"The declines were especially sharp for companies making equipment for the front-end process of forming circuits on silicon wafers. Tokyo Electron, Screen Holdings, and Kokusai saw combined China sales fall almost 20 percent from the previous year."
This means that China is either buying the lithography machines from someone else which is highly unlikely OR that they are using their own domestically produced versions which correlates with what the Tongji university President said about the first DUVI machine being delivered to SMIC in summer 2025 and being able to manufacture stably at the 7nm node with multi patterning. These two indicators both suggest that China has already domestically produced lithography machines and they're being bought by fabs and actually used in manufacturing chips instead of being prototypes.
