ASML · one lens
Ray Dalio on ASML
China's share of ASML's sales fell from half to a fifth in about a year — a squeeze the record reads like a cycle, not a shock.
Big Debt Crises is a template for credit cycles, not export-control regimes, but its core habit — read a squeeze as a recurring phase, not a one-off shock, and ask whether the rebalancing after it is fast or slow — travels further than the subject matter suggests (Big Debt Crises). Substitute customer concentration for leverage and the record on ASML maps onto that shape almost exactly.
The buildup: China was ASML’s largest market for four straight quarters through mid-2024, at one point 49% of combined sales (texxr.com/869689) — a concentration that, like rising leverage, looked fine as long as it kept growing. The squeeze: guidance, in January 2026, for China to fall to roughly 20% of full-year sales, as export controls tightened around the machines this page’s Helmer lens treats as ASML’s core Power (texxr.com/1162255). The rebalancing: South Korea’s share of net system sales jumped from 22% to 45% quarter over quarter by April 2026 (texxr.com/1167048) — fast enough to resemble the “beautiful deleveraging” case in Dalio’s template, where volume grows into a shrinking dependency rather than collapsing under it.
Where the read gets less comfortable: the book’s own diagnosis of what makes any crisis hard to manage isn’t the size of the imbalance, it’s two failures — not understanding the mechanism, and lacking the authority to act on it. On export controls, neither looks settled yet. A House committee publicly named ASML alongside other equipment makers in October 2025 (texxr.com/891096); by June 2026, a Commerce Secretary was personally questioning ASML’s leadership over an EUV machine China allegedly acquired in violation of rules already on the books (texxr.com/1171190). That isn’t a rulebook stabilizing. It’s a regime still discovering, case by case, what it actually prohibits — the exact condition under which the template’s own case studies say a squeeze runs longest.
An editorial application of Ray Dalio's published framework — not their actual view, affiliation, or advice.
Where this lens comes from
Ray Dalio's framework is set out at the lens page, drawn from Principles for Navigating Big Debt Crises. This page applies it to ASML and nothing else — the company's full record is in the dossier.