Dutch government takes control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia

This Dutch article also adds a lot more context, what the Dutch government did starts to make more and more sense and would for sure be something the Chinese would have intervened in if the situation were reversed. [0]

Update: Looks like China has retaliated: [1]

[0] https://tweakers.net/nieuws/240304/nexperia-ceo-bevoordeelde...

[1] https://nos.nl/artikel/2586411-china-legt-chipfabrikant-nexp...

What is interesting here is that for obvious reasons the Chinese do not seem to understand - or be able to understand - that NL actually has an independent institute for handling such disputes that will operate with a fairly high degree of impartiality. Abusing funds of one company and jeopardizing its existence in order to prop up a non-related entity abroad is precisely the kind of situation why we have this institution in the first place. Mismanagement is - regardless of who the shareholders are - also something that we frown upon here and there actually is a mechanism to directly intervene in the case of such actions. Seeing the 3 top financial people replaced with strawmen and funneling large amounts of money abroad to buy things the company does not need is a surefire recipe for intervention. This would have also happened if the CEO had been dutch and the shareholders had been dutch, we actually had such a case in the last few years where the top guy (founder, even) at one of our larger IT companies lost his marbles.

I am sort of surprised we even have an arm of government quick and authoritative enough to be able to intervene here. I always assumed the government would just let any frogs boil.

The press is full of contradictory information, so it is hard to guess which is the truth.

This information about misdeeds of the CEO looks like a very convenient excuse for the Dutch government, while another article published in the press claims that, according to newly published court proceedings, already at a meeting in June between US officials and Dutch officials USA had requested the removal of the Chinese CEO by the Dutch, as a condition for not enforcing export controls over Nexperia.

https://www.politico.eu/article/us-pressured-the-netherlands...

Both claims could be true, USA has pressured Netherlands to remove the Chinese CEO, then the Dutch have investigated the CEO to find a reason to intervene and they have found this dubious deal where he bought a double amount of wafers compared to the actual needs.

This deal may be abusive, but it looks rather mild in comparison with how most CEOs mishandle the assets of their companies. I doubt that there are many CEOs against whom a thorough investigation would not find such deals. Here at least he got usable semiconductor wafers, but many such deals are for valueless software or consulting.

Seems like business as usual. It's just that the industry it operates in is kinda sensitive subject for everybody right now.

this theory would contradict with the national security reason used by the government though. I have read in Chinese sources that they plan to remove the European directors, reasons I don't know.

> But the irony is that when a non-European entity were to do something like this, e.g. nationalize their oil or mining etc. industry or a firm, the whole hell would brake loose.

As far as I understand, Samsung, TSMC, and SMIC are all closely guarded by their respective governments. 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. Some China-specific examples:

tmnvix points out the perfectly analogous Chinese restriction of rare earth exports: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 - government plan with securing first local, and the global key markets, for indigenous firms, the acquisition of foreign technology companies, and independence from foreign suppliers, as explicit goals.

What do you mean "were to do"? It's already happened, probably many times, it just a single human can't keep up with all world news of every industry.

Here is an example how China raided and took over Chinese ARM subsidiary, along with all stolen western IP.

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/the-semiconductor-heis...

That has happened and not a lot came of it. Venezuela nationalized American oil projects under Hugo Chavez. If by hell breaking loose you mean law suits I guess so.

> Everybody is a fan of free access and capital markets, until a foreign entity purchases something of importance.

The problem with China is that the "free access" was always one-sided as we did not insist on reciprocity - not for the Internet, not for tourism, not for companies, not for goods.

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.

And look where that got us. They lock in their population in a way reminding me of the GDR/Stasi era - if you're not an obedient citizen, you don't get permission to travel, everything is subject to surveillance and the one will of the Party -, they use their access to the Internet to steal, hack and run secret police organizations while locking their population behind the Great Firewall, they buy up our companies and shift crucial knowledge back to China. And in the meanwhile, good paying jobs in our countries were lost en masse to China, what used to be high-quality products that would last many years if not decades got replaced by China made ultra cheap junk.

Of course the preferred option is what the Chinese do which is to never let that happen in the first place or if you do allow foreign investment always keep a 50.1% stake in the entity and exfiltrate any tech from the venture you need .

