Indeed, how did they even figure this out?

in the NRC article it says that board members started to complian that the CEO was "making choices that were not in the interest of the company". Four days later they were fired.

"It was at that moment that Nexperia alerted the ministry of Economic Affairs"

Right, I suppose at that point there was some chauvinism or at least fear of being held accountable for it. But the thing that surprised me was that there was actually someone listening at Economic Affairs. Perhaps at that level a board of directors has connections at the government. Either that, or there's some AFM type branch that listens to directors' complaints.

I'm surprised they did this while the cabinet is fallen.

That's just the cabinet, so lawmaking is on hold for now, but the government and the ministry of economic affairs is still operational. A government can't just stop working because a small (albeit important) part of it is waiting for the elections.

They can't make laws, but they can still enforce laws.

I am too. Although it appears computer and computer machinery, like chips amongst others, are the 2nd largest export[1]. I'm guessing these types of companies are very important to economic stability within the country and economic posturing in outside the company in global trade.

[1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/netherlands-top-10-exports/

We really would like to keep these companies alive. Geely buying Volvo is a nice example of a proper acquisition and Geely has - as far as I know - always played by the rules. What happened here would not fly under any management and China should take note, ownership does not give a pass to 'do as you please', we have many stakeholders including employees and customers, not just owners and managers.

The US asked them.

I'm a bit surprised by this move as well... If only someone had done similar to protect the gutting of Sears and K-Mart, even if both companies made several years of bad decisions themselves, the way they were cleaned out is disgusting.

America voted for Ronald Reagan in the biggest landslide victory the US had seen in a very long time.

Reagan promised "deregulation" and "get government out of business" etc, and had a very clear mandate to execute, which he did, IMO to our detriment, by doing things like telling the FTC to just let companies do whatever, and outright not enforce anti-competitive laws if you couldn't show "consumer harm", which explicitly meant you had to show prices going up before you could prevent the monopoly from forming.

What did people expect?

Reagan was out of office by three decades when Sears finally collapsed, and 16 of those interim years was with a Democrat in office, and Democrat control of both houses for several of those years.

Looks like there was some timely pressure from the US.

De ondernemingskamer is not a paper tiger. Ask Sanderink about that.

They rarely make decisions that I disagree with, even if I realize I usually don't have all of the facts. Business continuity, employees, shareholders, customers. Those are the priorities and management is definitely not acting with impunity. The shareholder angle here is an interesting one, that route has been stopped off preemptively it seems.

So it seems, but also this seems to have been dragging along since 2023 so it's less sudden than the press makes it seem. The contract with WSS that's underlying the complaint by the former management has apparently been allowed to progress to the point where the US is threatening to simply consider Nexperia a Chinese company for the purposes of sanctions.

And rightly so. The timeline here is fairly typical: until the day there is a judgment nothing changes and going through the process usually takes a while. And then everything changes at once. It is clear that they were no longer making decisions in the interest of Nexperia or its customers but solely to benefit Zhang's interests. What is interesting is that Wingtech actually was being defrauded but chose not to act. That's the bit that doesn't make sense to me, unless Zhang also controls Wingtech somehow. In one article it was said that they bought many more wafers than needed in order to destroy them, that's textbook mismanagement.

China, meanwhile has announced 'retaliatory measures', which seems a bit silly because that will just hurt their own exports, and shows that it wasn't necessarily Zhang that was the problem but someone much higher up in the party structure.