Evidence — Semitrical

Dated 2 December 2024

Nexperia — the screen that came back clean

In October 2025 Nexperia stopped shipping and automotive production lines stopped with it. The event took about a month. The exposure had been in place, and visible, for seven years.

The screen everyone ran

Nexperia B.V. returns no matches on the US restricted-party lists. It did so on the morning the lines stopped, and it still does today. Supplier-level screening worked exactly as designed — it simply asked about the wrong entity.

What an ownership screen says instead

Screened through its ownership chain, the answer is not “clear”. The parent is not disclosed in the global LEI register, so the ultimate owner cannot be checked automatically. The honest output is escalate — do not clear.

The answer, once you escalate

Wingtech Technology Co., Ltd. — added to the BIS Entity List on 2 December 2024, ten months before supply stopped. Its ownership of Nexperia has been public since 2019. Nothing was hidden. It simply was not looked at.

Why this is not hindsight. The finding does not depend on knowing how the story ended. Anyone could have found Wingtech in five minutes — for one supplier. A Tier-1 has thousands, and nobody runs a manual ownership investigation across an entire supply base. The value was never in finding Wingtech. It is in knowing which forty of your two thousand suppliers are worth the five minutes.

2015 → 2020

Integrated Silicon Solution — a clean history is not a current answer

US-founded in Milpitas. NASDAQ-listed. Cleared by CFIUS in 2015. And wholly owned by Ingenic Semiconductor of China since 2020.

Every fact in that sentence is public and none of them is in tension. A company's own record — where it was founded, where it listed, what review it passed — describes the company. It does not describe who owns it now.

A supplier approved on the strength of its origin story stays approved long after the story stops being the relevant one.

Current

STMicroelectronics — when “widely held” is the correct answer and still not enough

Nobody controls STMicroelectronics, so the standard reference data answers “widely held”, and that answer is right. Two governments nonetheless hold 27.8% jointly — Bpifrance Participations at 13.9% and the Italian Ministry of the Economy and Finance at 13.9%.

That is not a red flag. It is a fact a screening file should contain, and for defence, aerospace and medical work it is a compliance obligation rather than a curiosity.

A threshold test asks “is there a controlling owner?” and correctly answers no. The question a buyer actually has is “who holds the largest block, and does it matter for what we are shipping?” Those are different questions, and only one of them is automated.

What the three make together

Register coverage runs inversely to risk.

The companies whose ownership matters most are the least likely to have a followable record. Which means an automated check returning “no match” is not an answer — it is the absence of one, and the two look identical unless the system says which it is.

So the rule we apply is deliberately narrow, and it is a classification rather than a forecast: screen the owner, not just the supplier — and where the owner cannot be seen, escalate rather than clear.

Restricted-party screens run against a dataset refreshed every 24 hours. Ownership comes from the global LEI register, supplemented by hand where that register dead-ends. Any line above can be checked against its source.

Try it on yours

Send a list of suppliers.

No contract and no NDA required. Names are enough — we will screen the owners and send back what we find, including where the answer is “this cannot be seen”.

Request a screen