A new extension of the American export restrictions affects chip manufacturer Nexperia from Nijmegen. The measure that not only affects exports to, according to the US, ‘suspicious’ Chinese companies, but also restricts deliveries to subsidiaries.
The US government announced the new rules on Tuesday. They will start in two months.
Companies may therefore not deliver American parts or software to Nexperia without a permit. This can be difficult, for example for commonly used cloud software or equipment with American chips.
Nexperia explains on his website that it has already taken measures, so that production can continue. The chip maker wants to appeal against the export restrictions because they are “too wide and too drastic”. The Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs does not want to respond to individual matters.
Nexperia (12,500 employees) was part of NXP, the former chip division of Philips until 2017. Then it came to Chinese hands. The head office remained in Nijmegen, even after the chip manufacturer became owned by the Chinese Wingtech in 2019.
Wingtech has been on the American Entity List since December 2024. This is an expanding list of Chinese companies that are not allowed to purchase goods and services that contain American components without a permit. The US trying to prevent Chinese tech companies from gaining access to advanced technology, such as chips or chip machines. For that reason, Dutch chip machine makers such as ASML and ASM are not allowed to export their most modern equipment to China.
Blacklist
The expansion of the Entity List, kept by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) of the American Handelsministerie, is intended to close gaps in the export restrictions. Many Chinese tech companies use joint ventures and complex ownership constructions to still purchase American ingredients. Through shortcuts, via a lot of ‘forbidden’ material, modern AI chips also arrives. The new BIS rules exclude these ‘back doors’: every subsidiary that is at least 50 percent owned by a company on the black-list of the US now falls under the same extraterritorial rules as the parent company.
Nexperia has factories in Manchester and Hamburg and in Asia in China, Malaysia and the Philippines. Although the company makes relatively simple semiconductors – standard ingredients for electronics – it is nevertheless sucked into the tech war between the US and China.
It is not obvious that this is negotiable. But you can’t exclude anything with this government
At the same time, both Washington and Beijing use export restrictions as a bet during trade discussions on mutual import duties. Previous restrictions that the US introduced, on design software for chips, disappeared from the table again after trade consultations. In theory, this expansion of the entity list could also be reduced. But according to Emily Kilcrease from the American think tank CNAS, this adjustment of the Entity List has been in preparation for some time. “It is not a completely new approach – you also see it with financial sanctions. It is not obvious that this is negotiable. But you cannot exclude anything with this government.”
Flexible
This month, Trump took the nomination of Landon Heid, a politician who wants to feed a hard line towards China, as a intended sub -minister for export restrictions in the American Handelsministerie. It seems that the president would rather see a more flexible person on that important position. That fits in with Trump compared to Nvidia’s AI chips, who are allowed to go to China. The US president places less emphasis on national security, and more on the spread of American technology.
The supervision of the new rules is for the account of the heavily under -occupied Bureau of Industry and Security. That now gets even more to do: it must also take a closer look at all subsidiaries. But the administrative pressure of the export rules is mainly due to American companies, Kilcrease explains. “They now have to extensively investigate their customers-and also the financial construction of their customers. That has a deterrent effect: companies may not want to take no risk of exports if they think they may fall under the 50 percent rule.”
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