Looking to invest in semiconductor sector in Karnataka: Dutch PM

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said that the Netherlands is in talks with the Indian and Karnataka governments to expand the presence of Dutch companies in the semiconductor space.

Rutte, who visited Bengaluru with a business delegation after attending the G20 Summit in New Delhi, also said that they are in discussions with India to understand its fast payments system, the unified payments interface (UPI), better.

“This is clearly something we are discussing, not so much linking it, but to understand better what India is doing. There are many issues around privacy, around the banking system, what it means in terms of currency stability. So we have to work through all those issues. But this is clearly a development which we have to take seriously,” Rutte told reporters at a public event on Church Street.

India has used the G20 platform to showcase digital public infrastructure, including Aadhaar and UPI, to other nations.

Rutte also said that the New Delhi Declaration, which did not mention Russia and was highly diluted on the war in Ukraine compared to the Bali Declaration, was a compromise, but a necessary one. “It was a compromise clearly, and that is always the case when you come together with multilateral teams like the G20. But I was happy with the fact that there were some key elements in the declaration that were very important,” he said.

“But obviously if I were to have written it myself, it would have been written differently,” he added.

Rutte said he had “very successful” meetings with Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar. “One of the things we are discussing with the central and state governments is how we can expand in the semiconductor industry here in Bengaluru. We have NXP, for example, here, and we have hugely successful Indian companies like Wipro having presence in the Netherlands.”

Dutch company NXP is one of the largest semiconductor companies in the world. It has research and development offices in India, but not a semiconductor manufacturing plant.