(Editor’s note: The Eindhoven Business Briefing is part of our Tech Tuesday series. Dispatches covers tech because so many of our highly skilled internationals are engineers and entrepreneurs.)
It’s summer and everyone is on vacation … except for the first time since we arrived in Eindhoven back in 2016, they’re not. The restaurants at High Tech Campus Eindhoven are packed. Deals are happening and the Dutch tech companies and startups appear to be putting in the hours to fend off the Americans and Chinese.
Maybe we’re making too much of this, but we sense more Europeans are realizing you can’t take off the entire summer as well as every possible religious holiday and stay competitive.
Or maybe they read this NYTimes post about South Korean companies telling executives to work longer hours, “in some cases telling them to come to the office six days per week.” And what top execs do means lower-ranked employees and managers at smaller companies will feel pressure to follow suit.
Korea is NOT the Netherlands. A 52-hour legal limit on the workweek was introduced in 2018, down from 68 hours per week! This restriction is unenforced. Workers in South Korea log some of the highest hours among advanced economies, putting in about 100 hours more per year than the average American worker, according to 2022 data compiled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. And trust us … Americans do at least 48 hours per week, or 2,400 hours per year.
Like the rest of the world, the South Koreans see the U.S. and China dominating global business. Unlike Europe, they’re doing something about it.
With only about 50 million people and mercurial North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un as their neighbor, South Korea is an unlikely dominant tech economy, with Samsung, Hyundai, LG and others contributing to a $1.7 trillion GDP, $700 billion more than the Netherlands.
So, they must be doing something right.
Here in the Netherlands, we’re sensing reality is starting to creep in. In an interview with Innovation Origins, Delft-based Meatable’s founder Krijn de Nood is quoted as saying launching a startup is incredibly hard work and there are no shortcuts. Oh, and de Nood is leaving and an American, Jeff Tripician, is taking his place as the cultured meat startup focus on the U.S. market.
NXP renovating High Tech Campus HQ into ‘workplace of tomorrow’
One of the places on High Tech Campus that is very, very quiet is HTC 60, NXPs global headquarters. In fact, the building on south side of campus is empty, with NXP throwing a farewell party at the end of July when they symbolically closed the building.
The NXP headquarters is getting reshaped into the “Workplace of Tomorrow.” Exactly what that means is a bit of a mystery because the chipmaker took down its original LinkedIn post. What we do know is, as part of that project, they’re going to put NXP’s local R&D staff, its corporate staff and the business teams into a fully renovated building. The current NXP workforce at High Tech Campus is listed as 662 on the company’s LinkedIn page.
The renovation includes a new Demoroom where NXP will show its most innovative products.
From the NXP LinkedIn page:
In order to go full speed with the renovation process, we decided to empty the building for a few months.
Today we had a farewell party where we symbolically closed the building, reflecting on the unique milestone in the journey to our Workplace of Tomorrow. We all look forward to NXP’s reshaped global headquarters, which we expect to be ready early 2025.
NXP is in the expansion mode across the globe including a new $7.8 billion chip fab in Singapore in a partnership with TSMC-backed Vanguard and an upgrade and expansion of its facilities in Austin, Texas. It’s one of the most important semiconductor companies not just in Eindhoven and the Netherlands, but the world. It has a substantial share of the automotive market, supplying microcontrollers and analog chips into automotive clusters, powertrains, infotainment systems and radars.
We were fortunate to be with NXP CTO Lars Reger in June at TNW when he explained his vision of incorporating NXP technology into, well, everything. (See the vid above.) Lately, the company has doubled down on chips for the systems that make self-driving vehicles possible.
Ranked by total annual revenue, NXP is about half the size of ASML, with total 2023 revenue of 13 billion euros and 28 billion respectively. But ASML’s market capitalization – the value of all outstanding shares – is 312 billion euros, five times NXP’s capitalization of 61 billion euros as of mid-August.
Shapeways reincarnated
When we were living in the U.S., a group of city boosters (including yours truly) launched a private economic development effort to bring companies to Louisville, Ky. One of the companies we targeted was Eindhoven-based Shapeways, a Philips spinout and one of the first companies to offer consumers custom 3D printed goods in whichever material – plastic, metal or ceramics – they needed. We thought it would be a perfect match for UPS’ WorldPort global distribution center in Louisville.
We never got a meeting, which was disappointing. Then Shapeways moved their HQ to New York and we kind of forgot about them. Maybe it was good we didn’t land Shapeways because the company just declared bankruptcy.
The good news is, an employee group bought out the Shapeways assets and they’re back in business. In Eindhoven.
Now branded as Manuevo, the company will focus on B2B, specifically supplying parts to the automotive, aerospace, architecture, medical technology and the semiconductor industry.
Quick hits:
• At their new collaborate lab in Veldhoven, imec and ASML have achieved a new milestone in chip technology: the smallest chip structure ever. Burning circuitry onto computer chips is based on a photographic process, discovered by American Jay Lathrop back in the 1950s. Now imec, based near Eindhoven in Leuven, Belgium, and ASML have come up with new technology that allows chip makers to make even more microscopic circuitry … and faster DRAM and logic chips.
The addition of ‘High Numerical Aperture’ (High-NA) to this process allows for accuracy in etching these structures, which is crucial for creating smaller and more efficient transistors. The imec release is fairly technical, but we get the feeling this is another innovation that will keep ASML at the forefront of semiconductor innovation for years.
• As we suspected, the whole ASML stays or goes thing is still up in the air. The Eindhoven city council wants some assurances the company is actually going to stay before it commits to expropriating land for a mega infrastructure expansions under Operation Beethoven.
This issue is likely to be drawn out since construction is expected to begin in 2026 at the earliest, with 2027 more likely. All we have is anecdotal info, but the locals we’ve talked with don’t think ASML will stay. “Eindhoven is too small” is the consistent refrain.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
