By Joe Stonor
BE Semiconductor stock tumbled after a report said that some of the Dutch group's main customers are delaying uptake of its advanced hybrid bonding technology.
Shares fell 6.7% to 254.80 euros in early afternoon European trading. Still, Besi shares remain up over 90% so far this year as the Amsterdam-listed group benefits from soaring demand for the chips produced by its customers.
Memory chip makers Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix--which are customers of Besi--are questioning the need to adopt hybrid bonding technology for their most advanced chip stacks, Korean news outlet ZDNet reported, citing unnamed sources.
Besi is the market leader in advanced hybrid bonding, a technology that fuses chips together at a molecular level. Chip stacks fused with hybrid bonding have smaller gaps between layers than those fused via less-expensive thermal compression bonding, allowing more memory to be crammed into a smaller space.
Monday's share fall mirrors a sharp drop in Besi stock in March, when it fell over 17% after a separate ZDNet report said a microelectronics industry body was considering relaxing standards for memory chip stacks--a move that would reduce the near-term need for Besi's technology.
The latest report suggests a key growth driver for the Dutch company could take longer than expected to materialize, investor Ehrmantraut Capital wrote on social media site X.
"Their next massive growth driver is supposed to be mass-adoption of hybrid bonding for [high-bandwidth memory]. A pushout in mass-adoption of hybrid bonding for HBM would therefore be bad news for Besi."
Besi, SK Hynix and Samsung Electronics didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
Write to Joe Stonor at josephmichael.stonor@wsj.com