That’s not quite correct. It wasn’t the foreign entity purchasing something, or they wouldn’t have allowed all the foreign entities purchasing things. It is more accurate to say they didn’t care as long as they thought they had the advantage and letting the foreign entity buy critically important companies and industries was a means for grooming them or working them to serve your interests. What “America” has realized is that their plan to develop China into an asset/ally simply did not work, nor that they’ve totally empowered them and likely the Chinese were intentionally sharing false data to give false understanding of how they were doing overall.

We’ve recently seen a major reversal on China in particular, because it has dawned on people they were being played, not that they were the player.

The age of globalism and unfettered free trade is over, and good riddance.

There is a difference between blocking a sale on natsec grounds and first allowing a sale, taking in billions of investment, and then 7 years later nationalizing the company on natsec grounds.

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

Early America had no regard for intellectual property rights because all the good media came from abroad - then we built Hollywood and saw the light. The west pushes deregulation and free trade because we've got the money and the only thing that can keep us from sucking a market dry is government intervention. The Dutch just seized a company because a geopolitical opponent was using it to exercise leverage, which is also how TikTok became a sub-brand of Oracle.

Nation states will use whatever words are necessary to justify their actions, but the game is and always has been power, leverage, and interest. Given the rise of China, I'm guessing we're going to get a lot more opportunities to tut and shake our heads about how hypocritical western governments turn out to be with regards to national economic interests.

(And, to be clear, I'm not saying this is like it's a good thing. I'm not a government, I'm a person, so all I get is the pointy end of all this happy rhetoric.)

>But the irony is that when a non-European entity were to do something like this, e.g. nationalize their oil or mining etc. industry or a firm, the whole hell would brake loose."

We live in a "Rules Based Order" - one rule for thee, another one for me.

Fair points, but in this case the company has not been nationalized. The Dutch gov can veto certain decisions, but that's not at all the same as the company becoming an asset of the state (nationalization).

Europe isn't really a hotbed of this kind of thing, anyway. In fact, a frequent criticism of the EU from socialists is that the free competition rules generally prevent nationalising companies, and this is a little unfair because a lot of countries in the EU have nationalised industries that have been grandfathered in.

> Nobody in their sane mind would allow a company like ASML or the likes to be purchased by competitors.

But they did it.

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

Did it take over ownership as well or just the administration of the business?

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

This is not how free markets function.

> But the irony is that when a non-European entity were to do something like this, e.g. nationalize their oil or mining etc. industry or a firm, the whole hell would brake loose.

Russia has nationalised a number of Western companies since 2022, even McDonalds.

Nothing happened.

It's not a "free market" to allow a foreign communist country to own or control your companies or resources, whether strategic or not. The entire arrangement is governed by diplomacy between two states. FWIW, it never has been the case that everyone was a fan of "the world is flat" theory of capital and labor markets.

Case in point Chile and Salvador Allende.

This has always been the case, to some degree, but I think it will be a much bigger factor now that so many have accepted that Neoliberalism is dead and no longer give it lip service.

When these kinds of procedures were first promoted, China was a non-communist entity, aligned with western countries. After China was overtaken by CCP, China is now considered “adversary” after being called “non-aligned”, in similar vein to Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Not even Cuba is on this list.

So it is true that the Western first world aligned countries have greater access to each others assets. And there is a dark network at play at trying to limit the same to second world and third world nations.

USA is nationalizng Intel and under this administration more of the commie shit is coming :)

Probably not an awesome sign if multiple actors are invoking never-used laws that were created while WWII was still fresh on everyone's mind.

I always wondered how the large unified world of Roman Empire with running water and sewer fell apart (and backwards) into multitude of small feudal pieces with no technology to speak of for the 1000 years after Roman Empire. I think our modern civilization is probably at the beginning of similar process.

Netherlands imported more CeO2 (a rare earth) from China than any other country, with 517 metric tons during the first half of 2025.

How can you say what the minerals were actually used for though is the question I always have in these types of situations. There are multiple uses of the minerals. Since I've now gotten a literal boat load of the minerals from you, I can use those minerals on other things which now frees up my personal source of minerals on the things you didn't want them used in. In the spirit of the agreement, I'm in full compliance all while achieving the thing you didn't want me to achieve. It's nothing but Pilate washing his hands

Who cares what their legislation says. Xi and ccp can change that at will at anytime.

This is it.

That whole REE thing is more of a scare tactic than anything. REEs are really not all that rare, and the current imports of REEs into the US are worth around $200-250M annually. That is millions, not billions. It's actually a laughably small amount.

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.

Get control of foreign company with specialist knowledge in a domain you want to dominate, drain its cash and shut it down.

