Dutch Semiconductor Industry Reaches €45.6 Billion as Jobs Nearly Double in Six Years

The Dutch semiconductor industry is now large enough to be measured as an economic system rather than a collection of famous companies. Statistics Netherlands estimates that semiconductor-related turnover reached €45.6 billion in 2025, more than double the €21.3 billion recorded for 2019.

The new dataset matters because it attempts to isolate the portion of company activity genuinely connected to semiconductors. That produces a more useful measure than adding together the entire revenue of ASML, NXP and hundreds of suppliers whose businesses may span several markets.

Turnover has grown every year since 2019

CBS reports €21.3 billion of semiconductor-related turnover in 2019, €33.6 billion in 2022, €42.5 billion in 2024 and €45.6 billion in 2025. The agency calculates average annual growth of about 14% over the six-year period.

Most of the increase came from existing firms becoming larger and more semiconductor-focused. The estimated share of participating companies' turnover attributable to chips rose from 46% in 2019 to 51% in 2025. New entrants contributed about €400 million of the increase, according to CBS.

Employment has almost doubled alongside revenue

Semiconductor-related employment rose from 23,200 workers in 2019 to 43,200 in 2025. That is important for industrial policy because the Dutch chip advantage depends on engineering labour as much as on physical equipment.

The jobs data also suggest that the sector's expansion is not simply a price or accounting effect. Firms have added substantial labour while increasing the share of activity connected to semiconductors.

The dataset makes the ecosystem beyond ASML easier to see

The Netherlands is indispensable to advanced semiconductor manufacturing because of ASML's lithography systems, but the domestic ecosystem extends through chip design, precision engineering, photonics, packaging, process equipment and specialist suppliers. CBS built its estimate by combining Netherlands Enterprise Agency data with its own business and trade statistics.

That breadth is strategically important. Export controls and the AI investment cycle have made semiconductor capacity a question of economic security. A reliable domestic dataset gives policymakers a better baseline for judging where value, jobs and dependencies actually sit.

Our view: €45.6 billion should become the baseline, not a vanity number

Dutch Business Review's view is that the new CBS series is most valuable as a baseline for future measurement. It allows growth in jobs and turnover to be tracked without pretending that every euro earned by a diversified supplier belongs to the chip sector.

The figures are provisional and the methodology is still being developed, so false precision should be avoided. Even with that caveat, the direction is unambiguous: the Netherlands has built a semiconductor economy that is materially larger, more labour intensive and more strategically important than it was six years ago.