ASML`s Ex-CEO on US-China chip war: ideology over facts, decades-long battle ahead – WION
The ongoing rows between the United States and China over computer chips are ideological, not fact-based, and likely to persist, the recently retired Chief Executive Officer of semiconductor equipment maker ASML, Peter Wennink, said in an interview with Dutch radio station BNR on Saturday.
The ongoing rows between the United States and China over computer chips are ideological, not fact-based, and likely to persist, the recently retired Chief Executive Officer of semiconductor equipment maker ASML, Peter Wennink, said in an interview with Dutch radio station BNR on Saturday.
Wennink, a decade-long CEO of ASML before his retirement in April, led the company to become the largest European technology group. The US has escalated its sanctions on exports of ASML’s tools to China since 2018, its second-largest market after Taiwan. Most recently, it has sought to prevent the company from servicing equipment already sold to customers in China on security grounds.
‘These kinds of discussions are not being conducted on the basis of facts or content or numbers or data but on the basis of ideology,’ Wennink said.
‘You can think whatever you want about that, but we’re a business where the interests of your stakeholders have to be managed in balance … If ideology cuts straight through that, I have problems with that.’
He said the company has had customers and staff in China for 30 years ‘so you also have obligations.’
In a bid for balance, Wennink lobbied against excessively stringent export curbs and took concerns about intellectual property protection to the most senior Chinese politicians.
‘I think in Washington, maybe they sometimes thought, that Mr. Wennink, maybe he’s a friend of China,’ he said.
‘No. I’m a friend to my customers, to my suppliers, to my employees, to my shareholders.’
He said that many of the things driving the chip war are geopolitical, so this could take years and years; it might take decades.
‘This is going to go on for a while,’ he said.
