Pharmaceutical company Organon, payments firm Adyen and publisher Wolters Kluwer are among the main recipients of the Dutch Innovation Box, a scheme that discounts corporate tax on profit earned from innovative products.
The discounts they received last year came to 71 million euros for Organon, 41 million for Adyen and 27 million for Wolters Kluwer.
The figures come from research by financial daily FD, based on the annual reports of large companies.
Familiar Names At The Top
The three sit alongside established beneficiaries including ASML, MSD and Booking.
For Amsterdam that is a notable concentration. Adyen and Booking are both headquartered here, and the scheme is one of the quieter reasons the city is attractive to companies with software they can point to as innovation.
The Criticism Is Not New
The Innovation Box has been criticised repeatedly over the years, because most of the benefit goes to a limited number of companies.
That is the shape the FD research confirms rather than the shape it discovers. The scheme is open in principle to any company with qualifying profit, but the sums involved reward scale.
