Cabinet invests millions in tech company Smart Photonics

The Dutch state has decided to donate twenty million euros to invest in the Eindhoven company Smart Photonics. They produce photonic chips and could no find an external investor to make the current one productionexpand capacity. HereThrough threatened there a foreign takeover. The Ministry of Economic Affairs is therefore now jumped into the breach because thethem new industrybranch and the company yourself are of strategic importance for the Netherlands.  
 
Smart Photonics is a high-tech company that produces chips for the photonics industry. They make a specific type of complex chips for the global market. This is a relatively small industry in which this company is a leader. Semiconductors based on photonics are rapidly emerging worldwide, because such chips are more energy efficient, can process more information and are less susceptible to interference than traditional chips based on electrical circuits. 

Thanks to this technology, a foreign takeover of Smart Photonics was threatened. A foreign takeover could mean the end of this promising industry in the Netherlands. 
 
That is why this Eindhoven company has been designated by the Dutch state as a central spider in an ecosystem of companies that develop applications for photonics chips and want to make this type of technology more widely applicable. 
 
The support for Smart Photonics fits in with a broader trend in which strategic investing is increasingly being elevated to a government task. A line that FHI agrees with and which has ensured, among other things, that shipbuilder IHC and airline KLM are supported. The government is pursuing an increasingly active industrial policy.