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The Guardian (13 November 2025)

Lisa O’Carroll

A bitter battle over the future of a Chinese-owned chipmaker in the Netherlands that threatened to cripple the global car industry is a “wake-up call to Europe and the west”, the minister at the heart of the row has warned.

The six-week standoff between the EU and Beijing over Nexperia and its vital supplies of automotive semiconductors has served up a sobering lesson to world leaders over their dependency on China, says Vincent Karremans.

The Dutch economy minister says he has no regrets about the tussle and would not change his actions even with the benefit of hindsight. “There’s a lot of interest in exactly what happened,” he says. “It’s like an economic thriller.”

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