A one-year order, unwound in ten months
On September 30, 2025, the Dutch Minister of Economic Affairs invoked the Wet beschikbaarheid goederen (Goods Availability Act) against Nexperia, the Nijmegen-based chipmaker owned by China's Wingtech Technology. The order barred the company for one year from changing its assets, intellectual property, business operations, or personnel, citing "serious governance shortcomings" tied to the company's suspended CEO and risks to "Dutch and European economic security" (government.nl, Oct. 12, 2025). Beijing retaliated within days, blocking exports from Nexperia's Chinese assembly and test plants — which handle a large share of the group's legacy chip output for automakers and consumer electronics. By November 20, 2025, the Dutch government had suspended its own order, with Minister Vincent Karremans citing "constructive dialogue" and China's willingness to let shipments resume as part of the broader US-China trade truce (Al Jazeera, Nov. 20, 2025).
That suspension did not restore the status quo. On August 24, 2026, Nexperia's Chinese unit held a press conference under the banner "based in China, serve the world" and announced it is shifting its entire product line — diodes, MOSFETs, and logic ICs — from Dutch-supplied 8-inch and 6-inch wafers to domestically produced 12-inch wafers via an unnamed Chinese partner, with the stated goal of "100 percent domestic" production (South China Morning Post, Aug. 2026). The manufacturing partner is widely presumed to be a Wingtech-linked entity, though Nexperia has not confirmed it (Bits&Chips). Nexperia's European operations, meanwhile, have reportedly lost roughly 70% of the back-end assembly capacity the China plants used to provide, and are now investing in Malaysia to rebuild it.
The case for the intervention
The Dutch government's underlying worry was legitimate. Nexperia's legacy chips are unglamorous but structurally important — automakers around Europe depend on them, and a foreign parent with the ability to redirect assets, IP, or output on short notice is a real single point of failure. The Netherlands has separately built a licensing regime for advanced semiconductor manufacturing equipment since September 2023, expanded again in September 2024 to cover more deep-ultraviolet lithography tools, explicitly to manage "increased security risks associated with the export of this specific manufacturing equipment" (government.nl, Sept. 6, 2024). Invoking the Goods Availability Act — a Cold War-era statute last used to guarantee continuity of supply, not to police foreign ownership — was consistent with that same instinct: keep critical production capacity answerable to Dutch and European authority rather than a single overseas parent.
Why the intervention produced the opposite of its goal
But the instrument chosen was mismatched to the risk. The Goods Availability Act freezes governance; it cannot compel a Chinese subsidiary to keep buying Dutch-fabricated wafers, and it gave Beijing an immediate, low-cost lever — an export block on finished chips — that inflicted more near-term pain on European automakers than on Nexperia's Chinese operations. The Dutch government's own November 6, 2025 update acknowledged this dynamic explicitly, welcoming a US-China trade arrangement under which "China will enable the resumption of supplies from Nexperia's facilities in China" only after the ministry had effectively climbed down (government.nl, Nov. 6, 2025). Ten months later, the underlying vulnerability the order was meant to close — European dependence on a Chinese-controlled node — has not been closed. It has been inverted: Nexperia's Chinese arm is now moving to eliminate its dependence on the Dutch parent's wafer supply altogether, which is the opposite of the "strategic autonomy" the intervention invoked.
This is the pattern proportionate-regulation advocates should flag every time a government reaches for asset freezes or governance vetoes in a globally distributed supply chain: the tool that looks decisive on the day it's announced can hand the counterparty a permanent reason to build redundancy away from you. China's own long-run push for semiconductor self-sufficiency was already underway; a heavy-handed, unilateral Dutch order gave Wingtech both the political cover and the urgency to accelerate a domestic 12-inch line specifically to never be exposed to a repeat freeze. If the Netherlands' goal was to keep leverage over a nationally important supply chain, the Goods Availability Act episode has plausibly cost it that leverage faster than doing nothing would have.
What proportionate policy would look like instead
The more defensible tools are the ones the Netherlands already runs in parallel: transparent, case-by-case export licensing for equipment (the ASML DUV regime), paired with diversification support for European back-end capacity — which is exactly the Malaysia investment Nexperia Europe is now making on its own initiative. Emergency ownership-control statutes should be reserved for acute, provable sabotage risk, not governance disputes that can otherwise be litigated or negotiated. The Nexperia episode suggests the Dutch government reached for its most disruptive tool first and its most durable ones second — a sequencing question worth revisiting before the next foreign-owned critical-supply-chain dispute lands on a minister's desk.