The Chancellery has just pushed through the participation of a Chinese state-owned company in a container terminal at the port of Hamburg, against the will of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Another investment review is now coming into focus.

It is about the planned sale of the chip production of the Dortmund company Elmos to Silex, a subsidiary of the Chinese group Sai Microelectronics.

The "Handelsblatt" reported on Thursday that the federal government probably wants to approve the takeover.

Government circles said that the investment review process is ongoing, so there is no result yet.

Julia Loehr

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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At the end of last year, Elmos announced that it wanted to sell its wafer production facility in Dortmund to the Swedish competitor Silex for EUR 85 million.

According to information from Dortmund, Silex is a subsidiary of the Chinese Sai group.

Elmos develops, produces and sells semiconductors primarily for use in cars.

The company justified the sale of the production with the changing customer demand.

In future, smaller semiconductors will be used in the automotive industry.

Silex has a broader customer base.

Siltronic sale collapsed

According to the Foreign Trade and Payments Ordinance, manufacturers of microelectronics are among those sensitive economic sectors in which investments and takeovers by investors from non-EU countries must be carefully examined.

The key question is whether there is a threat to public order or security.

In addition to the level of participation, a role is played by how advanced the technology is that the company uses and how important it is in the respective market.

At the beginning of the year, the planned sale of a company from the microelectronics industry caused a stir.

It was about the Munich chip supplier Siltronic, which the Taiwanese company Globalwafers wanted to take over.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs did not complete the investment review within the takeover period agreed by the companies, and the deal fell through as a result.

The order of magnitude at that time was much larger than in the Elmos and Silex cases: It was about 4.4 billion euros.

The number of investment reviews has risen steadily in recent years, partly because the legal regulations have been tightened several times.

Last year there were a total of 546 investigations, 57 of which concerned Chinese investors.

So far this year, there have been 42 investment appraisal procedures with Chinese participation.

In fact, the federal government has only banned or averted a few takeovers in the past.