Believe it or not, but the dutch government has agency. It's not impossible for US pressure to be a factor, but I think it's more likely the management of the company was planning to move production to china or something like that. That'd (rightly!) spook the government into some quick action, especially given the political climate around Russia seemingly not being content with having their war confined to Ukraine.

Unfortunately we seem to be living in interesting times.

> I assume this is an entirely independent Chinese company without some Dutch sponsor or something.

It's not, it's a Dutch company, formed according to Dutch law, with headquarters in the Netherlands, that was bought by another Chinese company a few years ago.

Dutch law sets rules on how any company, but especially public companies (so-called naamloze vennootschappen) must be governed. Even if you own all the shares, by law you don't have unlimited and unchecked power in the company, you have to abide by governance rules.

Seemingly simultaneously with the government order, a suit was brought to the court enforcing these laws (the Ondernemingskamer) alledging that the CEO and owner were not abiding by them. The court documents are a bit weird to me as a non-lawyer, with Nexperia named as both plaintiff and defendant, so I'm not sure who brought it, but it might've been the government, who are named as a party.

The court agreed that the suit could have merit, and as an interim measure while the legal proceedings play out, has suspended the CEO and named a temporary director. It also suspended the authority of the owners over their shares (except for one), and assigned a trustee to manage them temporarily. The court did not actually rule on the contents of the suit yet, it only issued interim conservatory measures. We'll likely hear more about how the suit plays out over the next few months.

An interesting matter of contention in the suit is that the CEO/owner want the CLO to be suspended, while the other side asks the court to prohibit firing of the CLO. I presume there has been a conflict in the board, either leading to or caused by the government order.

The court documents are public by the way (in Dutch, obviously): https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/resultaat?zoekterm=nexperi...

> I assume this is an entirely independent Chinese company.

It's worth noting that Nexperia is a spin-off of NXP (Dutch company) which itself is a spin-off of Philips' (Dutch company) semiconductor division.

It's also worth noting that Nexperia's Chinese owners (Wingtech) are at least partially state controlled.

Also did the police actually raid the company and physically take it over? I didn't see this anywhere mentioned.

Did they? As far as I know Kuka is still fully controlled by Midea.

the jobs didn't disappear (yet). they grew from 13.000 in 2014 before midea took over to 15.000 in 2024. maybe they could have grown more in germany if midea hadn't taken over. who knows.

Tweet at the time: https://x.com/JacklouisP/status/1957432021388837117?t=HJgXNK...

We've also currently got an outgoing cabinet, meaning they aren't really supposed to make major decisions outside of emergencies. That has always been one of those things where it's basically up to the honor of the politicians to actually not make major decisions as far as I can tell, so I'm unsure whether this is politicians politicianing or if there IS some emergency requiring intervention. I'm sure it'll all get more clear in the coming days.

Warned multiple times over what exactly?

More likely: IP drain. IP was specifically mentioned in the complaint.

It has an interesting etymology: https://nydamprintsblackandwhite.blogspot.com/2014/09/words-...

EU and west finally TRYING to protect their market the way China is doing it all the time. They tax, ban, espionage everything beneficial to their society.

China would do it without a blink.

So what exactly are you learning in this case from the actions, the data, the private citizens or the scholars, that is so different from "Western" explanations?

Yes, Fourier Transform never lies when you get it right. :-/s

Oh please take that crackpot stuff to 4chan or something.

I can read about both sides of the Gaza conflict just fine in evil Western media. It is quite plain to see (read) that Israel is doing some really bad shit there after an, in the grand scheme of things, "less bad" attack on itself. About the pandemic... yes, mistakes were made. There was a dangerous situation and no one was really sure what to do. It's like some people realized for the first time that the government has power and that it isn't always acting in the way they'd prefer. Big fucking deal. I guess a lot of people didn't really understand how the world around them is structured before it bit them in the ass. It's not that bad though, compared to other places and times in the world.

> inferiority complex about China.

That's not some s** that someone made up. They/We created an unstoppable beast. They thought that China would be like India or Vietnam or so. Nope.

You name it, they build it.

We can only "regulate" it - see what Europe has come up with to justify it - with the CO2 nonsense, "human rights" and all that. More regulations are the only way to prevent to get your market over flooded by products that you can't possibly build at that speed and cost (and not necessarily quality, but finally, most of what we use come from there and aren't MacBooks good? or fridges/TVs/phones, etc).

You do realize this is china trying to abscond with European tech? Not the other way around?

I think they're difficult to compare.

