Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia

A other Dutch update/summary: https://nos.nl/artikel/2586472-amerikaanse-invloed-en-roekel...

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They needed wafers for 70 million, were going to order for 200 million. 3x more is hardly "funneling large amounts of money".

I would call that typical way to run business, perhaps they were making supplies for next three years, before tariffs kick in... Perhaps they were going to expand.

I am too. Although it appears computer and computer machinery, like chips amongst others, are the 2nd largest export[1]. I'm guessing these types of companies are very important to economic stability within the country and economic posturing in outside the company in global trade.

[1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/netherlands-top-10-exports/

Looks like there was some timely pressure from the US.

De ondernemingskamer is not a paper tiger. Ask Sanderink about that.

They rarely make decisions that I disagree with, even if I realize I usually don't have all of the facts. Business continuity, employees, shareholders, customers. Those are the priorities and management is definitely not acting with impunity. The shareholder angle here is an interesting one, that route has been stopped off preemptively it seems.

I'm a bit surprised by this move as well... If only someone had done similar to protect the gutting of Sears and K-Mart, even if both companies made several years of bad decisions themselves, the way they were cleaned out is disgusting.

I'm surprised they did this while the cabinet is fallen.

Indeed, how did they even figure this out?

I can imagine that there could be a case of parallel construction to build a case to get a specific desired outcome. I also think that if you're right and this is an example of a 'mild' case of mismanaged assets it's still pretty egregious.

I find the even milder circular financing of deals like nVidia investing in OpenAI to be concerning.

This is exactly the kind of thing you're not meant to do with a company you don't wholly own (and to some extent with any limited liability company). Part of the deal is that as an executive or majority shareholder the company is not an extension of yourself, it's a seperate entity and when making decisions about it you are meant to act in the interests of that company. This is sadly not well enforced, but it is the kind of thing where shareholders can and will take action.

(Musk has been heavily criticised for pulling these kinds of shenanigans between Tesla, SpaceX, and X, but it seems like there are not enough shareholders willing to take him to task for it)

To be clear the specific intervention used here is very rare. It's really not business as usual, but it's also not nation state shenanigans luckily. Just regular old grift.

It seems that microchips are a major export, a single industry in a country collapsing can cause a lot of damage. From other mentioned articles, it seems like the company was setup to extract all value to prop up another company... not dissimilar from K-mart and Sears stripped of all value at the end. Now imagine that accounts for say even 5% of GDP and other industries rely on that product as well.

I've been advocating for years that US prescription medications should require dual sourcing and at least 50% domestic production purely for security reasons. You can ramp up from 50% with multiple providers a lot easier than 0.

I guess that depends on 2 things:

* how critical Nexperia's chips are to national security

* how much this bogus order would harm Nexperia

If the bogus order is sufficiently harmful to important chip production, this could harm national security.

I said it that way because I don’t like the hypocrisies in general, and I said European because the comment I responded to combined Dutch and European markets into one.

It would be foolish to sell off a great value like ASML or others that adds incredible value. But one should also not get mad when other countries do it, because they see their industries as valuable things as well.

Our markets are just getting more closed and different groups are being formed. Let’s hope other high value companies gather their IP rights as well.

Yeah Asian tigers mostly didn't follow the narrow comparative advantage guidance and instead did state protection of industry to develop it: https://www.amazon.com/Kicking-Away-Ladder-Development-Persp...

The US did the same when it was young, along with large instances of exfiltrating tech (Samuel Slater, kicked off the American industrial revolution).

> And China doesn't (didn't?) allow foreign companies to operate in China without a local partner at all

Tesla was the first to buck this trend.

> And China doesn't (didn't?) allow foreign companies to operate in China without a local partner at all.

This is one of the most persistent misunderstandings about China.

China had a closed, planned economy. It began opening up to foreign investment in the 1980s, but not all at once in every sector. China's general approach has been gradual, instead of the "shock therapy" that the ex-Soviet Union went through (which destroyed its economy).

China initially allowed foreign investment in certain sectors, with conditions like involvement of a local joint-venture partner. An example of this was Volkswagen building a factory in Shanghai in 1984, with the Chinese company SAIC as a local partner with 50% ownership.

Over time, the number of sectors that are open to foreign investment has increased (most sectors are now open), and the rules on investment have been loosened. For example, joint-venture requirements in the automotive sector were phased out and completely eliminated by 2022. Tesla completely owns its operations in China. Toyota has announced that it is buying out its JV partner. Other Western automotive manufacturers have taken majority stakes in their operations.

China has been moving towards more openness to foreign investment over time, not less. It does have policies like "Made in China 2025" that are intended to move up the value chain, and avoid getting stuck making low-value plastic toys forever. China wants to be like the US and EU, after all - a developed economy that manufactures lots of high-tech goods.

