The high-tech industry is of great importance to the Dutch economy. Photonics is one of the key technologies for the Dutch high-tech Industry. Today’s leading companies, such as Philips and ASML, have their origins in photonics, and so do a wide range of small emerging innovative companies. Nearly 300 Dutch companies, a large proportion of which are SMEs, work directly on photonics products, with an estimated total turnover of more than 4 billion euros. Strong application areas in the Netherlands for Photonics are: Manufacturing, Health, ICT/Semicon, Agri-Food and Energy & Environment. Technology hotspots can be found in for example (fiber) sensing, integrated photonics (PIC and packaging), Biophotonics and opto-mechatronics.
On the national level, The Netherlands has strong photonics clusters such as PhotonicsNL, Dutch Optics Center (Optics) and PhotonDelta (Integrated Photonics).
