You have had your chips: Netherlands bans sale of microchip tools to China
Source: Sputniknews 4.7.2023
The Dutch government is one of several under pressure from Washington over the past year to emulate a US embargo on sales of microchips and the tools to make them to Beijing — part of Washington's ongoing trade and sanctions war with its main Pacific rival.
The Netherlands has imposed new restrictions on selling microchip-manufacturing equipment to China. The Dutch move follows suit on a US ban from last December on sales of chips to more than 30 Chinese companies on the pretext of "national security"
"We have taken this step in the interest of our national security," said Dutch Trade Minister Liesje Schreinemacher as she announced the ban on Friday.
But she added that only a "very limited" number of companies would be affected by the ban, and did not elaborate on precisely which equipment would be forbidden for export to which countries.
However, the Dutch government had been under pressure from the US for the past year to enact such a ban. A deal was reportedly reached between Washington, The Hague and Tokyo in January this year for several key firms, including the Netherlands' ASML and Japan's Nikon and Tokyo Electron, to emulate US export restrictions on China.
And last November, the UK's Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy ordered Nexperia, a Dutch subsidiary of China's Wingtech, to sell its controlling stake in Welsh microchip precursor factory Newport Wafer Fab for fear it could "undermine UK capabilities" in fields such as telecoms and facial recognition.
The Chinese embassy in the Netherlands protested the latest escalation of the West's trade war with Beijing.
The regulations were "an abuse of export control measures and seriously disrupted free trade and international trade rules," the embassy said in a statement, but stressed that it was still ready to "work with the Dutch side to address the issue based on the principle of mutual benefit, so as to jointly promote the healthy development of Sino-Dutch economic and trade relations."
