europe's most valuable tech company at NUMBER_TOKEN billion dollars or even that of a canon or nikon rather sme is one of china's national champions and bears expectations on par with cadal or huawei thus the company has adopted huawei's working practices this means long working hours considerable political intervention tough annual assessments for bonuses and a jack welch style bottom five to ten percent layoff each year this is based on comments from chinese message boards and job sites human capital is a lifeblood of the semiconductor manufacturing industry it's one of those industries where the right person can bring immense value to a company's competitive edge and is not like high precision optics and mechanics phds grow on trees i feel there is a significant gap between how the two companies work and treat their employees asml spends a lot of time and effort thinking about the best ways to develop their people and reduce turnover sme's huawei inspired approach on the other hand is likely to lead to a hard time acquiring and retaining the same type and level of talent smee's efforts get a lot of ink in the chinese press they refer to the photolithography effort as the mount everest of the intelligent manufacturing industry as is the case with any such high-profile effort there is a lot of steadfast cheerleading and rah-rah optimism here's one commonly encountered example as an ancient civilization with history of NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN years china has countless wisdom and strengths judging from china's four great inventions two bombs and one satellite aerospace manned spacecraft space station and many other scientific and technological achievements there is nothing that can't be done by us chinese strong rhetoric and yes sure anything can happen but so far the reality is that smee is at least NUMBER_TOKEN years behind asml in bringing a commercial-ready upper-class lithography device to the market immersion lithography is just nascent and euv is even farther away this is a reality that even chinese sources readily acknowledge such rah-rah words and outrageous claims are counterproductive it leaves behind pessimism when deadlines are inevitably missed and prevents people from facing the actual problem in front of them on the other hand i also don't want to say that china's semiconductor production equipment ecosystem is dead on arrival for instance the progress in backend lithography and led lithography is heartening especially as china gains market share in the display industry furthermore a few chinese companies have managed to build a strong track record in certain semiconductor equipment areas one has even managed to acquire tsmc as a client we can go over them in the future anyway one final thing on smee i'm seeing that the company is considering an ipo sometime in the future at valuations i reckon to be in the NUMBER_TOKEN to NUMBER_TOKEN billion dollar range but no official confirmation yet assuming they do that they would release a lot of new information in their prospectus and i can do an update if that happens alright thanks for watching that's it for tonight if you enjoyed the video consider subscribing i would like to reach NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN subscribers someday remember to hit up the email newsletter and sign up or check out the patreon if you
START_INTERACTION_TOKEN alright thanks for watching that's it for tonight if you enjoyed the video consider subscribing i would like to reach NUMBER_TOKEN NUMBER_TOKEN subscribers someday remember to hit up the email newsletter and sign up or check out the patreon if you END_INTERACTION_TOKEN