NXP, ASM International and Besi: The Dutch Chip Cluster Beyond ASML

The Dutch chip cluster is not one company but a lineage: Philips’ research labs in Eindhoven spawned ASML, NXP and, indirectly, Nexperia, while ASM International both co-founded ASML and seeded Besi, and together they give a country of 18 million people an outsized share of the tools and chips that make modern computing possible. This article looks past ASML to the three listed companies that complete the cluster: NXP Semiconductors, whose automotive exposure makes it a bellwether for the car industry; ASM International, whose deposition tools are critical for 2nm gate-all-around transistors; and BE Semiconductor Industries, whose hybrid-bonding machines are becoming essential for AI memory and logic packaging. It covers their Philips heritage, their 2025 results and 2026 trajectories, and the public money being spent to keep the cluster in Brabant. It is part of the Netherlands Company Stories hub.

How did Philips create a national semiconductor cluster?

Philips began making semiconductors in the 1950s at its Nijmegen plant, opened in 1953, and its NatLab research centre in Eindhoven became one of Europe’s most productive sources of electronics engineers. For four decades the company developed transistors, logic chips and later system-on-chip designs for its own televisions, radios and consumer products, building a captive ecosystem of suppliers and universities around Eindhoven.

The cluster took its modern shape through a series of spin-outs. In 1984 Philips and ASM International, founded by Arthur del Prado in 1968, created ASM Lithography, now ASML, to commercialise Philips’ wafer-stepper research. In 2006, under pressure from investors to focus on healthcare and lighting, Philips sold an 80.1% stake in Philips Semiconductors to a private-equity consortium of KKR, Bain Capital, Silver Lake, Apax and AlpInvest; the business was renamed NXP, for “Next eXPerience”, and listed on Nasdaq in 2010. NXP in turn sold its Standard Products division in 2017, creating Nexperia, whose later seizure by the Dutch state is told in our story on Nexperia and Wingtech.

The cluster’s other branch runs through ASM International. Del Prado’s company sold its ASML stake back to Philips in 1988 but kept building deposition and epitaxy equipment in Almere and Bilthoven, and its back-end assembly business in Hong Kong became ASM Pacific Technology. Besi, founded in Duiven in 1995 through a merger of Dutch die-attach and moulding businesses led by Richard Blickman, grew up in the same supplier network. The result is a region, branded Brainport, where lithography, deposition, packaging equipment, automotive chips and discrete semiconductors are all designed within an hour’s drive of each other.

What does NXP do, and why is it so exposed to cars?

NXP Semiconductors is the world’s largest supplier of automotive semiconductors by several measures, and automotive accounted for US$7.12bn of its US$12.27bn revenue in 2025, or 58%. Its chips sit in radar sensors, battery-management systems, vehicle network gateways, infotainment processors and the secure elements in car keys, and it counts almost every major carmaker and tier-one supplier as a customer.

That exposure made 2024 and 2025 difficult. Carmakers over-ordered during the 2021–2022 chip shortage, then spent two years running down inventory while European and Chinese demand softened. NXP’s 2025 revenue fell 3% from US$12.61bn in 2024, with automotive flat, industrial and IoT flat and communications infrastructure down 24%; GAAP net income was US$2.02bn and the non-GAAP gross margin 56.8%. The company went through a leadership transition at the same time: Kurt Sievers, CEO since 2020, handed over to Rafael Sotomayor, who became president in April 2025 and CEO in October 2025.

Sotomayor inherited a portfolio that had been reshaped by acquisitions. NXP closed the purchase of Aviva Links, a maker of in-vehicle networking chips, for US$243m on 24 October 2025, and of Kinara, an edge-AI processor designer, for US$307m three days later, following the earlier purchase of TTTech Auto for its vehicle software. It also sold its MEMS sensors business for US$900m in February 2026 to sharpen the focus on processing, connectivity and analogue. The strategic thesis is “software-defined vehicles” and “physical AI”: cars, robots and industrial equipment that need more compute per unit regardless of how many units are sold.

How did NXP’s recovery play out in 2026?

The up-cycle that Sotomayor predicted in October 2025 arrived on schedule. Fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of US$3.34bn beat guidance, and on 28 April 2026 NXP guided second-quarter revenue to US$3.35–3.55bn against a consensus of about US$3.27bn, sending the shares up by a record 25% in a single day, the biggest move since the 2010 IPO.

The second quarter delivered. Revenue of US$3.50bn was up 19% year on year and 10% sequentially, with growth in every end market and region: automotive US$1.94bn (up 12%), industrial and IoT US$755m (up 38%), mobile US$351m (up 6%) and communications infrastructure US$452m (up 41%). GAAP net income was US$767m. Guidance for the third quarter of 2026 was US$3.65–3.85bn, implying 15–21% year-on-year growth, with data-centre demand emerging as an additional engine alongside vehicles and physical AI. NXP returned US$360m to shareholders in the quarter and US$1.92bn in all of 2025.

