China's Wingtech Will Appeal the Dutch Ruling Escalating the Nexperia Takeover
Wingtech, the Chinese owner of the Dutch chipmaker Nexperia, says it will appeal an Amsterdam court ruling that bans it from executing its own Chinese court orders — with fines that could reach 300 million euros.
The Nexperia saga has entered a new round. On 11 November, the Amsterdam Court of Appeal's Enterprise Court ruled that Wingtech — the Chinese owner of the Netherlands-based chipmaker — must permit Nexperia's administrator to conduct market research and contact market entities, withdraw some of its Chinese litigation claims, and is prohibited from executing the Dongguan court's asset-freeze ruling. Violating the injunction could cost the company up to 300 million euros in fines. Wingtech says it will appeal.
The company's response was blunt: the ruling, it says, "has no factual basis, violates international judicial comity, and in substance constitutes a cross-border anti-suit injunction." The company argues that the ruling "unilaterally strips the lawful rights of a controlling shareholder," and has hired lawyers inside and outside China to evaluate the decision.
The escalation is the latest move in a two-year standoff that has defined China–Europe investment disputes. The Dutch government intervened in September 2025, freezing Nexperia's assets and intellectual property for a year, as China's largest financial news outlet reported at the time; a Dutch enterprise court then suspended the company's Chinese CEO — Wingtech's founder Zhang Xuezheng — from his post. Nexperia's 2024 revenue was roughly 14.7 billion yuan.
The ruling came after Wingtech's own escalation. In August, a court in Dongguan, China, froze Nexperia's China subsidiaries' assets — worth about 300 million dollars — at Wingtech's request, and the Dutch Enterprise Court's November ruling responds directly to that: it bans Wingtech from executing the Dongguan freeze and orders it to withdraw some of its Chinese litigation claims.
The standoff has been a two-way tit-for-tat, and China has shown its own willingness to shape cross-border deals — last month it blocked SoftBank's purchase of ABB's robotics business over factory data flows. The Dutch court's intervention follows the same logic in reverse: the government's freeze order, and then the Enterprise Court's suspension of Zhang Xuezheng, were designed to keep Nexperia's operations out of the Chinese parent's control. Chinese readers, who have watched their own government intervene in foreign deals, are watching the mirror image.
The company's stock now carries the *ST designation that flags delisting risk on China's A-share market. The next question is the same one the standoff has been arguing for two years: who controls Nexperia. So far, the Dutch courts have had the answer.