Oct 22 (Reuters) – BE Semiconductor Industries on Thursday reported third-quarter orders that exceeded analyst expectations, driven by demand linked to AI data centres, but said its revenue would be flat quarter-on-quarter in the last three months of 2026.
Quarterly order intake, the industry’s most closely watched metric, was €342.6 million ($385.2 million), up 17% from the second quarter and 96% from a year ago. Analysts polled by researcher Visible Alpha had expected €298 million.
Besi, whose machines assemble and package chips, expects its fourth-quarter revenue to be broadly unchanged from the third quarter’s €283.4 million, give or take 5%. Analysts polled by LSEG had expected third- and fourth-quarter revenue of €277.3 million and €291.5 million, respectively.
“Favorable order momentum in the first nine months of this year should continue in Q4-26 as the multi year AI capacity build-out progresses,” CEO Richard Blickman said in the earnings statement.
However, the company said some customers had asked for deliveries of third-quarter orders to be timed with their production plans for the first half of 2027.
Besi is betting on hybrid bonding, a technology that joins stacked chips directly for faster, more energy-efficient connections. Orders for those systems have more than doubled so far this year compared with all of 2025, it said.
Investors have worried that memory makers such as Micron or SK Hynix will be slow to adopt hybrid bonding for high-bandwidth memory, a key component in AI accelerators. Besi shares have roughly halved since hitting a peak in June.
($1 = 0.8894 euros)
(Reporting by Nathan Vifflin in Gdansk, editing by Milla Nissi-Prussak)
