Amgen Inc. vs ASML Holding NV: Strategic Comparison

This in-depth comparison examines Amgen Inc. and ASML Holding NV across revenue, market value, business model, competitive positioning, and long-term growth strategy. Whether you are researching Amgen Inc. on its own, evaluating ASML Holding NV, or weighing the two companies side by side, the breakdown below highlights where each company leads and where the gap between Amgen Inc. and ASML Holding NV is widest.

On the headline numbers, Amgen Inc. reports annual revenue of $36.8B against ~$36.9B for ASML Holding NV, while their respective market capitalizations stand at $228.2B and $696.4B. Amgen Inc. is headquartered in United States and ASML Holding NV in Netherlands, and those different home markets shape how each company competes.

Amgen Inc.: Amgen is one of the companies that created the biotechnology industry. Instead of synthesizing small-molecule drugs, it engineers living cells to make complex proteins, an approach it first commercialized with Epogen in 1989. Based in Thousand Oaks, California, it is best known for medicines in bone health, inflammation, cardiovascular disease and kidney disease, and since the 2023 Horizon acquisition in rare disease. Fiscal 2025 revenue was US$36.8 billion across a portfolio in which 14 products each sold more than US$1 billion, although several of the older brands are now losing both price and volume.

ASML Holding NV: ASML is the most consequential technology company most consumers have never heard of. Based in Veldhoven in the Netherlands, it is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, room-sized systems that use 13.5 nanometer light, plasma generated from molten tin, and mirrors polished to near-atomic smoothness to print circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. Without them, chipmakers such as TSMC, Samsung and Intel cannot manufacture the leading-edge logic and memory used in phones, data centers and AI accelerators. ASML sold 535 systems in 2025 and reported total net sales of ~$37 billion (32.7 billion euros).

Amgen Inc. and ASML Holding NV pursue distinct approaches to generating revenue, and understanding how each company operates is the foundation of any fair comparison between Amgen Inc. and ASML Holding NV.

Amgen Inc. business model: Amgen operates a high-risk, high-reward biopharmaceutical business model. It spends heavily on research to discover and engineer new biologic drugs: US$7.3 billion in fiscal 2025, or 20.7% of product sales. Once a drug is approved by the FDA, Amgen secures a patent, granting them a temporary monopoly to sell the drug at a premium price. Because biologic drugs are grown from living cells rather than chemically synthesized, they are much harder for competitors to copy, resulting in slightly longer and more defensible monopolies than traditional pills.

ASML Holding NV business model: ASML designs and assembles lithography systems, sells them to a small number of chipmakers, and then earns recurring revenue maintaining and upgrading the installed base. In 2025, net system sales were ~$27.7 billion (24.5 billion euros), or 74.9 percent of total net sales, and net service and field option sales were ~$9.27 billion (8.2 billion euros), or 25.1 percent. Customer concentration is extreme: four customers each accounted for more than 10 percent of 2025 net sales and together for 61.2 percent, while the single largest customer accounted for ~$8.81 billion (7.8 billion euros), or 23.9 percent. ASML works as a systems integrator rather than a vertically integrated manufacturer. It buys all lenses, mirrors, illuminators and collectors exclusively from Carl Zeiss SMT, in which it holds a 24.9 percent stake, and draws on a base of about 5,100 suppliers. Because systems take many months to build, customers pay substantial down payments before delivery.

The durability of a company's moat often decides long-term winners. Here is how the competitive advantages of Amgen Inc. stack up against those of ASML Holding NV.

Amgen Inc. competitive advantage: Amgen's main competitive advantage is experience making complex biologics at commercial scale, which it has done continuously since Epogen launched in 1989. Producing a glycosylated protein or a monoclonal antibody to a consistent specification requires validated facilities, process know-how and a regulatory record that take years to build, which is also why the company can turn the same capability toward biosimilars of competitor products. Its balance sheet lets it buy late-stage assets rather than rely only on internal discovery: Onyx, Otezla, Five Prime, ChemoCentryx and Horizon together cost about US$57 billion between 2013 and 2023.

ASML Holding NV competitive advantage: ASML's competitive advantage is the difficulty of building an EUV machine at all. The system fires a high-power laser at molten tin droplets roughly 50,000 times a second to create a plasma that emits 13.5 nanometer light, which cannot pass through glass or air and so must be steered by mirrors polished to near-atomic smoothness inside a vacuum. Those optics come only from Carl Zeiss SMT, under an exclusive arrangement, and ASML spent roughly two decades between the start of EUV research and the first production shipments in 2017 before the technology worked at commercial throughput. The company spent ~$5.31 billion (4.7 billion euros) on R&D in 2025 alone, 14.4 percent of sales, and coordinates about 5,100 suppliers to build the systems.

