Besi Brand Guidelines: A 1995 Duiven Start, Four Machine Names & Applied Materials

Incorporated in May, listed in December.

Besi is the short name of BE Semiconductor Industries N.V., a Dutch maker of equipment for the assembly stage of chip production, with its headquarters in Duiven, the Netherlands. The company says it was incorporated under Dutch law in May 1995 and held its initial public offering in December 1995; Dutch Wikipedia points out that the listing came only seven months after the founding. English Wikipedia names Richard Blickman as the founder, and Besi’s own management page still lists him as chief executive and chairman of the board of management.

The shares trade on Euronext Amsterdam under the symbol BESI. Dutch Wikipedia, citing the newspaper NRC, says the stock joined Amsterdam’s AEX index on 22 March 2021, and the company adds that its American depositary receipts trade over the counter in the United States.

Besi describes itself as being in one line of business: the development, manufacture, marketing, sale and service of semiconductor assembly equipment for the chip and electronics industries. Its customers, the company says, are chip makers, assembly subcontractors and electronics and industrial companies. Some are manufacturers that buy machines for their own plants; others are subcontractors that assemble packages for third parties on contract. Dutch Wikipedia names some of the buyers of its machines and services, among them Infineon, Intel, NXP Semiconductors, STMicroelectronics and TSMC.

The group is spread across two continents. Besi says it runs eight development and production sites in Asia and Europe and thirteen sales and service offices in Europe, Asia and North America, and that at the end of 2025 it employed 1,964 people, about two-thirds of them in Asia.

Datacon, Esec, Fico and Meco.

Besi sells under older product names rather than its own initials alone. The company says the principal brand names for its assembly systems are Datacon, Esec, Fico and Meco, and its catalogue still runs model by model under those names, from the Esec 2100 die bonders to the Fico molding lines and the Meco plating systems.

Each name sits with a product group. Die attach, the placing of individual chips onto a substrate or onto other chips, is headed from Besi Switzerland in Steinhausen, which the company says makes epoxy, flip-chip and soft-solder die bonding systems. Besi Austria, in Radfeld, develops flip-chip and multi-chip equipment on behalf of the Swiss unit, and a Singapore office is the group’s main contact point in Asia for die attach.

Packaging carries the Fico name. Besi Netherlands, in Duiven, designs and develops molding, trim-and-form and singulation systems for leadframe, substrate and wafer-level packaging, and the company says all of that equipment, with its tools and molds, is produced at its plants in Shah Alam, Malaysia, and Leshan, China. Plating carries the Meco name: Meco Equipment Engineers, in ’s-Hertogenbosch, designs tin, copper and precious-metal plating systems for semiconductor and solar uses, and Besi says it moved plating production to Shah Alam in 2015.

That split is the company’s own summary of where things are made: its product range, it says, is mainly designed and developed in Europe and manufactured in Asia. English Wikipedia describes production as outsourced to subsidiaries in China and Malaysia; Dutch Wikipedia lists China, Malaysia and Vietnam.

The newest line is hybrid bonding, a way of joining chips directly to one another for dense three-dimensional packages. Besi presents its Datacon 8800 CHAMEO ultra plus AC as a hybrid bonding platform, alongside thermo-compression bonders such as the 9800 TC next.

Equipment, cleanrooms and trade fairs.

Semiconductor equipment makers sell to a small circle of customers: the chip manufacturers that run wafer fabs. Their machines deposit, etch, measure, test and package, and they are rarely seen outside a cleanroom. That shapes how these companies present themselves. The product is a large enclosed tool, and what happens inside it takes place at a scale no camera can show directly.

So the pictures tend to repeat. Corporate sites and annual reports show tools standing in rows behind glass, with panelled housings in white, pale grey or blue, and cleanroom staff in full gowns, hoods and gloves. A polished wafer held up to the light in a gloved hand is a familiar image, because it stands in for the chips the machines help to make. Fab interiors, lit evenly and seen down long corridors, give a sense of size and order.

Words do much of the work that pictures cannot. Makers describe their processes by name — atomic layer deposition, epitaxy, metal-organic chemical vapour deposition, wire bonding, wafer inspection — and give their tool ranges short product names and model numbers. Company histories, milestone lists and timelines are common, since many of these firms began as university spin-offs, sales agents or divisions of larger groups, and changed hands or split along the way.

Trade fairs remain a meeting point for this industry. SEMICON West and SEMICON Taiwan are among the shows where equipment makers set up stands, present new tools and meet customers. For a design guide, the pattern is a disciplined, technical register: cool colours, precise product names and photographs of clean, closed machines.

A partner, a shareholder and an independent company.

Besi’s closest link is with Applied Materials, the American chip-equipment maker. In October 2020 the two companies announced a collaboration on hybrid bonding, which Besi describes as joint development and commercialisation of integrated hybrid bonding production systems for leading chip manufacturers. On 14 April 2025, Dutch Wikipedia says, Applied disclosed a 9% stake in Besi.

Takeover talk followed. On 13 March 2026 the Dutch public broadcaster NOS reported that trading in Besi shares was briefly halted at the Amsterdam open after Reuters reported talks with Lam Research and Applied Materials about a possible acquisition; the shares opened almost 12% higher. NOS noted that Applied was then Besi’s largest shareholder and that, according to Reuters, any American takeover would need government approval. Besi said it does not respond to market rumours and that it was fully committed to its strategic plan as an independent company.

On 26 October 2026 Applied announced that it had raised its holding to about 20% of Besi’s shares. In a statement the next day, Besi said Applied regards the investment as long-term, does not intend to seek a seat on Besi’s board and has no current plans to buy more shares. Besi remains a listed company with its head office in Duiven.

For a design guide, Besi shows a corporate name that sits above four product names it keeps in use, with design in Europe and manufacturing in Asia. Compare ASML, another Dutch chip-equipment maker, and Applied Materials, its hybrid bonding partner and largest shareholder. For this guide we use a deep slate, a pale silver and a muted copper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Besi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.