What about the suez canal or iranian oil fields

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> And China doesn't (didn't?) allow foreign companies to operate in China without a local partner at all. So I don't see the irony - everyone practices protectionism, some are just more subtle about it than others.

And the west always said that China is bad for doing it.

That’s the irony part.

Also, no hell broke loose when Argentina nationalized YPF.

Ah yes, Venezuela famously only has lawsuits that happened to them. Maybe look up Guaido, the 3% polling self and US declared president of Venezuela.

You're talking about it as if it was a bug, it was not. I'm pretty sure a generation of MBAs got raised and retired really rich shifting manufacturing jobs to China. The narrative about them not being open is just a way to cope with their rise now and get rid of any blame.

> We gave China everything - we allowed their people to study at our universities, we allowed their tourists, we gave them virtually full access to our economic market, we gave them access to the Internet, we gave them seriously discounted shipping rates and customs exemptions.

Lol, when you have to convince people that working in services instead of manufacturing is the future, that's what you get. Mindset is also a big issue, I know enough people who played the Erasmus game and graduated in double the normal time just by coasting that I think it's just normal at this point. And the problem with this spiral is that it just compounds, Europe is shifting to a continent of pensionists, highly educated people that live with their parents til their 40s and nepobabies playing airbnb landlords.

We got back slave labour and offshored manufacturing pollution.

Personally, I'd rather pay extra for high quality goods made ethically than some planned obsolescence or plastic garbage.

> We gave China everything - we allowed their people to study at our universities, we allowed their tourists, we gave them virtually full access to our economic market

I'm impressed by their generosity (whoever you're referring to as "we"). Did they also allow the Chinese to win Math Olympiad trophies at some point?

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I’m not very familiar with Dutch company structure but after a certain percentage you’re usually privy to trade secrets etc. so it’s dangerous even then.

And my point has nothing to do with Chinese or Dutch or European, even though those are the examples I used.

The main thing is that it was a mistake to sell vital industries, and some people are really hypocritical when other countries do something like this, but in this particular case they’re finding out reasons to side with the Dutch government. I just want consistency, it is seldomly okay to allow any other entity into critical industries.

Let's have a quick recap of two of the things we've already tried:

Isolationism sucks. You have a domestic industry but it's not allowed to sell to other countries in retaliation for you doing the same to them, so it's small and consolidated and when the domestic providers are correspondingly terrible the trade barriers inhibit you from using the foreign ones.

"Free Trade" (but not actually) is even worse, because you take down your own trade barriers nominally in exchange for others doing the same, and then some of them don't. They subsidize their industries so that the global industry consolidates into one country and then if that country sucks you're in even worse shape because it's also a single point of failure and subject to foreign political forces.

What we should be doing isn't going back to trade barriers, it's creating sufficient tax incentives to sustain a domestic industry for strategically important products and then letting other countries do the same and consumers choose which company they want to buy it from. Because then you don't have trade barriers but you do have both domestic production and competition.

The price is that companies in those industries would essentially be paying lower taxes than they currently do or receiving some subsidies in order to make them competitive with the other countries doing something equivalent. But maybe that's not the worst of the three options.

People are going to miss it in the age of fractured, paranoid isolation.

Some will win and some will loose without free trade as well. Or do you think without free trade everybody will be great?

For me consumerism seems much worse than free trade. Buying clothes and use it once, change the car each year or other similar behaviors seem unsustainable because nobody cares about the generated garbage or the energy/material requirements.

Sure, now in some countries we can associate free trade with consumerism, but it's not everywhere the same.

I feel like I profited a lot as a consumer. Maybe not as an employee, but overall it wasn’t bad.

Yeah globalism is what got us into this dependency on China (and on the US as well). I'm very much a proponent of limiting international investment.

Too little too late. China will catch up on everything of importance, and we're on the hook for pretty much everything else.

When was there unfettered free trade? There's always been tariffs in some form and the WTO exists

Yes let's go back to times where marrying a girl from a neighbouring town would raise eyebrows. So much better than "globalism"

The company has not been nationalized.

Let’s hope this one is still cold.

s/while WWII was still fresh/the cold war was

_Washington Post_ just had an article about why (https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/10/12/america-r...).

"In 1984, a German historian compiled 210 explanations historians had suggested for Rome’s fall, from lead poisoning and barbarian invasions to Christianity, moral decline and gout.

After studying dynamic civilizations such as Athens, Rome, Abbasid Baghdad, Song China, Renaissance Italy and the Dutch Republic, I can attest that there is no single explanation. Each golden age had its own character and its own downfall."

As I understand it, the Roman Empire was fuelled by expansion (stealing other people stuff), enabled by their exceptional military machine. Once they could not profitably expand any further, they were in trouble.

Aren't you exaggerating it?

