ASM International Reports Today With Shorts Barely Present

ASM International, the Dutch maker of atomic layer deposition equipment for advanced chip manufacturing, reports Q3 results later today against a backdrop of unusually light short-seller pressure and a stock that has recovered sharply in the past session after a rough month.

The borrow market tells a story of almost zero conviction on the short side. Short interest is negligible and availability in the lending pool is essentially uncapped, with far more shares available to lend than anyone is borrowing. Borrowing costs have also retreated sharply, falling roughly 66% over the past week to around 0.65%, after briefly spiking above 2.7% in late September. That spike has unwound completely. The ORTEX short score of 25.2, in the 96th percentile for low short-selling pressure relative to the broader universe, reinforces the picture: this is not a stock where bearish positioning is building into the print.

The price action is more complicated. ASM gained 5% on Tuesday to close at €743.20, but it remains down 12% over the past month, a steeper fall than most of its closest peers. ASML rose 1% on the week, and BESI added nearly 5% on Tuesday alone, while SMHN dropped 7% over the same period, making the peer group itself a mixed picture. ASM's one-week return of roughly 0.5% compares with a median decline of around 2.8% for its closest peer group, so the relative performance is actually better than the monthly slide suggests. The Q2 results in July produced a one-day gain of 4.3% and a five-day gain of 8.5%, though the prior quarter's report saw a one-day fall of nearly 10% before the stock recovered over the following week.

The analyst consensus, last updated in mid-October, carried a mean price target around €1,148, well above the current price. That gap is wide enough to be treated with caution given the staleness of the data, but the direction is clear: the institutional view has been that the market is pricing in too much caution on the semiconductor equipment cycle. The EPS momentum factor scores support that framing, with 30-day forward estimate revisions ranking in the 75th percentile and 90-day momentum in the 63rd, suggesting analysts have been nudging numbers higher rather than cutting. Amundi added more than 520,000 shares as recently as mid-October, a notable addition from a major European asset manager ahead of the print.

The question today's results will settle is whether the recovery in equipment orders that management flagged after Q2, when revenue and margins both beat expectations, has continued into Q3 at a pace that justifies the stock trading at a near-40% discount to where analysts thought it was heading just weeks ago.