NRC reconstruction: How Nexperia exposed Europe’s real dependency

A sprawling, almost anonymous factory in Dongguan, southern China, is one of the most critical places in the global electronics economy. Inside, copper strips loaded with tiny components roll past operators in cleanroom suits, “like the rattling film rolls of a cinema projector,” as NRC journalist Marc Hijink observed in his reconstruction of Nexperia’s implosion. What comes off those reels is not glamorous silicon; no AI accelerators, no smartphone brains, but the “industry rice” of modern life: diodes, transistors, and power switches that quietly keep cars, chargers, TVs, and industrial systems running.

Then, in early October 2025, that never-ending film stopped.

NRC

Nexperia in no-man’s-land: how a chip company became caught between two world powers

Behind the scenes: Chinese entrepreneur Wing set out to turn Nexperia into a global chip powerhouse. But his company was caught in the crossfire between China and the US, triggering a diplomatic crisis in the Netherlands and chip shortages worldwide. NRC followed Nexperia from the inside for a year and a half and witnessed Wing’s dream fall apart.

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Hijink’s engaging long read, built on 18 months of reporting, factory visits, interviews with executives and policymakers, and documents reviewed, follows how Nexperia, headquartered in Nijmegen yet owned by China’s Wingtech, became a pawn between Washington and Beijing. The result: a Dutch diplomatic crisis, an automotive supply shock, and a harsh lesson for Europe’s chip sovereignty ambitions: the continent can be strategically vulnerable not only to advanced chips but also to the simplest.

A company built for globalization and then punished by it

Nexperia’s lineage runs straight through Philips and NXP. It emerged in 2017 when NXP sold its “standard products” division, once dismissed internally as “chicken feed”, to investors with Chinese ties, a deal that raised little political resistance at the time. It was precisely the kind of cross-border industrial logic that defined peak globalization: European know-how, Asian scale, worldwide distribution.

In Hijink’s telling, the Dongguan plant embodied that system. Wafers made in Hamburg were cut, packaged and shipped via Hong Kong to customers everywhere. Nexperia’s “hero product” was a chip package format dating back to the 1960s, produced at volumes of tens of millions per day: profitable only through relentless efficiency and ultra-low defect rates.

That efficiency became a geopolitical choke point.

Enter “Wing”: ambition, impatience, and a collision of governance cultures

The turning point, according to NRC, arrived with Zhang Xuezheng - “Mr. Wing” - the Wingtech entrepreneur who bought Nexperia for $3.6 billion in 2019. Wing, Hijink writes, styled himself as a relentless builder: early runs, marathon discipline, a founder’s obsession with control. He wanted to turn Nexperia from a highly profitable “boring” supplier into a global powerhouse and set targets that left European managers stunned.

Hijink captures the core tension in a single quote Wing gave him: “The Americans say we’re a Chinese company, and in China they say we’re a Dutch company. How are we supposed to survive like this?” That “no man’s land” status wasn’t rhetorical. It became operational as the US-China tech war deepened and “backdoors” in export control regimes started to close.

Within the company, culture clash compounded geopolitical tensions. Wing increased the pace, extended meetings into weekends, and demanded exhaustive datasets on markets and customers. Managers, NRC reports, sometimes fed him spreadsheets padded with “randomly selected and sometimes fabricated numbers” just to satisfy impossible requests, until Wing discovered the fiction and erupted. It’s a corporate pathology that feels familiar in founder-led scaling stories; except here, the stakes were national.

The strategic fault line: wafers, “quick fixes,” and the fear of leakage

A major thread in Hijink’s reconstruction is the relationship between Nexperia and WingSkySemi, a separate Chinese wafer fab affiliated with Wing. As the US tightened restrictions, Nexperia’s European leadership saw Chinese wafer capacity as a hedge. But they also feared it could become a channel for knowledge transfer and a commercial threat.

Hijink relays the internal suspicion: WingSkySemi started releasing similar MOSFET products under its own brand, and a former employee told NRC: “It’s impossible to prove that knowledge was leaked, but they started selling their products out of nowhere.” Whether that allegation can be proven in court, it became explosive in the context of U.S. blacklists and European security screening.

