Dutch Interest Group ChipNL Requests Government Investment in Semiconductor

TapTechNews July 4th news, according to the Dutch media NOS, the interest group ChipNL submitted a joint letter to the new Dutch cabinet led by Prime Minister Dick Schoof, asking the cabinet to increase government investment in the chip field.

ChipNL is composed of more than 30 Dutch semiconductor companies, including ASML, NXP, Nexperia, Philips, and important enterprises in the deposition process field such as ASM.

ChipNL requires the Schoof cabinet to invest 100 million to 150 million euros annually in the semiconductor field in the next six years, and these enterprises promise to also allocate 100 million to 200 million euros from their own budgets every year, with a total amount up to 2.1 billion euros (TapTechNews note: currently about 2.63 billion US dollars).

This fund will be used to deepen the cooperation between upstream and downstream enterprises in the Dutch chip industry.

Earlier this year, the previous caretaker cabinet of the Netherlands and the Eindhoven regional government announced the Beethoven Plan worth 2.5 billion euros, aiming to improve the infrastructure in the Eindhoven area and retain enterprises such as ASML that had expressed the intention of overseas expansion.

Regarding why they asked the government for financial support again soon after, Paul Verhagen, the chief financial officer of ChipNL group member enterprise ASM, said that it is closely related to the competitiveness of the Netherlands and the domestic chip industry.

Verhagen expected that the scale of ASM company will double in the next few years, and the same is true for other enterprises in the same industry.

If the Netherlands provides too little support to domestic semiconductor enterprises, then these enterprises will naturally be more willing to expand some of their businesses to more investable overseas.