ASML Profit Drops; Lifts Dividend; Announces EUR1 Bln Buyback

(RTTNews) - Dutch semiconductor equipment maker ASML Holding NV (ASML) Wednesday reported a lower profit and sales for the fourth quarter. However, sales and gross profit topped the company's own guidance. Additionally, ASML announced a 1 billion euros share repurchase and plans to increase dividend by 15 percent.

Net income fell to 305 million euros ($353.2 million) from 481 million euros in the previous year.

Net sales declined to 1.494 billion euros from last year's 1.848 billion euros, but were higher than the company's guidance of around 1.3 billion euros for the quarter.

Gross margin was 44 percent, compared to 43.6 percent in the prior year. The company's expectation was for gross margin of about 43 percent.

Litho units sold fell to 35 from 56, and net booking value was 1.387 billion euros, EUV NXE:3350B orders. In the fourth quarter of 2013, net booking value totaled 1.449 billion euros.

President and CEO Peter Wennink said, "Our 2014 fourth-quarter net sales came in ahead of guidance, as the memory sector was stronger than we expected...Looking ahead to H1 2015, we expect both our sales to the memory segment and our service and field option business to continue to be strong and sales to the logic segment to increase from H2 2014 to H1 2015, underpinned by the EUR 2.8 billion backlog."

ASML said it intends to increase the dividend per ordinary share by 15 percent to 0.70 euro per ordinary share for 2014, compared to 0.61 euro per share paid last year.

ASML also plans to repurchase up to 750 million euros of shares. Additionally, ASML intends to buy as part of this program up to 3.3 million shares to cover employee stock option plans. This program will start on January 22, and represents a total value of about 1 billion euros.

Looking ahead to the first quarter of 2015, ASML expects net sales of around 1.6 billion euros and gross margin of around 47 percent.

The stock closed up around 0.2 percent in Amsterdam on Tuesday at 89.51 euros.