Cabinet presents rescue plan to keep ASML here: ‘The Netherlands has a dominant position with this company’

The outgoing cabinet will most likely present plans today to keep chip machine maker ASML in the Brainport Eindhoven region. A boost for ‘the Silicon Valley of the Netherlands’ is extremely important, says Ingrid Thijssen, chairman of VNO-NCW in Good Morning Netherlands on NPO 1. “Chips are the new oil. The Netherlands therefore has a dominant position in the world.”

According to various media, the government wants to invest approximately one billion euros in the Brainport Eindhoven region with the so-called Operation Beethoven, where around six thousand tech companies are located. These growing companies will attract more and more highly educated workers (from home and abroad) to the Eindhoven region in the coming years and the infrastructure and facilities must be adapted accordingly. According to Eindhoven mayor Jeroen Dijsselbloem, this will require five to eight billion by 2040.

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“The Eindhoven ring road is already completely stuck. Many more houses are also needed, namely 65,000 by 2030. All to attract twice as much talent. The world is at war for people like this. That is why the region must remain attractive. A leap in scale is necessary,” says Thijssen.

The chairman states that a quarter of innovation investments in the Netherlands are made in the Eindhoven Airport region. “Over the past ten years, economic growth there has been much higher than the Dutch average.”

Disaster

The departure of ASML, which the company with 40,000 employees previously threatened, would be a disaster for the Netherlands, says Thijssen. “It is one of the most important companies in the world.”

Rudy van Belkom, director of the Future Image of Technology foundation, endorses the enormous value of ASML and other tech companies. But we also have to take the social context into account, he says. “There are all kinds of terms, huge concepts, ‘the new oil’, ‘war for tech talent’, ‘power’, but it is also about the people who already live in that region. What about social relations? This causes changes. We also have to look at the person who is experiencing this.”

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