This year, President Trump invoked laws from the 1960s and 1970s while imposing tariffs. Recently, the Netherlands did something similar.
In late September 2025, the Dutch government invoked the Goods Availability Act of 1952, a law that had been dormant for over seven decades. It was suddenly used to freeze all major decisions at Nexperia, a semiconductor company controlled by the Chinese firm Wingtech. The controlling shareholder, Zhang Xuezheng, lost his voting rights.
In our latest podcast, Diane and Aaron discuss why this matters. They argue that this case marks the end of one path: Chinese companies acquiring foreign firms to go global. That strategy is no longer viable.
From Ambition to Trouble
To understand what happened, you need to go back to 2019, when Wingtech, then a low-margin ODM (Original Design Manufacturer), made a rare move for a Chinese firm and acquired a European company.
That company was Nexperia, formerly the discrete and logic chip division of NXP, which had spun out from Philips. Nexperia’s products were not glamorous. They made power management chips and transistors found in cars, energy systems, and chargers. Wherever reliability mattered more than performance, Nexperia was there.
The acquisition signaled Wingtech’s ambition to move up the value chain from ODM to IDM (Integrated Device Manufacturer). Investors believed in that story. The stock soared for a time, then began to fall and kept falling for five years.
Aaron noted in the podcast that investors had been asking two underlying questions. The first was whether a Chinese company could truly acquire and integrate a European one and make it work. The second was whether such a deal could actually create the strategic synergies everyone hoped for, and whether the know-how could be brought home. Five years on, the answers appear more complicated than expected, and the optimism that once surrounded the deal has largely faded.
Nexperia’s automotive business accounts for more than 60 percent of its revenue, embedding it deeply in European supply chains from Volkswagen to BMW. This is why the Dutch government began to pay closer attention.
Governance Meets Geopolitics
After the acquisition, Wingtech sought to improve profitability by transferring part of Nexperia’s manufacturing capacity to another company in China, WingSkySemi. The move was meant to cut costs and create synergy, a common business practice in China. But because both firms were controlled by the same person, it became a related-party transaction involving critical manufacturing capacity.
Aaron explained in the podcast that this conflict reflected two corporate governance traditions. In China, compliance is procedural, as long as the deal is properly disclosed and the interested party abstains from voting. In Europe, it is substantive. EU rules require independent fairness reviews and approval from non-related shareholders to protect minority interests.
To Zhang, the deal was a reasonable business decision. To Dutch law, it was a conflict of interest. Two legal worlds collided, and the Dutch court ruled it as mismanagement.
The case, however, was never just about governance. In 2024, the U.S. added Wingtech to its Entity List, which extends export controls to any subsidiary more than 50 percent owned by a listed firm. That meant Nexperia could also be targeted unless it proved it was free of Chinese control.
Faced with this dilemma, the Dutch government acted first. Aaron argued that the move was meant to protect Europe’s supply chains from U.S. sanctions by legally separating Nexperia from its Chinese parent. The related-party transaction was the pretext, and the real motive was geopolitical.
A Radical Intervention
The Dutch court took an extraordinary step. It did not force Wingtech to sell its shares but stripped it of voting rights for a year and appointed an independent trustee to manage Nexperia.
Wingtech remains the majority shareholder but has no control over management decisions. Aaron noted in the podcast that this was almost unheard of, a case where state power directly overrode shareholder rights.
Ironically, the Dutch government’s attempt to protect Europe’s semiconductor supply chain immediately disrupted it. In response, China’s Ministry of Commerce banned Nexperia’s Chinese factories from exporting certain components to Europe.
Nexperia now stands divided, with design and intellectual property in the Netherlands, and final testing and packaging in China. Each side needs the other, but neither can function alone. Automakers like Volkswagen and BMW feel the strain. As Aaron put it, this is mutually assured disruption. Both sides lose, and the company’s global competitiveness erodes.
Updates: China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Sunday that it had resumed exports of Nexperia’s semiconductor chips for civilian use.
The New Paradigm
The Nexperia case captures the unraveling of the old globalization model, where capital flowed to the most efficient place, pairing European design with Asian manufacturing. That system can be undone overnight by politics.
For Chinese firms, the era of going global through acquisition is over. Since the 2018 CFIUS reforms, Chinese capital has withdrawn from Silicon Valley and Europe alike. The United States closed its doors first, and now Europe is following, reclaiming control of strategic industries.
Aaron calls this new phase regionalization, as each region builds its own supply chain and ecosystem. There is no longer one global network, only several regional ones.
Chinese companies can no longer rely on business alone. Law and politics have merged. To survive abroad, they must understand and engage with political systems, something many once tried to avoid. The old idea of separating business from politics no longer holds. The global order that once allowed cross-border expansion has given way to one where every move is political.
Nexperia’s story illustrates the end of an era. The efficiency-based world of globalization is giving way to regional self-reliance. Europe, America, and China are all building their own supply chains.
For Chinese companies, expansion now depends not on acquisitions abroad but on innovation at home, a slower and harder path, but perhaps the only one left.
