationship with Tokyo Electron, and until that resolves, sizing past a starter prices a physics argument as a fact.

13 The scorecard puts a real chokepoint against an unproven share

---

14 What moves the call toward accumulate or toward reduce

---

15 How we would express it

---

1. Starter long SUSS, add on confirmation. Buy a starter near €80, sized well below a full position, and add toward the mid-€50s to €65 or on a second quarter of intake above revenue. The reverse-DCF asks for about 14 percent CAGR at a mid-case exit against roughly 16 percent guided, so the entry pays for the physics without needing the bull.
Risk: the margin trough proves structural, and the H1 report shows the order book improving with no margin following.

2. Pair trade: long SUSS, short an expensive comp. SUSS trades at about 21 times forward earnings against 30 to 51 times for Besi, ASMPT, Aixtron and Camtek. A small, beta-aware long-SUSS, short-Besi pair expresses the cheapest seat in the set without a view on memory’s direction.
Risk: the comps are not a clean hedge, since their end-market mix differs from SUSS’s HBM concentration, and a sector de-rate moves both legs together.

Treat a Tokyo Electron or EV Group design-slot win at Samsung or Micron as the signal to cut, not to average down: the cleanest evidence that the share is capping.

16 Dates to watch

---

The events that resolve the call over the coming months:

• Early-to-mid August 2026: H1/Q2 2026 report. The first hard read on whether Q1’s 4.3 percent EBIT margin was a fixed-cost trough or the FY2026 run rate.
• H2 2026: HBM4 16-hi process disclosures at SK Hynix, Samsung and Micron. Which final-joining technology each maker ships, the direct test of the kill chain.
• Ongoing: SUSS book-to-bill. Whether Q1 2026’s record order intake converts into revenue or piles up as backlog.

Two predictions we will mark, dated: SUSS’s H1/Q2 2026 EBIT margin prints above 6 percent, a genuine narrowing from 4.3 percent toward the floor, resolved against the reported figure by mid-August 2026; and no public disclosure through 31 December 2026 shows SK Hynix converting its R&D-line toehold into a repeat or volume order, resolved against company disclosures and trade press by then. A no on the second leaves conviction at Medium; a surprise yes would upgrade it.