I think we are fine in term of infra -- I don't work as a civil engineer, but considering companies in my city repair the roads every year /s they probably retain the knowledge.

Why stop there why not Indus Valley Civilization

with Dutch stats like this it’s always important to note what’s for Dutch use or transporting through the Port of Rotterdam.

Are you tracking that harvesting REM is a nasty business with a lot of “don’t look” environmental impacts? As such, most countries don’t do it, or have an infrastructure for it.

So can Trump and USA.

If the west want's the other 7 billion to care, you're going to have to find some principles and live by them. Without exception.

Strategic REEs, i.e. heavyREE (Dysprosium, Terbium) are infact exceptionally rare, as in GEOLOGICALLY RARE. They are produced in China, because China (and Myanmar deposits controlled by China) are where ionic clays containing strategic HREEs can be economically extracted at scale. It's not just building altenrate HREE (empahsis on H) is not worth it, the technology simply doesn't exist to do so in other geologic deposits, i.e. all the har rock REE US+co has access to. The fact is PRC controls 90% of deposits and 99% percent of processing for elements that enable high temperature magnets, high power sensors, EW aka all the good shit that enables modern military capabilities... which was designed BECAUSE PRC commericialized process on specific geologic deposits that enabled commoditizing those materials. US built their miltary overmatch on material science and dirt that PRC controls and is nearly exclusively geopgraphically bound to PRC, with no short/medium term alternatives. PRC as monopoly supplier has much more complete ability to enforce export controls. This is just MIC specific, there's also stuff like dysprosium for highend capacitators where PRC has functionally 100% control, i.e. less performant alternative materials would effective regress performance by 10-25%, comparable to losing node size.

> The main reason that it's mostly China producing them may simply be due to the fact that the volumes are so small that building your own industry is not really worth it.

There's also an element of their production generating pollution and us preferring to think of ourselves as cleaner than that. We only use the rare earths.

Compare how desalinization is very cheap, but California prefers constant screaming about drought.

Dollar value is not the point. For the US MIC this matters a lot. There are not really any ready replacements for some vital weapons components at a time when US weapons stockpiles have been heavily depleted.

The US has immense pressure on the dutch government, given their control over ASML . Its US big tech and semi design studios that determines who will need to buy EUV from ASML. Given ASML is not allowed to do business with China, Russia etc.

Ultimately the Dutch, like for instance the Australians, are a rounding error compared to China and a pawn in a bigger game. At least the Dutch can "hide" behind the EU.

So there will noise but this won't stop China' rise and it won't stop Europe's decline, either.

> Unfortunately we seem to be living in interesting times.

China played a remarkably smart game. We let it happen.

People have been telling us for twenty years that this would happen and nobody listened until it was almost too late.

Sounds like the OR (ondernemingsraad) apparently wants to get rid of the CEO for incompetence which is very interesting. It is extremely hard to prove (in a court of law) but a valid reason. I assume they were doing all kind of shady things if they go that route. (Havent read the Court Docs, it is a guess)

OR vs CEO also explains the duplicate entries as they are both representatives of the company.

From what I've read it was the company's own board that asked for the ceo (Wing) to be removed.

What is a CLO?

Nexperia was also spun off to placate Chinese regulators back when Qualcomm wanted to acquire NXP, and then after the spin off the Chinese regulators still refused to approve the acquisition.

Perhaps also worth noting that ASML is also a spin-off of Philips.

The regulation was created after that

There are only about 3200 jobs in Augsburg (Germany), it's HQ?

https://www.marketscreener.com/quote/stock/KUKA-AG-436260/ne...

Note: Looking for more information about the distribution of jobs atm ( countries). But it's hard to find. Any resources?

But you're right. They still have jobs there, I didn't knew that.

Note: This is about the law Germany created afterwards: https://www.akingump.com/en/insights/alerts/germany-tightens...

> The western companies aren't using the business as a strategic tool to destabilise the host country.

What is your source for this claim? Wouldn't companies destabilize the host country to facilitate their own business?

Western companies have been destabilizing local regimes for centuries at this point. Companies in general are a convenient way to mask state power that pays for itself. Many of these companies were established in former colonies as a direct replacement for explicitly colonial resource extraction.

Searching online for examples I find Glencore, TotalEnergies, ExxonMobil, Chevron (among others) have all recently engaged in bribery or even supported violent political groups abroad to protect their own interests.

Read about the United Fruit Company, they created “banana republics” destabilizing governments.

> The western companies aren't using the business as a strategic tool to destabilise the host country

where did you get that info? from cartoons? how old re you little npc?

Edits aren't possible, but what the body of replies (so far) miss is that this is discussing the weaponisation motive versus the profit motive.

The Dutch taking ownership of this company is not to divert its profits, it's to prevent the weaponisation of the company against the host country. There is an expectation that the Dutch have reasonable evidence of this. It's also set against a background of the foreign country's other attempts of unprovoked interference.

