SÜSS MicroTec ($SMHN) is a German equipment company based in a small town north of Munich that almost nobody in the US follows, and that’s kind of the whole point.

They hold about 90% share in photomask cleaning at TSMC and about 50% share in temporary wafer bonding used by Samsung and Micron for HBM production. Around 70% of their revenue ties to advanced packaging, which makes them one of the purest plays on that theme anywhere in the world.

Right now the stock is getting slightly punished because there’s an HBM ordering pause ahead of a 2027 ramp. The market is treating it like a cyclical equipment story in a down cycle, which is fair on the surface. What the market is missing is that every silicon photonics foundry being built or expanded for AI optical interconnects (GFS, Tower Semi, UMC) needs a heterogeneous integration step, physically bonding lasers onto wafers, and that runs on SUSS’s XBS300 platform. Photonics is still a small piece of their revenue today, so it’s not in the numbers yet.

On top of that, hybrid bonding is becoming the next standard for chip stacking, and SUSS’s XBC300 Gen2 is built specifically for it. They have proprietary IP on bonding accuracy and are the only vendor with a single platform that covers every hybrid bonding configuration.

The valuation is roughly 16 to 18x trough EBIT today. Management is targeting 750 to 900 million euros in revenue at 20 to 22% EBIT margins by 2030, which puts you at about 6x forward on their numbers. BE Semiconductor is the closest comparable, and trades around 40x forward EBIT and has lower market share concentration in its core niches.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Gonna go long SÜSS MicroTec starting with a small position. NFA. DYOR.