The western companies aren't using the business as a strategic tool to destabilise the host country. While nationalising something like an oil company is only about changing where profits are sent.

This is the premise of the book "Silent Coup".

It explores how western companies use the the Investor–state dispute settlement system to usurp the will of countries to control their own resources. ICC (International Chamber of Commerce in Switzerland) and the World Bank (via ICSID) are the main arbitration venues for this corporate bullying/neocolonialism.

Then of course, as soon as that arbitration is ignored/won then the genocidal defenders of democracy are activated.

If you pull the thread on many conflicts, at some point you will find these courts.

I'm not a fan of the Chinese government but I hope the Chinese firms/people involved use these same systems against the Dutch government.

They're not nationalizing though

You could argue that point but you would need evidence which showed trade with dictatorships resulted in peace in Europe. To that point, my gut reaction is that peace in Europe is a product of internal politics, MAD, American imperialism, and global trade (in that order).

The past fifty years may just be an exceptional footnote. Fifty years is not a significant period of time and the peace we have endured has not been evenly distributed (nor does it appear to be stable).

Clearly in this case very destructive, constuctive gets people to the moon and back. With retaliation loading from Beijing , looks like this company is dead/on life support going forward. This action has benfitted none of the entities involved and even the thinly veiled excuses of securing EU chip supply are moot.

Unchecked late stage capitalism isn't better, either.

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

Also: Even while ASML steppers are built in Netherlands, there are a lot of other non-photolithography tools needed to build a fab in addition to the ASML tools.

Nor for long. If the Chinese didn't already have incentives to break ASML's monopoly, they do now.

Oh lord no. Pacino’s Scream made acting history and is of the finest scenes to come out of the Strasberg acting ecosystem. Critics gonna crit, but there are some remarkably good things about that film.

Yeah there are so many memorable quotes.

Probably the case. The Chinese probably knew about this too and willingly came forward.

Definitely US pressure. NL is always eager to get on the good side of the US, even if they get nothing in return. For example participation in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Gaza today.

Not better, just cheaper copies. And all it took was mining Nortel to death and then moving on to mining Cisco itself.

How long until we're all learning Chinese in order to better understand their datasheets.

The Arm China CEO went rogue and spun it off as its own company. ARM HQ were unable to fire him, as he had physical possession of the company's seal stamp. Reading between the lines, the Chinese government chose not to intervene for multiple years.

In no way this is comparable, come on.

When you run your business in China, China runs the copy of your business for you ;)

I do understand that we want to try to see "the same" in the stupidity of our politicians that let all of this happen just like that for many years, but we are different.

This has been going on for decades.

I once did a brief consulting stint at what was then considered one of the most innovative, startuppy departments of Philips Healthcare, and it was by far the slowest-moving, least productive software team I've ever seen.

They had just "ended a sprint" when I came in, and 3 months later they still hadn't started another. People were just fooling around. There was a rule that talking about work during lunch was a no-no (so we talked about hockey and babies, the only subjects that 2+ people had in common). Testers were a separate team, and they refused to test things, no matter how small, without being allocated months of dedicated time to first make a detailed 50-page docx "test scenario". The mini product I was assigned to work on took 3 months to complete but the 5-page spec had been argued over for the past 18 months and signed off by, in total, 8 managers and 6 directors. I was the only person shipping anything of actual business value during that period (not because I'm so great, just because I was the only one asked to do anything of business value).

This is now a decade and a half ago. With the series of number-crunching Excel MBAs leading Philips since then I quite doubt that this will have changed for the better.

Philips 'unalived' any chances for massive future revenues when they killed off Natlab (in spirit, not just in name). Philips Natlab was the Bell Labs of the Netherlands, even Europe perhaps.

In 1989 Philips introduced a new financing structure that required Natlab to secure two-thirds of its budget through contracts with Philips' product divisions. This marked a major change from its prior model, where funding came directly from the corporate board.

Anything that wasn't "commercially viable" according to the penny-polishers with MBAs was abandoned. The dumbest move ever. Fundamental research can't be outsourced, and never has immediate commercial value.

afaik there was the added danger there that if the blast furnaces are turned off its very difficult /impossible to start them again.

Firstly, that wasn't "the same government". Secondly, better course correct now than never.

Of course. Securing Europes independence is extremely important, other countries should follow and seize more Chinese assets.

Easier to blame a foreign villain than to hold the shareholder class accountable.

