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July 16, 2003 – The Netherlands is strong in MEMS research, but it fares badly compared with other European countries when it comes to boasting companies that actually produce components.
Analysts who recently completed a government-sponsored study said most MEMS firms in the Netherlands are small- to medium-size design firms or niche manufacturers. Its lack of mid-size producers to drive commercialization partially explains why it lags neighboring countries.
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The largest companies with in-house production include C2V, with about 40 employees, Lionix, with 15 and Pamgene, with 90, said Jean-Christophe Eloy, director of Yolé Développement, a French MEMS consulting firm.
“Looking at the number of companies, the Netherlands represents approximately 6 percent of European activities. Looking at sales, it’s less than 3 percent because there are no large Dutch manufacturers, but mostly design companies and manufacturers targeting niche markets,” Eloy said.
Willems & van den Wildenberg, a Dutch strategy consulting firm, recently studied MEMS activities in the Netherlands for the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The firm divided these activities into four categories that make up the value chain: R&D, production, supply and demand.
Guy Konings is consultant at Willems & van den Wildenberg. It turns out, he said, 61 out of a total of 88 MEMS companies are active in R&D – that’s 69 percent. He said only 14 percent of the Dutch working on MEMS are in production. That’s low compared with countries like Switzerland with 52 percent in production, and Germany, France and the UK with around 30 percent each.
Why this big difference? Of course, countries like Germany, France and Switzerland have a head start with large automotive or watch industries.
According to Kees Eijkel, technical commercial director at the MESA + institute, one of the two main MEMS research centers in the Netherlands (the other is DIMES), the way the electronics industry is structured also explains some of the gap.
“In the Netherlands, we only have one huge company active in this field, Philips Electronics,” said Eijkel. “And we have many small companies offering specialized products or services. In between there is nothing.”
There aren’t enough mid-size OEMs willing to develop these high-tech components, because they consider it too risky, according to Eijkel. This is quite different from Switzerland for example. “That country has a long tradition in microsystems, with many mid-size companies active in this field.”
And the country needs mid-size companies to boost MEMS industry, he said. “A large company like Philips doesn’t use startups with 15 employees as key suppliers. If it’s important to them, they’ll either do it themselves, or hire an established company to do it for them,” said Eijkel.
Vincent Spiering, vice president marketing and sales of C2V suggested an additional reason for the slow commercialization of MEMS in the Netherlands. “Here, MEMS started at universities, so in the past our approach sometimes was too academic. But Switzerland, for example, already had an established precision industry, so they developed an industrial and commercial approach right from the start.”
Eloy summarized the Netherlands’ strengths as follows:
· Strong microfluidics and lab-on-a-chip R&D
· Experienced people in existing MEMS companies
· Strong systems manufacturers that potentially could integrate MEMS functions
And its weaknesses:
· Low production
· No real startup culture
· Difficulties to find venture capital
· Brain drain
Yolé Développement’s Eloy was surprised to find that a number of good Dutch R&D people left the Netherlands to join American, Swiss, French or German universities and companies. “That may be because of the lack of MEMS activities in the Netherlands,” he said.
Spiering agreed. “Perhaps there weren’t enough MEMS opportunities in the Netherlands in the ’90s. If big companies like Shell, Akzo Nobel, Unilever, and Philips had invested in MEMS then, we might have had more production experience and a stronger position in MEMS today,” he said.
Still, Spiering is optimistic about the future. “Lately, we’ve seen a number of new companies that develop exciting applications,” he said, “and we expect a lot from them.”
Willems & van den Wildenberg also sees lots of opportunity for Dutch MEMS companies. “Both Nexus and Mancef predicted double-digit growth from existing applications such as inkjet heads, hard-disk heads, and accelerometers, and new applications such as RF MEMS, fingerprint sensors and micro displays,” Konings said.
But he thinks the Dutch concentrate too much on development of new technologies and new designs. “There aren’t enough people that look at what the market demands. We need companies that develop MST applications from a market demand, through technology pull rather then technology push. That’s the cheapest and safest way to introduce any new technology,” Konings said.
“And the government tries to stimulate research and development even more. While it should look at the demand side first. It should stimulate the use of microsystems in the traditional Dutch industries such as biomedical and agro-food by clearly showing the advantages,” said Konings.
Will nanotech business develop in the same way as MEMS? Today, the Netherlands also has a good reputation in nanotech research. And the government recognizes nanotech as a key technology for the future. December 2002, the Dutch government decided to invest €23 million ($29.8 million U.S.) in nanotechnology academic research.
But that’s not enough.
The big companies such as DSM, Philips, Unilever, ASM International and ASML should get involved in nanotech early in the game, so we can approach this field from an industrial and commercial point of view, said Spiering.
And he is confident they will.