The replies seem to miss the mark and provide examples where nefarious activities were engaged in the pursuit of profit, some other examples provided were further off the mark by citing examples of retaliation against nationalisation (which is the opposite situation).

This is why I state that they're difficult to compare. If the Dutch were claiming this company for a financial motive it would be the source of significant uncertainty in foreign investment. That doesn't seem to be the case here.

> The western companies aren't using the business as a strategic tool to destabilise the host country.

Do western governments use other methods to destabilise the host countries? What should be done about those?

> The western companies aren't using the business as a strategic tool to destabilise the host country.

The 2004 book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins makes the US has.

Really depends on your definition of destabilise the host country, not that this is what's happening right now in the Dutch case.

One can argue about the causes -- and no doubt there are many, the biggest IMO being that WW2 was so horrific that Europeans were willing to do anything to prevent it again -- but there's no disputing that the last 75 years of peace in Europe is unprecedented in its long history of near-continuous inter-state warfare for the past ~2000 years (since "Pax Romana").

It benefits the US just fine. Just like Germany moving it's production facilities to the US after dismantling its own energy infrastructure suites the US just fine. As witnessed by BASF shutting down German production, while scaling up US production.

At least short term it does. Long term however, hollow shells of allies drag you down, whereas strong allies are more beneficial.

But I still remember the US stating they will not tolerate Germany if they dare to vote against them in the UN security council back when they were talking about destroying Libya[1]. Back then I thought Germany couldn't fall any lower with such a weak foreign minister, but here we are.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/mar/18/libya-...

> constructive gets people to the moon and back.

NASA is a government agency, there was no “state capitalism” in that case. Of course NASA used private contractors, but it didn’t own them.

Don't pick your poison, mix them together! Industrial policy for losses, rent-seeking for profits.

Erm - there is such thing as the concept of strategical industries. And it is neither a European thing or a modern thing either, but don't let that stop you from spouting a narrative where Europe is the bad guy in an international landscape where they have transferred voluntarily or not such much technology to China.

> Netherlands AND Holland? Isn't that the same place?

Holland is part of the Netherlands. Not unlike how say Texas is part of the United States.

So in that regard the statement was redundant, yes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holland

Roughly half the Capex for a new modern fab goes to ASML.

There's more to that than just ASML, as that company in turn uses specialty lenses produced by Zeiss. Additionally there's crucial American IP (I don't recall what specifically) that goes into those machines, so advanced semiconductor production is more of a global effort really.

Meanwhile China is trying to do all that domestically. They might even pull this off, but just like with their 7nm tech, they're unlikely to be able to do this economically.

They're working hard but this particular product is so high-tech they struggle to develop it. I bet they have mostly complete reproductions, but just missing key components like the laser.

Godfather 3 is actually my favorite Godfather movie.

It detours from the mafia line of story and instead dives into the darker maelstrom of high politics.

It is from this movie that I learned about Michele Sindona, about Propaganda Due, and in large gained an undying interest in Cold War and geopolitics. Of course I'm just an amateur who only knows English, Mandarin and a bit of French (for Cold War study I'd say all major EU languages are important), and too much source material was buried in history, awaiting for all relevant parties to die so that it has a chance to go into daylight again.

Not true. Huawei's HiSilicon was even or ahead of Qualcomm Snapdragon as early as 2018 in phone SoCs.

This stuff constantly happens to foreigners in China and just seems to be mostly due to having bad local legal teams. If your CEO can run off with the company stamps and screw you over.. then it just sounds like amateur hour and you have no idea what you're doing.

The legal system there is fundamentally very bureaucratic - there are rules, but they're very different from the West. You need local help - and a lot of it. You see similar bureaucratic insanity in Japan, though I'm guessing there is just a lot more legal infrastructure for guiding foreign companies there.

I can see what both of the above commenters are saying. Here is my synthesis:

In the US, the powers-that-be are often content to let markets, popular forces, and regulation shape foreign companies. In China (I'm no expert, please weigh in [1]) it seems that the CCP is very motivated to make foreign firms serve its industrial agenda while staying under Party control. That usually means insisting on Chinese ownership stakes or joint‑venture structures, so the state always has a foothold in the business.

In this way, politicians of both countries do find ways to "get what they want" from a foreign business -- even if they go about doing it differently.

[1] I'm not ignorant of geopolitics; I do read about China, but focusing on it is not part of my job nor education.

In this situation I disagree. This is a blatant seizure of the control of a foreign owned company for political reasons. This is straight out of China's playbook.

I agree that the West is in general different, as in this is more an exception than the rule. But being in the semiconductor industry, I'm fed up with the stupid rules we are dealing with since the 1st Trump admin. Even more stupid is the US foreign policy affecting EU companies much more than US companies.