The United Kingdom Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has ordered the Chinese company Nexperia to sell its recently gained 86% share of the company Newport Wafer Fab. Nexperia originally only had a 14% share in the company before July 5th, 2021 when it bought the remaining 86% shares, giving it full ownership over the Wales-based manufacturer. The order states that Nexperia is to sell that 86% share immediately. The full statement from the UK government is below.

However, Nexperia corporate released this statement saying: “The far-reaching remedies which Nexperia offered to fully address the government’s concerns have been entirely ignored,” the company said in a statement. The UK government chose not to enter into a meaningful dialogue with Nexperia or even visit the Newport site.More than 500 employees in Newport also raised their own significant concerns about such a divestment – the government has chosen not to listen to them and instead taken this decision which puts the livelihoods of them and their families, as well as more than £100m of taxpayers’ money, completely unnecessarily at risk.”

UK Business Secretary Shapps cites national security grounds as the primary motivation for issuing the order and will not allow the critical silicon chip manufacturing site to fall into Chinese hands. The Chinese government, through commercial proxies, has a long history of buying up critical commercial entities and then either exporting the intellectual property of the acquired company or the manufacturer altogether, as what happened with Alpi Aviation, an Italian drone manufacturer that was bought out in 2020 under the nose of the Italian government.

Nexperia is a semiconductor manufacturer headquartered in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. It is a subsidiary of the partially state-owned Chinese company Wingtech Technology. It has front-end factories in Hamburg, Germany, and Greater Manchester, England.