Dutch minister confident ‘crown jewel’ chip firm ASML will stay in Netherlands after threat to leave
A top Dutch government minister said he’s confident the country’s coveted chip-equipment maker ASML will remain in the Netherlands following threats from the company to move its operations abroad.
Steven van Weyenberg, the Netherlands’ finance minister, told CNBC’s Karen Tso on Thursday that he isn’t worried by ASML’s statements threatening to leave the country. The company has since walked back the comments.
In a January call with investors, ASML CEO Peter Wennink said: “The consequences of limiting labor migration are large, we need those people to innovate. If we can’t get those people here, we will go somewhere where we can grow.”
His comments followed controversial plans by the Dutch to scale back tax breaks for highly skilled migrants and limit the number of foreigners who can attend Dutch universities.
ASML is core to the world’s semiconductor supply chain. The company makes extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) machines, which are critical to the semiconductor industry for manufacturing integrated circuits.
EUV machines generate an incredibly short wavelength of light in large quantities to print small, complex designs on microchips. The EUV light is created with tiny explosions of molten tin happening at extreme speeds and then bounced off mirrors that ASML says are the flattest surfaces in the world.
“I think many people, many countries would love to welcome ASML, but I think they’re strongly embedded in the Netherlands,” Van Weyenberg told CNBC Thursday.
The minster said he had been involved in discussions between the cabinet and ASML last month concerning the firm’s plans to grow in the Netherlands and whether there were enough roads, houses and skilled people from abroad to foster that growth.
“I’m very optimistic about ASML’s future and that it will be within the Netherlands,” he said.
ASML logo is seen at the headquarters in Veldhoven, Netherlands June 16, 2023.
Piroschka Van De Wouw | Reuters
The Dutch government last month launched a campaign dubbed “Operation Beethoven” in an attempt to address ASML’s concerns and convince them to stay in the Netherlands, Reuters reported.
The semiconductor-equipment maker has since ruled out a complete departure from the Netherlands, but the company remains unhappy with its home country’s approach to fostering growth.
“There is a considerable gap between the concerns of industry, and what we think is necessary, and what politicians think,” ASML CEO Peter Wennink told reporters after a meeting with the Dutch government in March, according to Reuters. If ASML can’t grow in the Netherlands “it can do so elsewhere”, he reportedly said.
Though the Dutch are still working to appoint a new government, plans previously approved by Parliament to cap the number of foreign students and scrap the skilled-migrant tax break have upset several businesses in the country, including ASML and Dutch chipmaker NXP.
More than 40% of ASML’s 23,000-strong workforce in the Netherlands are not Dutch.
The Netherlands has previously seen some of its multinational firms ditch its shores for greener pastures. In 2021, for example, oil major Shell decided to move its corporate headquarters and tax base to London from Amsterdam.
Meanwhile, Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch consumer goods firm, in 2020 moved forward with a plan to unify its headquarters in London, ending a hybrid structure that saw the firm dual-headquartered in both the U.K. and the Netherlands.
Britain’s high-growth technology firms have gripes of their own, however, in terms of how the government is encouraging foreign investment into tech startups, as well as the hiring of foreign labor following the country’s Brexit vote.
‘Crown jewel’ of Dutch economy
ASML has also been caught up in geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China. In January, the company was barred by the Dutch government from exporting some of its tools to China.
The trade block was imposed after the U.S. government tightened export controls on advanced semiconductors and chipmaking tools to China in October, building on previous rules.
Van Weyenberg said the Dutch government was cooperating with ASML and the U.S. on chip export controls on China.
“ASML is one of the crown jewels of the Dutch economy,” Van Weyenberg said. “They are really one of the basis of our growth model.”
“We want to support them, we actually help them to grow in the Netherlands. And I think there is a great future for them ahead also complying with all the rules that are on the playing table,” he added.
But he also warned that global fragmentation caused by fractures in the world economy puts a small and open economy like the Netherlands at risk.
He added that from a security risk perspective, “we have to also look at China and make sure they play by the same rules.”
Piotr Swat | Lightrocket | Getty Images
AppLovin CEO Adam Foroughi provided more clarity on the ad-tech company’s late-stage effort to acquire TikTok, calling his offer a “much stronger bid than others” on CNBC’s The Exchange Friday afternoon.
Foroughi said the company is proposing a merger between AppLovin and the entire global business of TikTok, characterizing the deal as a “partnership” where the Chinese could participate in the upside while AppLovin would run the app.
“If you pair our algorithm with the TikTok audience, the expansion on that platform for dollars spent will be through the roof,” Foroughi said.
The news comes as President Trump announced he would extend the deadline a second time for TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance to sell the U.S. subsidiary of TikTok to an American buyer or face an effective ban on U.S. app stores. The new deadline is now in June, which, as Foroughi described, “buys more time to put the pieces together” on AppLovin’s bid.
“The president’s a great dealmaker — we’re proposing, essentially an enhancement to the deal that they’ve been working on, but a bigger version of all the deals contemplated,” he added.
AppLovin faces a crowded field of other interested U.S. backers, including Amazon, Oracle, billionaire Frank McCourt and his Project Liberty consortium, and numerous private equity firms. Some proposals reportedly structure the deal to give a U.S. buyer 50% ownership of the company, rather than a complete acquisition. The Chinese government will still need to approve the deal, and AppLovin’s interest in purchasing TikTok in “all markets outside of China” is “preliminary,” according to an April 3 SEC filing.
Correction: A prior version of this story incorrectly characterized China’s ongoing role in TikTok should AppLovin acquire the app.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event announcing new tariffs in the Rose Garden at the White House in Washington, April 2, 2025.
Chip Somodevilla | Getty Images
President Donald Trump announced an aggressive, far-reaching “reciprocal tariff” policy this week, leaving many economists and U.S. trade partners to question how the White House calculated its rates.
Trump’s plan established a 10% baseline tariff on almost every country, though many nations such as China, Vietnam and Taiwan are subject to much steeper rates. At a ceremony in the Rose Garden on Wednesday, Trump held up a poster board that outlined the tariffs that it claims are “charged” to the U.S., as well as the “discounted” reciprocal tariffs that America would implement in response.
Those reciprocal tariffs are mostly about half of what the Trump administration said each country has charged the U.S. The poster suggests China charges a tariff of 67%, for instance, and that the U.S. will implement a 34% reciprocal tariff in response.
However, a report from the Cato Institute suggests the trade-weighted average tariff rates in most countries are much different than the figures touted by the Trump administration. The report is based on trade-weighted average duty rates from the World Trade Organization in 2023, the most recent year available.
The Cato Institute says the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate from China was 3%. Similarly, the administration says the EU charges the U.S. a tariff of 39%, while the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 2.7%, according to the report.
In India, the Trump administration claims that a 52% tariff is charged against the U.S., but Cato found that the 2023 trade-weighted average tariff rate was 12%.
Many users on social media this week were quick to notice that the U.S. appeared to have divided the trade deficit by imports from a given country to arrive at tariff rates for individual countries. It’s an unusual approach, as it suggests that the U.S. factored in the trade deficit in goods but ignored trade in services.
The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative briefly explained its approach in a release, and stated that computing the combined effects of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in various countries “can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.”
“If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair,” the USTR said in the release.
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