On 28 August 2026 the Dongguan Intermediate People's Court froze about 2.14 billion yuan (roughly US$300 million) of Nexperia-linked assets. The frozen assets include equity in Chinese subsidiaries. The order sits on top of a dispute that began with a Dutch government intervention in September 2025. It is a preservation order, not a judgment on the merits. Even so, it shows how a Dutch decision about one chipmaker has turned into litigation in two legal systems, with real assets at stake in both.
This is not an ASML story. No new ASML export-control action surfaced in the last two months, and this article does not claim one. But Nexperia is the closest live test of how far the Netherlands will go to keep semiconductor capacity inside its borders, and how well its tools work when the counterparty is China.
What the Dutch state did, and the case for it
On 30 September 2025 the Minister of Economic Affairs invoked the Goods Availability Act (Wet beschikbaarheid goederen) against Nexperia. The Rijksoverheid announcement cites "serious governance shortcomings" and acute signals that the continuity of crucial technological knowledge and capacity in the Netherlands and Europe was at risk. It says the company's regular production process could continue. Loyens & Loeff's summary says this was the first use of the power.
The strongest case for intervention is serious. Chips from Nexperia go into cars, consumer electronics and defence systems. The minister's stated concern was that production capacity, finances and intellectual property were being moved to a foreign entity tied to the then-CEO. A state that waits for a supply shock before acting may find it has no capacity left to protect. A narrow, company-specific order that leaves production running is also a more proportionate step than a sector-wide measure.
The courts did the heavy lifting, and the executive order faded
The government order did not last long. On 19 November 2025 the minister suspended it, keeping a reporting obligation on transfers of production resources and knowledge between facilities. The measures that remain come from the Amsterdam Enterprise Chamber. On 7, 8 and 13 October 2025 it found reasons to doubt the soundness of Nexperia's policy and course of affairs. It suspended the CEO, appointed a temporary non-executive director with decisive voting rights, and placed all but one of the shares held indirectly by Wingtech with a court-appointed administrator, according to Loyens & Loeff.
That sequence matters for policy design. The durable intervention came from a court applying established company law, with reasoned findings and a right of appeal. The emergency statute, built for goods shortages in a crisis, was used as an ad hoc corporate-governance tool and was then put on hold. Investors and trading partners cannot easily predict when such a law will be used again, and unpredictability is itself a cost to the open, investment-friendly climate that Dutch tech depends on.
Two legal systems, two sets of claims
China answered through its own courts. According to The Star's reporting on the Wingtech filing, the Dongguan court froze equity in four Nexperia-owned subsidiaries and in a Chinese entity owned by ITEC B.V. The freeze runs until August 2029. Its stated purpose is to stop the assets being transferred or pledged. In May, Wingtech sued Nexperia and three executives under China's anti-foreign sanctions law. It seeks restored control and 8 billion yuan (about US$1.17 billion) in compensation. The Next Web reports that Nexperia says the order does not affect daily operations, management or business continuity.
The fight runs both ways. According to the Gelderland District Court's news item, the court partly granted Yuching's request for a preliminary witness hearing. Yuching says the purpose is to decide whether to bring a damages claim against Nexperia and its executive directors, not to supply evidence in the Enterprise Chamber inquiry. The Dutch court limited the subjects the hearing may cover, and the hearing is reported to follow completion of the Enterprise Chamber investigators' work. We could not retrieve the full ruling, so readers should consult the court's text for the exact scope.
What this means for policy
The weakness in the Dutch approach is not that it protected a strategic asset. It is that the protection came with no stated end point and no instrument matched to the problem. Three lessons follow.
- Use the instrument built for the job. Governance disputes belong in company law, where a court can hear both sides, give reasons and be appealed. Emergency supply statutes should stay for emergencies. Dutch chip policy is more credible when each tool is used for its own purpose.
- Publish the exit criteria. The minister suspended the order after "positive developments", but the public still has no clear test for when such an order lifts or returns. Predictable conditions would lower the cost to legitimate foreign investors and would make retaliation harder to justify as a response to an arbitrary act.
- Expect mirrored retaliation and plan for it. A Chinese preservation order is routine in civil litigation, and Nexperia has described it that way. But with duration until 2029, it can still tie up capital for years, and the frozen subsidiaries are exactly the operations a Dutch-led company needs to run its supply chain. Governments that intervene in firms with large foreign operations should model this before acting.
A pro-innovation reading is not a naive one. The Netherlands is right to care about where leading-edge and power-chip capacity sits. But security-motivated controls work best when they are narrow, transparent and temporary, and when they do not push the company's own supply chain into two hostile jurisdictions. The Nexperia case shows what happens when they are none of those things: the original risk persists, the legal bill grows, and the real assets sit in a court file in Dongguan.
The merits are still undecided on both sides, so no one should treat the freeze or the Gelderland ruling as a verdict. The Enterprise Chamber's investigation is still running. What is already clear is that Dutch semiconductor control is now argued in two courts at once, and that clearer rules would have made that less likely.