Applied Materials doubles its Besi stake to 20% after Besi fell 50%

Short answer: Applied Materials told the SEC on October 26 2026 that it will lift its stake in Besi, the Dutch maker of hybrid bonding tools for stacked AI chips, from about 9% to about 20%. In April 2025 it said it had no plans to buy more. The difference between then and now is price: Besi closed at EUR 159.05 on October 27, 50% below its June 22 peak of EUR 320.30, while its orders more than doubled.

TL;DR: The extra 11% is about 8.89 million shares, roughly EUR 1.41 billion (about $1.58 billion) at the October 27 close by our math. Besi's first-half 2026 orders were EUR 562.6 million, up 116.5% on a year earlier, and Besi says about 60% of system orders now come from AI. The only gate left on the deal is a US antitrust waiting period, so the biggest toolmaker in chips is buying the AI packaging bottleneck at half price, in plain sight.

Key numbers

What	Number	Source, checked Oct 27 2026
Applied's stake after the deal	about 20% (from about 9%)	Applied 8-K exhibit 99.1
Besi close, Oct 27 2026	EUR 159.05	Yahoo Finance
Besi peak close, Jun 22 2026	EUR 320.30 (now -50.3%)	Yahoo Finance
Besi shares outstanding	80.82 million	Motley Fool quote page
Extra 11% at Oct 27 close	about EUR 1.41B ($1.58B)	Our math; EUR/USD 1.1199 from FRED
Besi H1-26 orders	EUR 562.6M, +116.5% y/y	Besi Q2-26 release
AI share of Besi system orders	about 60% in H1-26 (50% in H1-25)	Besi Q2-26 release

April 2025: "no plans to purchase additional shares." October 2026: 20%

When Applied first disclosed its 9% Besi stake on April 15 2025, it said it would not seek a board seat and had no plans to buy more shares, as Bits&Chips and Evertiq reported that week.

Eighteen months later the board-seat line survives and the second line does not. The new release says Applied has "no intention to increase its investment in Besi beyond approximately 20 percent." Read that as a ceiling with a date on it, not a promise.

The buy runs through an accelerated share purchase agreement, which means a bank sources the shares now and Applied takes delivery once the Hart-Scott-Rodino waiting period ends. Applied did not give a price, so every euro figure below is our estimate at market closes.

Why now: the stock halved while the orders doubled

Besi peaked at EUR 320.30 on June 22 2026 and closed at EUR 159.05 on October 27, a 50.3% drop. Applied itself fell from $723.00 on June 30 to $387.59 on October 26, about 46%.

The business did the opposite. Besi's first-half 2026 orders hit EUR 562.6 million, up from EUR 259.9 million a year earlier, driven by hybrid bonding capacity for current and next-generation AI chips, photonics and data center parts.

Hybrid bonding, in plain terms: instead of soldering chips together with tiny bumps, you fuse copper pads directly, so stacked memory and logic sit closer, run cooler and move more data. It is how the industry keeps adding AI performance after shrinking transistors got expensive.

By the numbers: what EUR 1.41B buys

Besi is not a story stock. Its first-half 2026 revenue was EUR 434.7 million, up 48.8% on a year earlier, and net income was EUR 140.6 million, up 121.1%.

The second quarter alone brought EUR 249.9 million of revenue, up 68.7%, with orders of EUR 292.9 million. Gross margin for the half was 64.7%, a level most equipment makers only see in their pitch decks.

On a trailing basis the Motley Fool quote page shows EUR 884.5 million of revenue and EUR 290.58 million of net income, against a market value of EUR 11.83 billion at EUR 159.05. That is a price-to-earnings ratio of about 40, down from roughly double that at the June peak, by our math.

So 11% of the company costs about EUR 1.41 billion and comes with a claim on about EUR 32 million of yearly profit at the trailing run rate. Applied is not buying earnings. It is buying a guaranteed seat next to the tool every stacked AI chip has to pass through.

Besi also returns cash: it paid EUR 125.4 million in dividends in the second quarter of 2026. At 20%, Applied's cut of a payout that size would be about EUR 25 million a year, enough to cover a rounding error on its own capex and nothing more. The dividend is a side effect; the position is the point.

The pattern: toolmakers are buying the bottleneck, not the fab

Chipmakers fight over GPUs, but the scarce step for the next few years is putting chips on top of each other. Whoever controls bonding throughput controls how much high-bandwidth memory and how many chiplets reach data centers.

Applied now holds a fifth of the packaging specialist it most depends on. Our bet: it will not be the last, and the next one will also come right after a sell-off.

Follow the money: who wins, who loses

Applied wins twice. Its original 9% was worth about EUR 708 million at the April 15 2025 close and about EUR 1.16 billion at the October 27 close, by our math. It now buys the next 11% at roughly half of June's price.

Besi shareholders who sold the summer top lose the obvious way. Holders who stay get a 20% anchor holder that has said twice it wants no board seat, which caps the governance fight but also caps the odds of a clean takeover premium soon.

Rivals are the quieter losers. Every packaging line that wants hybrid bonding at volume now shops from a supplier whose biggest owner sells the wafer tools that sit next to it. Lam Research and Tokyo Electron do not get that seat.

Who blocks it? So far, one US antitrust clock

We looked for the brake. The release names one condition: the HSR waiting period. The 2025 purchase needed no regulatory approval at all. No Dutch government objection appears in the filing, and Applied says it views the holding as long term.

Our read: 20% is the line where US accounting usually presumes "significant influence," and Applied stops right on it. It gets the strategic weight without a takeover review. If nobody objects inside the waiting period, the bottleneck supplier for stacked AI chips gets its anchor owner by year end.

What this means for you

If you build or buy AI hardware, track the packaging layer, not just GPUs: hybrid bonding capacity decides how much stacked memory ships. Download our data (Besi and Applied daily closes since January 2025) below and set your own alert on the next Besi quarterly order print and the HSR outcome.

If you want that done for you, Company Watch ($99 a month) watches SEC filings, federal contracts and lobbying for the companies you name and tells you when something moves. We keep fixing it at no extra cost until it does what it promises.

More money and deep tech on Tensorust News, the deep tech + finance hub and our economics section.

Not financial advice. Our numbers and our read, so you can check them.

Sources

• Applied Materials, 8-K exhibit 99.1: increase in Besi investment, Oct 26 2026
• Bits&Chips, Applied becomes major shareholder of Besi, Apr 16 2025
• Evertiq, Applied Materials acquires 9% stake in Besi, Apr 15 2025
• Besi, Q2-26 and H1-26 results release, Jul 23 2026
• Motley Fool, Besi quote page (shares outstanding, market cap), checked Oct 27 2026
• Yahoo Finance, BESI.AS and AMAT daily closes, our pull Oct 27 2026
• FRED, DEXUSEU euro to dollar rate, Oct 23 2026