The company remains Dutch in incorporation and headquarters, with its main office in Eindhoven and its historic fab in Nijmegen, but it reports in dollars, lists only on Nasdaq and runs most of its manufacturing through foundries and joint ventures: SSMC in Singapore (61% owned), the VSMC joint venture with Vanguard and TSMC in Singapore, and the ESMC fab with TSMC, Bosch and Infineon in Dresden. That hybrid identity, a Dutch company managed largely from Austin and Eindhoven for a global customer base, is typical of the cluster and a contrast with the fully Dutch-rooted ASML described in our story on ASML’s EUV monopoly.

Why is ASM International critical to 2nm chips?

ASM International makes the deposition equipment that lays down films a few atoms thick on silicon wafers, and its atomic layer deposition (ALD) tools hold more than 55% of a market that has become essential as transistors move to gate-all-around (GAA) architectures at 2nm and below. Because GAA transistors wrap the gate around nanosheet channels, they need more deposition and epitaxy steps than the FinFETs they replace, and ASM has been the main beneficiary.

The company’s 2025 results, published on 3 March 2026, showed record revenue of €3.2bn, up 12% at constant currency, a record gross margin of 51.8% and an adjusted operating margin of 30.2%. Fourth-quarter orders of €802.8m rose 19% year on year. Chief executive Hichem M’Saad, who succeeded Benjamin Loh in 2024, attributed the growth to customers investing in 2nm GAA capacity and to molybdenum ALD and area-selective deposition entering high-volume production. China was more than 30% of revenue in 2025 even as equipment sales there declined, and the board proposed a €3.25 dividend plus a buyback of up to €150m.

Momentum accelerated in 2026. Second-quarter revenue of €1,003m was a record, up 24% year on year and above guidance, with adjusted net earnings of €292.9m, record free cash flow of €355m and a cash pile of €1.18bn. ASM guided third-quarter revenue to €1.1bn, said second-half revenue would be more than 20% above the first half as leading-edge logic, memory and the first 1.4nm pilot-line investments arrived, and told investors that 2027 revenue would exceed its earlier €4.6bn target. The company is headquartered in Almere, near Amsterdam, which makes it the only major Dutch chip company outside Brabant.

What is hybrid bonding, and why are Besi’s orders doubling?

Hybrid bonding joins two chips or wafers directly, copper pad to copper pad, without the solder bumps used in conventional packaging, allowing interconnect pitches below 10 micrometres and far higher bandwidth between stacked dies. It is the technology behind AMD’s 3D V-Cache, the next generations of high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators and the co-packaged optics that hyperscalers want for data-centre networking. Besi is the leading supplier of the die-to-wafer hybrid-bonding machines needed to do it at scale.

The numbers in 2026 reflect that position. First-quarter orders of €269.7m more than doubled year on year; second-quarter orders of €292.9m were up 129%, with revenue of €249.9m up 69% and net income of €89.0m up 177% at a gross margin of 65.7%. For the first half, revenue was €434.7m and orders €562.6m, both roughly doubling. The number of customers that have adopted hybrid bonding rose to 21 by June 2026, up from the mid-to-high teens at the end of 2025 and with cumulative orders above 150 systems, including a new hyperscaler customer, and Besi guided third-quarter revenue up a further 10–15%. Chief executive Richard Blickman, who has run the company since 1995, has told investors he expects a multi-year AI capital-spending cycle and that hybrid bonding adoption is accelerating ahead of product launches in 2027–2030.

Besi’s strategic partnership with Applied Materials, the US equipment giant that took a 9% stake in 2023, produced a fully integrated die-to-wafer hybrid-bonding platform launched at Semicon West. The company itself is small by cluster standards, with 2,311 staff at the end of June 2026 and manufacturing in Malaysia and China as well as Duiven, but it carries a market value of more than €10bn because investors believe advanced packaging will absorb an increasing share of chip capital spending as transistor scaling slows.

All figures are from company results releases published between February and October 2026; Besi’s 2025 net income was €131.6m on orders of €685.0m.

What is Project Beethoven and who benefits?

Project Beethoven is the Dutch government’s name for a €2.5bn package agreed in March 2024 to keep the semiconductor cluster growing in the Eindhoven region after ASML’s then-CEO Peter Wennink warned that the company might expand abroad. The money is split roughly €1.7bn from the national budget, partly through the National Growth Fund, and €800m from the province and municipalities.

