[tinco]

So it seems, but also this seems to have been dragging along since 2023 so it's less sudden than the press makes it seem. The contract with WSS that's underlying the complaint by the former management has apparently been allowed to progress to the point where the US is threatening to simply consider Nexperia a Chinese company for the purposes of sanctions.

[jacquesm]

And rightly so. The timeline here is fairly typical: until the day there is a judgment nothing changes and going through the process usually takes a while. And then everything changes at once. It is clear that they were no longer making decisions in the interest of Nexperia or its customers but solely to benefit Zhang's interests. What is interesting is that Wingtech actually was being defrauded but chose not to act. That's the bit that doesn't make sense to me, unless Zhang also controls Wingtech somehow. In one article it was said that they bought many more wafers than needed in order to destroy them, that's textbook mismanagement.

China, meanwhile has announced 'retaliatory measures', which seems a bit silly because that will just hurt their own exports, and shows that it wasn't necessarily Zhang that was the problem but someone much higher up in the party structure.