How Dutch Business Review verifies semiconductor, company, regional and infrastructure research in the Netherlands.
Dutch Business Review focuses heavily on the semiconductor and high-tech supply chain, where a company's role can be technically important without semiconductor revenue representing all of its business. The publication therefore records capability and evidence of ecosystem participation instead of inventing segment revenue estimates.
Statistics Netherlands, De Nederlandsche Bank, Dutch government and regulator material, company filings, infrastructure operators and national technology roadmaps form the preferred evidence base. Brainport, municipal, provincial and national geography are labelled separately.
Primary-source hierarchy
Sources are chosen according to the subject and the claim being made. The following source types normally receive priority, with the most specific underlying document preferred over a general summary.
- Statistics Netherlands, De Nederlandsche Bank and Dutch ministry or regulator releases
- Dutch government semiconductor policy, national technology roadmaps and official ecosystem documents
- Company filings, annual reports and investor-relations releases
- Grid, port, planning and infrastructure operators
- Regional public bodies and high-quality secondary reporting where primary evidence needs context
Core research rules
Semiconductor supply-chain classification
Chip design, wafer processing, lithography, packaging, photonics, metrology, precision engineering and general high-tech supply are kept distinct. Inclusion in the ecosystem does not imply that semiconductor sales are the majority of a company's revenue.
Brainport and regional geography
Eindhoven municipality, Brainport Eindhoven, the wider metropolitan area and North Brabant are different geographies. Employment, company and investment figures are labelled according to the boundary used by the source.
Infrastructure constraints
Grid queue, contracted capacity, connection timing and operating electricity use are not treated as the same metric. A planned connection or announced project is not counted as operating capacity.
Company comparisons
Private and public companies disclose different levels of financial detail. Rankings state whether they use revenue, market value, employment or another measure and preserve the reporting date.
Dataset and permanent-reference rules
Dutch Semiconductor Supply Chain Tracker
Companies are included where Dutch government, national semiconductor-roadmap or Invest in Holland material identifies them as part of the ecosystem. Research institutions are excluded from the company table and should be mapped separately.
Regional guides
Regional pages explain the boundary before comparing companies, workforce or infrastructure. A global company workforce is never presented as local employment without local evidence.
Review dates, corrections and refreshes
Semiconductor and regional reference pages are reviewed when company status, government roadmaps, infrastructure conditions or official statistics materially change. The review date describes a substantive check, not routine formatting work.
Where a material factual error is identified, the correction process follows the Editorial Standards. Research pages are not given a newer date simply to create an appearance of freshness.
Network-wide quality gate
A publication-wide quality gate for research, rankings, explainers and evidence-led reporting. New pages should add verifiable information, structure or analysis that a reader could not obtain by merely restating the same source material.
Add a new fact, comparison or structure
Every authority page should contribute at least one material element beyond a generic summary: an original dataset, a ranked or normalised comparison, a historical series, a project-stage classification, a source reconciliation, a geographic breakdown, or a clearly reasoned synthesis across multiple sources.
Prefer primary evidence
Company filings, regulators, government datasets, official project disclosures, investor materials and other first-party records should establish factual claims wherever practical. Secondary reporting can add context, challenge claims or fill gaps, but should not replace an available primary source without a reason.
Preserve provenance
Numbers must retain their observation date, source and qualification. Announced investment is not treated as completed spending, planned capacity is not operating capacity, and group-wide figures are not silently assigned to one site, country or subsidiary.
Make definitions explicit
Rankings, trackers and databases must explain what is included, what is excluded and how ambiguous categories are handled. Terms such as largest, capacity, investment, employer, headquarters, analyst consensus and project stage should be operationally defined.
Show uncertainty instead of inventing precision
Missing values remain missing unless a defensible calculation is explicitly labelled. Estimates, ranges and inferred values must be distinguished from disclosed figures. Conflicting sources should be surfaced rather than averaged into false certainty.
Keep a time dimension
Materially changing subjects should retain review dates, historical observations or event histories so readers and machines can distinguish a current state from a previous disclosure.
Connect the evidence graph
High-value pages should link to the relevant authority hub, supporting analysis, persistent entities, methodology and primary-source evidence. New pages should strengthen an existing topic graph rather than exist as isolated search landings.
Do not publish thin variants
A new page should not exist solely because a keyword has a slightly different wording. Overlapping intent should be consolidated into the strongest canonical resource unless the new page has a genuinely different dataset, audience task, geography, time frame or analytical question.
Publication gate before a new authority URL is created
- What verifiable information or structure does this page add that is not already present elsewhere in the archive?
- Can the important quantitative claims be traced to a source and observation date?
- Are scope, definitions and exclusions clear enough for another analyst to reproduce the classification?
- Does the page distinguish disclosed facts from estimates, interpretation and commentary?
- Does the page belong to an existing authority cluster and link back into that cluster?
- Would merging this material into an existing canonical page produce a better resource than publishing a separate URL?
Default decision: if a proposed page cannot clear these questions, the preferred action is to strengthen, update or consolidate an existing canonical resource instead of publishing another thin URL.