The package pays for things that no single company can fix: road and rail connections to Eindhoven, grid reinforcement by TenneT including a new high-voltage station near Best, nearly 20,000 homes and expanded technical education at Eindhoven University of Technology and the region’s vocational colleges. Demand for the education money quickly exceeded the budget; NOS reported in 2025 that applications from the chip sector were far larger than the allocation, with Eindhoven receiving the largest share. Mayor Jeroen Dijsselbloem had asked for €5–8bn and called the eventual figure a start.

Although ASML was the trigger, the whole cluster benefits. NXP’s Eindhoven headquarters, Besi’s suppliers in Brabant and the hundreds of smaller firms such as VDL, Prodrive and Sioux that supply ASML all compete for the same engineers and the same grid connections. The grid problem is real: Dutch transmission congestion has left new industrial connections waiting years in some provinces, a story told in our piece on TenneT and grid congestion. The housing shortage that Beethoven tries to address is examined in our story on the Dutch housing shortage.

How exposed is the cluster to China and export controls?

All three companies sell heavily into China, and all three are subject to the same Dutch and US export-control regime that has reshaped ASML’s business. ASM International derived more than 30% of 2025 revenue from China, where domestic fabs have been buying deposition tools for mature-node capacity; NXP sells automotive and industrial chips to Chinese carmakers and runs joint ventures with Datang and ASMC; Besi has a manufacturing site in China and sells assembly equipment to Chinese OSAT firms.

The Dutch government’s September 2024 decision to take direct control of licences for certain lithography tools, and the January 2025 widening of the regime to cover more equipment and metrology, signalled that The Hague will follow Washington on advanced tools while trying to protect mature-node trade. ASM has said it expects China sales to rise again in 2026 after a dip, and Besi’s hybrid-bonding customers are mostly outside China, but any extension of US controls to deposition or advanced packaging would hit the Almere and Duiven companies directly. The Nexperia seizure of 2025 showed that the pressure can also flow the other way, with China restricting exports from its own territory.

For NXP the China question is commercial rather than regulatory: Chinese carmakers such as BYD are gaining share in Europe and increasingly source from domestic chip suppliers, which puts pressure on the Western incumbents’ automotive franchises. NXP’s response has been to deepen relationships with Chinese OEMs through local joint ventures and to push into physical AI and data-centre segments where Chinese substitution is slower. How this balance holds is one of the central questions for the cluster, and for the wider Dutch economy explored in our story on Dutch multinationals and China de-risking.

How do the three companies compare as investments?

The three companies offer different exposures to the same cycle. NXP is the most diversified and the most cyclical in the traditional sense: its fortunes track car production, industrial capital spending and inventory corrections, and its shares de-rated through 2024–2025 before the April 2026 guidance rally. It pays a steady dividend and buys back stock, and it trades at a lower multiple than its equipment-making neighbours.

ASM International is a pure play on leading-edge process technology. Its revenue depends on a handful of customers, TSMC, Samsung, Intel and the big memory makers, deciding to build 2nm and 1.4nm capacity, and on DRAM makers adopting new deposition steps. It has no debt, more than €1bn of cash and a 30%-plus operating margin, but it also carries a China share above 30% that export controls could squeeze, a risk shared with ASML.

Besi is the most concentrated bet. Its hybrid-bonding revenue depends on a small number of adopters moving from pilot lines to volume, and quarterly orders can swing by half. The 65% gross margin and the doubling of orders in 2026 explain why the stock commands a premium, but investors should remember that in 2023 and 2024 Besi’s mainstream assembly business was in a downturn while hybrid bonding was still a promise. All three companies, like ASML, are sensitive to the AI capital-spending cycle; if hyperscaler budgets are cut, orders for deposition tools and bonders would fall before chip revenue does.

What can founders and investors learn from the Dutch chip cluster?

The first lesson is that clusters are built by spin-outs, not by plans. Philips did not set out to create ASML, NXP and Nexperia; it created the engineering talent, the suppliers and the research institutions, and then, often reluctantly, let businesses go. Governments that want their own Brainport should focus on the conditions that make spin-outs likely, including university research funding, patient capital and tolerant labour mobility, rather than on picking the companies.

The second lesson is that specialisation beats scale. None of NXP, ASM or Besi is the largest company in its broad category, yet each dominates a narrow one. ASM’s ALD share above 55% and Besi’s lead in hybrid bonding are worth more than a larger but undifferentiated equipment business, because customers cannot substitute them when roadmaps change. For founders, finding the step in a process that everyone else treats as a commodity, and making it hard, is a repeatable strategy.

The third lesson is about public money. Project Beethoven shows that even a rich country with the world’s most valuable chip company has to pay to keep it. The question for investors is whether €2.5bn of infrastructure and housing is enough, and whether the Netherlands will match the subsidies being offered in the US, Japan and Germany. For a comparison, see how the same debate played out in the Japan Company Stories hub, where Rapidus and TSMC’s Kumamoto fab attracted far larger sums.

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