I don't think people are blaming China. You can see this from all the extremist movements in Europe. People are blaming politicians and the "elite". They gave away for free all the technological advancements and knowledge to China to make huge profits and become filthy rich, and now they complaining that no one is buying their expensive outdated cars and other goods that people can't afford because they don't have decent jobs any more and the economy is bad. The only goal with outsourcing everything to China was to make as much money as possible for themselves, with no regard for the future and how this will affect our economies in the long run, but that doesn't matter when you are rich, for now.

This is it pretty much, not sure why it took so long to come to this realization. Was it greed that caused a warp in rational and common sense?

I don't know what you are talking about

In China, most locally manufactured brands seem to vanish after roughly two decades — whether in clothing, food, daily necessities, automobiles, or electronics. Yet, global brands such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Adidas, P&G, Unilever, Colgate, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi (collectively known as “BBA” in China), and even Nokia, dominate the market;

Interestingly, many European companies were eventually overtaken by their American counterparts — Nokia for example.

We’re not even talking about computers and smartphones—when it comes to these sectors, the U.S. simply won’t allow anyone else to take the lead. The market is dominated almost entirely by just a few platforms: Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android.

European companies have had massive investments in China for decades now.

Many people in the West have no idea what's going on in China. Western brands and investments are all over the place. Half the cars on the streets used to be European or American (and that has only recently changed, due to the rise of EVs).

Yet Europeans and Americans often complain, "Why can't Western companies operate in China?" Excuse me?

There are many companies which the Chinese government could target in retaliation. In China foreign companies are usually minority partners in some ventures with some Chinese company.

Firing a company's boss and appointing a trustee is uncommon, but it happens.

E.g. at IT service provider Centric, where the majority owner and CEO had a mental breakdown. Employees suffered from his delusions, but it also threatened to affect customers. The trustees aren't government agents, they just run the business as a going concern, minus the mismanagement (in this case, minus the mental illness).

US law also provides for a CEO to be ousted and a trustee to be appointed in cases of mismanagement or fraud. I wouldn't call that taking control, in much the same way as bankruptcy proceedings appointing a trustee don't amount to government taking control.

Now, the article refers to a filing made by former management. That filing is conflating the order and the firing of the CEO. The ministerial order didn't fire the CEO, that was a separate action filed by the company's works council and happened before the order was issued. The reason for the firing lies mostly in mismanagement and conflicts of interest.

The ministerial order is much more limited in scope, allowing the government to roll back decisions detrimental to the company - especially transfers of assets.

It's a shame that CNBC is just parroting the former management's objections, rather than you know, doing any reporting.

In both the order and the legal case, it's clear the ownership/management wanted to shut down the company and take the assets. The company was also not doing OK financially, and this kind of thing reeks of bankruptcy fraud (i.e. fraudulent conveyance).

The kind of tech nexperia makes isn't rocket science but I could imagine they produce some chips that are used in essential supply chains. So rather than wait for the bankruptcy and the fraud to happen, the company was restricted from transferring assets.

So the wording "takes control" is misleading. "subjected to additional oversight" is perhaps too wordy but more accurate. "put on a leash" might be a good way of putting it.

One point to clear up, China did not ban Google. Google left China because they refused to comply with Chinese data sovereignty laws.

Google even tried to crawl back with a search engine that did comply with Chinese laws put activist employees forced them to stop.

Both Microsoft and Apple fully comply with Chinese laws and are doing really well there.

People like to play the victims, nobody else wanted to buy these unattractive companies back then, but once these companies are turned around or eventually fail, suddenly they are of national importance, we were ripped off.

The Google Facebook examples probably would hold better if the US hadn't axed TikTok, also, Google isn't banned in China, they refused to comply with censorship regulations and left themselves.

Rules only apply when the people that set the rules win, maybe China is to be blamed for seeing through this cruel world earlier.

Ukraine-Russian conflict is a result of US instigation. Totally their responsibility.

This has nothing to do with capitalism. This is pure government intervention in a global market where other competing governments (China) are extremely interventionist already.

Capitalism != Free Market

> and therefore supporting war in Europe because it suits them.

FWIW, EU countries are still sending more money to Russia for oil than they send Ukraine in aid. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/feb/24/eu-spends-more...

Modern global economies are complicated.

> they are exporting to Russia on the sly

is it really on the sly though?

The Euro stance on buying US weapons for Ukraine is probably the most dumbest strategic move or the century. Europe is losing at an alarming rate in many ways. I would be more concerned about the US if I were Europe.

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