This is the part of the story that is bigger than Nexperia. In 2025, “legacy” chips and power components, once considered benign, began to appear as critical infrastructure. Reuters reported that Dutch officials warned the US about the downstream effects of export controls, pleading for time because Nexperia’s chips are crucial to automotive supply chains.

A Dutch emergency law, a US rule, and China’s retaliatory lever

The rupture, in NRC’s account, came in a cascade of extraordinary measures:

• The US prepared an “Affiliates Rule” to extend export bans to subsidiaries of blacklisted Chinese firms.
• Dutch officials, fearing a strategic hollowing-out of European operations and possible transfers of money and know-how, invoked a Cold War-era instrument: the Goods Availability Act (WBG)—a 1952 emergency law reportedly never used before in this way.
• Almost simultaneously, the Dutch minister imposed the emergency measure and the Enterprise Chamber (Ondernemingskamer) suspended Wing as CEO in an unusually rapid intervention.

To Beijing, the optics appeared to be coordinated action under American pressure. China responded with a blunt economic weapon: an export ban that effectively trapped Nexperia’s packaging output inside China, triggering global shortages. Reuters documented the shockwaves across automakers and the diplomatic scramble that followed.

Hijink’s narrative underscores a brutal symmetry: the West weaponizes software, tooling, and export controls; China weaponizes processing capacity and export permissions. And Europe, sitting in between, discovers how little room it has to maneuver when a company’s supply chain is geographically and legally split.

“Industry rice” becomes a summit issue

One of the most striking moments in Hijink’s reconstruction is how quickly Nexperia escalated from a corporate dispute into leader-level geopolitics. He describes Trump and Xi discussing not only soybeans and raw materials, but also the “industry rice” chips that Nexperia packages. Reuters similarly reported the White House move to announce resumed shipments from Nexperia’s China facilities as pressure mounted from automakers.

For Europe, the humiliation was evident: Brussels and The Hague were not central at the table when the superpowers pressed pause. Even the simplest chips exposed a dependency Europe had not operationally planned for.

The afterlife: two Nexperias, one broken logic

Hijink ends with a picture of a company sliced into two entities: Nexperia BV in Europe trying to secure financing and accelerate “China plus one” capacity (Malaysia), and Nexperia China seeking alternative wafer suppliers while lawsuits multiply. Recent reporting continues to show how contested control remains and how long “qualification” cycles for new suppliers can take.

Wingtech, in its right-of-reply included by NRC, denies the allegations of mismanagement and argues that the “root cause” was “deliberate intervention” by the Dutch minister, not Wing. It also claims WingSkySemi was “specifically established for Nexperia” and that agreements were approved by management and regulators. That rebuttal matters, because it points to the legal and reputational battlefield ahead: if courts ultimately reject the Dutch government’s premise, Europe’s emerging “economic security” playbook will face a credibility test.

What this means for Europe’s chip sovereignty agenda

The lesson is not simply “don’t sell strategic assets.” Europe already knows it is late to the debate on sovereignty. The lesson is that strategic dependency lives in the boring layers too:

1. Legacy chips are critical infrastructure. They may not store data, but they decide whether factories run, cars ship, and grids stay stable.
2. Back-end capacity is a geopolitical lever. Packaging and testing can be just as weaponizable as EUV tools.
3. Governance is now industrial policy. The fight wasn’t only about ownership; it was about who signs bank mandates, who approves wafer contracts, and who controls “reserved matters.”
4. Europe needs enforceable “China-plus-one” redundancy. Not as a slogan, but as financed capacity, qualified suppliers, and contractual optionality.
5. Coordination must be European, not just national. When Germany’s automotive base is hostage to a Dutch intervention in a company with Chinese operations, “sovereignty” is inherently collective.

Hijink’s reconstruction reads like a corporate thriller, but its underlying message is policy-hard: Europe’s economic security strategy cannot focus only on cutting-edge nodes. The next crisis will also come from the cheapest chips, because those are exactly the ones nobody stockpiles, and the ones supply chains optimized hardest to a single point of failure.

And in a world where globalists have run out of room, even “industry rice” can become a weapon.