Applied Materials to Raise Its Besi Stake From 9% to About 20%
Applied Materials agreed on Oct. 26 to take its BE Semiconductor holding to about 20% of outstanding shares. Reuters says that is up from 9% bought in April 2025. Delivery waits on U.S. antitrust review.
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The release page showed only a logo. About 20 percent is Applied's figure. Reuters reported the current stake as 9 percent.
Illustration (AI-generated)
Applied Materials said on Oct. 26 it signed an accelerated share-purchase agreement that would take its stake in BE Semiconductor Industries to about 20 percent of Besi's outstanding shares, on top of an investment it first made in April 2025.
Share delivery still waits on the U.S. Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period. Applied said it will not seek a board seat.
Illustration (AI-generated)
Reuters reported that the holding would rise from 9 percent, and that Applied has been Besi's largest shareholder since that April 2025 purchase. Applied's release states the roughly 20 percent result and the April 2025 start. It does not print the 9 percent figure. The shares are delivered only after the waiting period under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act ends or is terminated. Applied said it does not intend to go past about 20 percent, and it does not intend to seek a seat on Besi's board.
The packaging work the stake is tied to
The companies have collaborated since 2020. Applied said the partnership, extended when Besi joined its EPIC Center as an innovation partner, now reaches beyond hybrid bonding into interconnect schemes for AI scaling. The work it named covers next-generation 3D integrated-circuit scaling, logic and memory integration, thermo-compression bonding, and die-on-wafer, die-on-die and die-on-panel platforms. Prabu Raja, president of Applied's Semiconductor Products Group, said hybrid bonding and those interconnects are becoming critical to energy-efficient AI compute.
Hybrid bonding stacks dies with very short connections. That is how memory and compute stay in one package as accelerators get larger, and it is a bottleneck distinct from wafer starts at the foundry. A larger equity stake does not, by itself, add bonding tools or a customer order. It does tie Applied more closely to the equipment maker those packages depend on. The release gives no tool shipment figure, no wafers per month and no named chip customer for the expanded work.
What is still conditional
The purchase is not closed. It still needs the U.S. antitrust waiting period to run out or be ended. Applied described the holding as long term. Besi remains an independent listed company in Amsterdam. No price for the new shares appears in the release or in the Reuters account.
