In Part 1, the thesis was simple:
Europe is not divorcing America.
Europe is buying insurance.
Not ideological independence. Not some fantasy of total self-sufficiency. Just redundancy where dependence has become dangerous.
That idea still works.
But the first version of the trade has already been discovered.
Defense stocks ran.
Cyber got crowded.
Sovereign cloud became a buzzword.
Semiconductors became obvious.
The next layer is more interesting.
Because strategic autonomy does not only require fighter jets, cloud servers, and chip fabs.
It requires the parts underneath them.
The machines that package chips.
The valves inside vacuum chambers.
The cables that move electricity.
The cooling systems that keep AI infrastructure alive.
The control devices that make buildings consume less energy.
This is the midcap version of the Europe-autonomy trade.
Not the headline companies.
The bottleneck suppliers.
And that is usually where the better percentage upside lives.
The screen
The goal here is not to find the cheapest stock in Europe.
Cheap can stay cheap.
The goal is also not to buy turnaround stories.
Turnarounds have one problem in this theme: they need to fix themselves before they can capture the opportunity.
That is not the best setup.
If Europe is rebuilding critical capacity, the winners should already be trusted suppliers. Already profitable. Already taking orders. Already sitting in supply chains where failure is expensive.
So the filter is:
No broken companies.
No policy zombies.
No “maybe next year” stories.
Only midcaps that are already working — and become more important if Europe keeps moving from efficiency to resilience.
The five that pass the screen:
BESI. VAT Group. NKT. Munters. Belimo.
Not the obvious names.
That is the point.
1. BE Semiconductors — the chip bottleneck after ASML
The lazy semiconductor thesis is: buy ASML.
That is not wrong.
It is just obvious.
The more interesting question is what happens after the wafer is made.
AI chips are becoming less about one monolithic die and more about connecting multiple pieces of silicon into one powerful system. Logic, memory, photonics, advanced substrates, high-bandwidth memory — the game is increasingly about packaging.
That is where BESI matters.
BESI makes advanced assembly and packaging equipment. The company is especially relevant in hybrid bonding, one of the key technologies for stacking and connecting chips more efficiently.
This is not the old back-end semiconductor industry where packaging was treated like a low-value afterthought.
Packaging is becoming part of performance.
And when packaging becomes part of performance, the equipment supplier becomes strategic.
The numbers show the inflection. In Q1 2026, BESI orders rose to €269.7 million, up 104.5% year over year. Revenue increased 28.3% to €184.9 million, and net income rose 63.8% to €51.6 million. Management guided Q2 revenue to grow another 30–40% versus Q1, with gross margin expected at 64–66%. (Besi)
That is not a turnaround.
That is demand pulling through a high-margin niche leader.
The strategic angle is simple: Europe does not need to own the whole semiconductor stack to have leverage. It needs to own difficult pieces of the stack that others cannot easily replace.
BESI is one of those pieces.
The risk: semiconductor equipment is cyclical. AI packaging demand can be real and still arrive in waves. The stock will not move like a utility.
The reason it belongs: if advanced packaging becomes one of the next bottlenecks in AI hardware, BESI is one of Europe’s cleanest midcap ways to own that bottleneck.
