China knows this, developed countries that lost their manufacturing capacity are relearning this.
The people who are hired and organized by the korean comapny. This is litterlly the logic that collapsed venezuela's oil industry after it was seized by the state.
The people are physically in Europe, too. (Adding limits on remote management for national-security reasons might make sense.)
If Korea and Europe get in a war, or, more likely, China pressures them to straight up ditch that capital investment, that lets the EU hold those folks until knowledge transfer can be conducted. Again, this is a strategically different place of leverage from those assets being overseas.
Wasn't it sanctions? The state seizing ownership should not have meant the loss of:
> the people, the managers,engineers,etc
Ownership of companies change every day across the world without collapse.
Holy shit, finally someone who understands this, this comments needs to be to the top.
Same thing happened in my ex-commie country when the communists kicked out the capitalists, shipped them to UK, US, Switzerland, and took over their factories. Over years and decades, those factories became inefficient and went bust under state control, while those capitalists who got kicked out flourished by making new business in their new homes that were business-friendly countries.
Just because you seize factories doesn't mean anything if you don't know what to do, they're just commodity equipment anyone else can buy within walls and a roof. The people with the secret-sauce know-how and IP are just as if not more valuable.
That's why US had operation Paperclip.
If you go to a TSMC factory, you'll find the same ASML EUV machines every other country and and company on the planet (minus China) has access to buy, but yet only TSMC can extract the smallest nodes and highest yields because only they managed to perfect the entire process.
I think the EU performing such an action is outside the Overton window, at least for now...
China does know that but they knew how to make the deal palatable enough for auto manufacturers (other companies too, but this one IMO is a big factor in the grand scheme[0]) to all sell out one way or another for a stake in the pie, be it cheaper manufacturing or accessing that market.
Developed countries are re-learning it but are struggling with paying the piper. By that I mean, a lot of manufacturing, especially technology based, can be dirty as heck. Doing certain widgets results in environmental costs that have to be managed or externalized[1].
[0] - I posit, that Auto manufacturers probably keep a lot of documentation around, but also have a lot of history of 'good ideas' being killed by business politics one way or another. You can glean a -lot- of manufacturing tribal knowledge being able to access any existing or new incoming data on that set of signals.
[1] - No, we should not externalize, to be clear.
There's an established base of steel mills in Europe. Take one over, and your local talent pool can probably keep it running. There's less risk.
You had something: production. Now you have nothing.
For one it's a peace-time situation where strong-arming interventions are met with consequences, in this case China can stop supply of critical products to punish the Dutch. In a wartime situation such supply would've been stopped anyway, so there is nothing further to lose and everything to gain from an intervention, but such an intervention is only possible if the factory is on your soil.
Second, Nexperia is a legitimate Dutch company with Dutch expertise. The Chinese bought it. The Dutch don't need Chinese expertise to operate the local factory they built and sold to the Chinese.
Third, China is a global hegemon, South Korea isn't by comparison, and South Korea is a neighbour of China, the Netherlands isn't. China could pressure a battery factory in South Korea during a military conflict by military force, but in Western Europe that's a different story.