Future prospects matter as much as current results. The growth strategies below explain how Amgen Inc. and ASML Holding NV each plan to expand from here.

Amgen Inc. growth strategy: Amgen's growth plan has two parts: scale the newer medicines and buy what the pipeline does not supply. Recent launches and acquired products drove the 10% revenue growth in fiscal 2025, with Tezspire up 52% to US$1.48 billion, Repatha up 36% to US$3.02 billion, Evenity up 34% to US$2.10 billion, Uplizna up 73% to US$655 million and Imdelltra reaching US$627 million in its second year. The company is pushing into obesity with MariTide, now in six Phase 3 MARITIME studies, and runs a biosimilars business that produced about US$3.0 billion of fiscal 2025 sales across Pavblu, Mvasi, Amjevita and Wezlana.

ASML Holding NV growth strategy: Growth depends on how fast chipmakers add advanced capacity and on how quickly ASML can build systems. In EUV, the workhorse is the TWINSCAN NXE:3800E, whose higher productivity drove 2025 EUV sales and a large volume of field upgrades on installed systems; ASML recognized 44 NXE systems for ~$11.8 billion (10.4 billion euros) in 2025. The next step is the High-NA EXE platform, which raises numerical aperture from 0.33 to 0.55 and prints 8 nanometer features in a single exposure. ASML shipped its first full-specification EXE:5200B in April 2025 at 175 wafers per hour, 60 percent more productive than the EXE:5000, recognized four EXE systems for ~$1.36 billion (1.2 billion euros) in 2025, and expects the platform to support high-volume manufacturing from 2027. Beyond lithography, ASML is pushing multibeam e-beam inspection toward high-volume manufacturing, shipped its first advanced packaging system the TWINSCAN XT:260 in 2025 to address 3D integration, and invested ~$1.47 billion (1.3 billion euros) in Mistral AI for about 11 percent on a fully diluted basis to apply AI models across its products and operations. Service and field option sales, which grew 26.2 percent to ~$9.27 billion (8.2 billion euros) in 2025, expand automatically with the installed base.

A closer look at the financial trajectory of Amgen Inc. and ASML Holding NV rounds out the comparison.

Amgen Inc.: Amgen is a cash-generative business with high product gross margins. In fiscal 2025 it reported US$36.8 billion of total revenues, US$7.7 billion of GAAP net income, a 25.8% GAAP operating margin, US$8.1 billion of free cash flow and US$5.1 billion of dividends paid. Its results used to depend on a few large franchises, first Epogen and Aranesp, then Enbrel. As those matured Amgen bought revenue instead: Onyx in 2013, Otezla in 2019 and Horizon Therapeutics for US$27.8 billion in 2023. That last deal is also the main reason for the balance sheet it now carries, with US$54.6 billion of debt outstanding at December 31, 2025, debt leverage of about 3.2 times EBITDA and US$2.8 billion of net interest expense in fiscal 2025.

ASML Holding NV: ASML's financial profile reflects a sole-source position in a concentrated market. In 2025 total net sales rose 15.6 percent to ~$37 billion (32.7 billion euros), gross profit was ~$19.5 billion (17.3 billion euros) for a gross margin of 52.8 percent, income from operations was ~$12.8 billion (11.3 billion euros), and net income was ~$10.8 billion (9.6 billion euros), a net margin of 29.4 percent, on basic earnings per share of 24.73 euros. R&D spending was ~$5.31 billion (4.7 billion euros), or 14.4 percent of sales, and selling, general and administrative costs were ~$1.47 billion (1.3 billion euros). Operating cash flow was ~$14.4 billion (12.7 billion euros) and free cash flow ~$12.4 billion (11.0 billion euros), helped by customer down payments received before systems are delivered. ASML returned ~$9.61 billion (8.5 billion euros) to shareholders in 2025, including ~$6.67 billion (5.9 billion euros) of share buybacks, and proposed an annualized dividend of 7.50 euros per share against 6.40 euros for 2024. It held ~$15 billion (13.3 billion euros) of cash and short-term investments at year end. The main financial exposures are the concentration of sales in a few customers and the export control regime covering China, which was 29.1 percent of 2025 sales.