It’s time to throw the ballast overboard and set a clear course in the Netherlands. It’s official: The Netherlands is the global center of gravity for hybrid bonding technology. The news that ASMPT has designated Beuningen in the Netherlands as a development location for advanced packaging R&D puts our country firmly on the map. Strikingly, the company is developing its new generation of hybrid bonders here rather than in Asia. Advanced packaging and 3D technologies mark a new era in the chip industry, and our ecosystem is in an excellent starting position with players such as Besi, ASMPT, ASML, Nearfield Instruments and an extensive high-tech ecosystem. With this foundation, even entirely new business models become possible. Nearfield CEO Hamed Sadeghian presents an imaginative proposal. I won’t go into it further here; you can read more about it in this issue and on his company’s website. Bits&Chips’ Dutch state of semicon 2026 This article is part of the Bits&Chips special edition on the Dutch state of semicon, published on 23 October 2026. Order your hard copy of the special at info@techwatch.nl. Sadeghian makes his proposals with a healthy dose of self-interest, but this is someone who knows the semiconductor industry inside out. Like ASML’s top management, he sits at the table with the people who determine the direction of the chip industry: the American systems companies and the major chip manufacturers. We have too few people in the Netherlands with this kind of experience and these contacts. And when we do have them, we often don’t take them seriously. As a result, the advisory boards of high-tech startups in our country often look rather uninspiring. Too many professors, people from the old boys’ network or, even worse, retired Philips managers who spent their entire careers achieving little more than collecting subsidies in The Hague. It’s time to throw that ballast overboard and set a clear course in the Netherlands. The signs, however, aren’t good. While billions in subsidies for semiconductors, photonics and quantum are flooding into our country, our high-tech landscape is becoming fragmented with little clubs that happily burn through all that taxpayers’ money. They’ve sprung up like mushrooms in recent years. Every region, every market segment, pursues its own interests. The waste is enormous. Half of the trade mission to Japan that I joined last year consisted of civil servants and representatives of (semi-)government organizations. On trips like these, you should be meeting entrepreneurs. I heard the same story from participants in other missions – Germany, the US, Singapore, you name it. All these little clubs have their own agendas The problem is that all these little clubs have their own agendas and start competing with one another. One lobbies for an OSAT in NXP’s written-off MOS4 fab in Nijmegen, another for a focus on heterogeneous integration. Some organizations receive a pile of money for semiconductors while they don’t know the first thing about the chip market. Earlier this year, I was approached by a friendly person of this kind from the Province of Gelderland. Would I be willing to moderate a discussion at the Lifeport Semicon event in Nijmegen? When it turned out to be a pre-cooked session with a mediocre panel, I declined. When I subsequently asked whether I would be welcome as an attendee, I received an email saying: “Unfortunately, it’s not possible for journalists to attend the full program.” Fine if there are closed sessions, but independent journalists should simply be welcome at an event funded with taxpayers’ money. I declined the special “press moment.” Back to the question of how we can effectively spend the billions that have become available. Do we opt for a well-coordinated high-end initiative that allows us to remain relevant in global chip developments? Or do we choose a mature OSAT fab that has to compete with lean Asian players? One more comment on the latter. NXP should be asham