【By Observer News, Xiong Chaoran】According to Reuters, on March 4 local time, a trade delegation from India visited Eindhoven, known as the "Dutch semiconductor center," to explore investment opportunities. Currently, India is accelerating the development of its domestic chip industry.

India has pledged billions of dollars in subsidies to attract semiconductor manufacturing plants and related industries. At present, India is advancing eight projects, including a $1.4 billion factory invested by Tata Electronics in Gujarat.

The report stated that at the same time, due to export controls and trade restrictions triggered by the Sino-US technological rivalry, Dutch semiconductor companies are seeking new markets and regional diversification.

Michiel Smit, an official from the RVO, a government agency under the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs, said: "It is clear that Dutch companies have many opportunities in India, first of all equipment exports, and secondly as a manufacturing base, because India has a large pool of engineering talent."

Manish Hooda, technical director of the Indian delegation, took the opportunity to urge that Dutch companies following the so-called "China+1" manufacturing strategy should consider India as their production base outside China. He claimed: "If they are interested in establishing operations in India, we are very open to it."

ASML Headquarters, Bloomberg

According to the report, as a key hub for the country's semiconductor industry, the Eindhoven area is home to ASML, the Dutch lithography machine manufacturer, and dozens of its top suppliers. Additionally, the headquarters of another chipmaker, NXP Semiconductors, is also located there.

ASML recently revealed plans to establish a "support office" in India. However, the company's spokesperson refused to disclose more details.

Last September, at the Indian Semiconductor Annual Summit in New Delhi, ASML's CEO, Peter Wennink, stated that the company hopes to establish partnerships with Indian chip manufacturers within the next year.

"We believe India is a highly promising partner, and we are committed to supporting India's ambitious goals in the semiconductor sector through cooperation, knowledge exchange, and talent development," Wennink said during his keynote speech: "Our advanced lithography solutions can help Indian wafer fabs achieve cutting-edge performance."

Hooda said that India's subsidy program launched in 2021 covers up to 50% of project costs, with additional subsidies of 20% to 25% provided by state governments. He also added that the second subsidy plan, which is expected to be approved on March 30, may be larger in scale.

Smit stated that about 50 to 60 Dutch companies have requested meetings with the Indian delegation.

Reuters reported that Indian engineers already make up a significant proportion of the tech workforce in the Netherlands. According to data from the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), in 2024, the number of Indians living in the Netherlands tripled compared to 2014, reaching 89,000, with over 10,000 living in the Eindhoven region.

The Netherlands and India hope to announce the establishment of a strategic partnership during Prime Minister Modi's visit to the Netherlands later this year.

Earlier in 2021, the Indian government launched the "Semicon India" initiative, with an initial budget of approximately $8.7 billion. The Indian government has pledged to provide up to 50% of the project cost funding, covering the entire supply chain from silicon-based semiconductor manufacturing to packaging and testing. However, this initiative has not yielded significant results.

In August last year, Prime Minister Modi announced in his Independence Day speech that India would restart its "semiconductor strategy," aiming to promote domestic chip manufacturing and announced that the first "Made in India" chip would enter the market by the end of 2025.

However, Bappa Sinha, Chief Technology Officer of Virtunet Systems, pointed out that Modi's policies have not driven local knowledge accumulation or actively pursued technology transfer from abroad. Essentially, it remains providing financial subsidies to foreign companies to set up factories in India using cheap labor. Although the Indian government's subsidies once attracted the attention of big companies like Foxconn, Tata Electronics, and Micron, only Micron has agreed to build a factory in India in four years, and it is not a semiconductor factory.

He bluntly stated, "The government hasn't realized that without a local market, even if the government provides 70% of the funds, but facing construction costs of $10 billion to $15 billion, no foreign company or leading semiconductor company will come."

He also mentioned that India originally hoped that manufacturing would shift to India after the West moved away from China. But in fact, this strategy has already failed. "India needs to establish connections with China's supply chain, otherwise it will achieve nothing in the 'China+1' strategy."

Analysts also point out that although India is actively building high-tech industries, currently, India's semiconductor industry is small in scale, lacks export competitiveness, and lags significantly behind countries like the US and China in terms of production scale and technological level. Domestic market demand also needs further segmentation.

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Original: toutiao.com/article/7613576144939434536/

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