China warns of fresh chip shortage as Nexperia dispute escalates again - Dutch headquarters allegedly locked Chinese staff out of IT systems

China's commerce ministry warned on Saturday of a renewed global semiconductor supply chain crisis, after Nexperia's Netherlands-based headquarters disabled office IT accounts for all employees at its Chinese operations from the evening of March 3rd, according to a Reuters report. Beijing said the action "provoked new conflicts" in an already-fractured corporate standoff and warned that the Netherlands would bear "full responsibility" if chip shortages spread globally.

Nexperia, which controls roughly 40% of the global market for transistors and diodes, isn’t purely an automotive supplier. The discrete semiconductors it manufactures appear throughout consumer electronics, PC power supplies, motherboards, and chargers — pretty much everything — meaning a sustained supply disruption would carry consequences well beyond car production lines.

The current crisis traces back to October, when Dutch authorities invoked emergency powers to seize Nexperia from its Chinese parent, Wingtech Technology, citing governance failures and European economic security risks. China's Ministry of Commerce retaliated with export controls on Chinese-made Nexperia chips, which disrupted automotive production at Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, and Bosch before diplomatic talks partially eased the situation.

Nexperia Netherlands didn’t deny disabling the Chinese staff accounts in a Friday statement, per Reuters, but disputed claims that the action affected production at the company's assembly and testing facility in Guangdong province. China's commerce ministry rejected that, saying the Dutch entity had "seriously disrupted the company's normal production and operation."

The scale of any potential disruption is difficult to precisely quantify. Estimates of how much of Nexperia's output originates in China vary widely, with figures cited by industry analysts ranging from roughly 50% to close to 75% of global production volume. The Alliance for Automotive Innovation CEO John Bozzella warned in October that any resumed export controls would "disrupt auto production in the U.S. and many other countries and have a spillover effect in other industries."

Supply chain analysts have previously noted that finding and qualifying an alternative wafer supplier for Nexperia's Chinese facility could take up to six months. A Dutch Enterprise Chamber hearing on the Wingtech control question was scheduled for January 14 in the Netherlands, but it’s not yet clear what followed that hearing, and no resolution to the corporate governance dispute has been publicly announced.

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