Comment by Doxin

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"

free for me but not for thee

Only they will not admit it.

The capitalist propaganda, "freedom", is so ingrained that we cannot easily paddle back on it. So we will become helplessly hypocritical instead.

The company has not been nationalized.

> It gets a lot less contradictory when you realize the principles are window dressing for the interests.

I don't think this is the epiphany you think it represents. The whole point of laws and regulations is to protect interests.

Do you think that any regime passes and enforces laws that are detrimental to their best interests?

In free market economies, laws and regulations are put in place to foster competition, and antitrust legislation is in place to prevent anticompetitive practices. However, laws and regulations are also in place to prevent strategic interests from being captured or even threatened. The motivation is rather obvious and to the point. Where is this window dressing you speak of?

> Nation states will use whatever words are necessary to justify their actions, but the game is and always has been power, leverage, and interest.

Your post shows some degree of confusion, specially by the way you imply inconsistencies. There are none, and the whole point is rather on the nose. Internal competition and level playing fields are promoted as they pressure companies to improve their competitiveness. "Competitiveness" is the operating principle. Having a rival third-party perform an action that threatens your competitiveness is obviously not acceptable.

I think the issue is more complex than that but certainly vested interests / national interest is definitely one aspect of things.

The west and the US specifically has operated on an open market policy partly as a result of two world wars we got dragged into in relatively short order. Economic integration was thought to reduce the likelihood of another great war.

However what we have currently is a relatively developed economy (China) using currency manipulation and protective policies to prop up their own economy long after it has passed out of the "developing" phase. Plus massive and ongoing state investment and debt deferral. China effectively subsidizes massive amounts of economic activity that makes any US or EU tax breaks / protective policies look like chump change.

When you have such a large market participant behaving that way it is little wonder that people lose their faith in free markets and want to intervene. Including doing explicitly punitive things against China. It is an attitude of China's own making. After all... China will not allow you to buy a freakin' popsicle stand as a foreigner let alone a shipbuilding company or anything else.

China wants all the access to the rest of the world and wants everyone to buy their products... but they do not want to reciprocate.

The Dutch did not seize the company, but assumed control over certain aspects of its governance.

I wonder how this would affect patent applications, since after such an event, some countries might not respect patents for their internal markets.

"For my friends, the law; for my enemies, arbitrariness."

They didn't take ownership, they just paused decision-making and now major choices can veto'd by the ministry of economic affairs if they are deemed not in the interest of the Dutch company (which is part of a larger Chinese holding).

You are right. China does not really implement free market without government interaction. Then again, neither does the US or any other country for that matter.

The US used its massive state surveillance apparel to spy on essentially every country in the world, not only for diplomatic advantage, which you might argue would be fair game, but also to steal industrial secrets and promote US companies (see e.g. https://www.mediapart.fr/en/journal/france/290615/revealed-m... for France, one of their supposed allies).

Paraphrasing you:

> The US heavily subsidize their companies and have large government bureaus that strategically guide industries over long time frames. For example, the US has been on a long, intentional path to destroying all international corn producers via subsidies, dumping, etc.

The US essentially destroyed the traditional crop growing in Mexico by a combination of subsidies and free trade agreements.

It is _true_ that China does not play a fair free trade game. It is _not true_ that the US, or any other country, does. (The reasons for it should be obvious btw, free trade only works if legislation is more or less the same everywhere, otherwise it's just stupid.)

A free market just means that people are allowed to buy and sell what they want. If a government decides to help some industries that is irrelevant.

It stops being free when government attacks economic activity, not when it promotes it.

> For example, the CCP has been on a long, intentional path to destroying all international solar manufacturers via subsidies, dumping, etc.

You should see what Microsoft did. Forgetting the corruption the open document format, free/subsidised licences for students is almost the same thing.

Let's rather choose a set of principles and apply them without exception?

Lol, how is this not a free market? Apple subsidizes dozens of organizations internally to advance its strategic interests, what’s the difference?

Yeah relations between Russia and the west are famously normal right now.

I have a feeling the function that tell us "if hell breaks loose" has something to do with number of nukes ready and waiting.

Actually that is the free market

Psst, your bias is showing! Tuck it in...

The argument I have heard about the US taking 20% stake in Intel is that when a company asks for federal money then it’s only fair if the federal government gets some equity in return.

You can’t socialize losses and privatize gains.

Calling the current US administration "commie" wan't on my bingo card. I swear most people these days have no actual concept of the things they argue against.

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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...

See https://tweakers.net/nieuws/240304/nexperia-ceo-bevoordeelde...

Well if I'm from EU and if I know my government doesn't do espionage and all sorts of nasty things, I'd really be very worried. They (the government and its agencies) are supposed to do the nasty jobs, and it is very incompetent if they don't do so.

The West has not been trying to protect their market? What do you thing those wars have been all about?

Freedom, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

“Protect their market” - And yet the U.S. and Europe are richer than ever.

It’s hilarious seeing the US oligarchs distracting from the fact that they’ve transferred massive amounts of wealth from the broader society to themselves by blaming every one else.

There is a fair argument to protect strategic industries and actions like these are probably needed, but let’s not pretend the “markets” are at risk because of anything China is doing, which is essentially giving Americans and Europeans actual stuff in return for pieces of paper.

China liberalized their economy to compete with Western economies, showing their leaders don’t really believe in communism.

And the US and Europe are moving towards command economies to keep up with China, showing their politicians don’t really believe in liberalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93Timor-Leste_...

Uh, you gotta understand that China has never been alone.

They would, they do and they did it. But we called them communists for doing so. ;)

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Touché :)

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I frankly am not sure why people keep on downvoting this comment without providing a counter argument or whatever. I would like to be contradicted rather than downvoted (that too, if you can take 2 minutes to at least say why).

That’s a myth. Yes, we allow them to move faster—much faster—but it’s simply because their government is more efficient.

Western society, in contrast, runs on a kind of religion. People follow a few belief systems: socialism, right-wing conservatism, and perhaps liberalism as a softer sub-flavor.

Here’s the fun part: China learned the hard way that no single dogma—whether communism or anything else—is worth worshiping if it leaves people hungry. They’ve mixed communism, socialism, and raw capitalism, using whatever tools best serve their progress. Ruthless goal achievement.

Meanwhile, Western society has turned the left-versus-right divide into something resembling the conflict between major branches of Islam—where factions despise and fight each other. It’s extremely foolish.

It's soolish, like any blind reglion following. And yeah, with this divide we have, we all become religios == stupid.