Japanese chemicals company sees potential niche in EUV chip making materials

Osaka Organic Chemical Industry, a Japanese producer of high-end chemical substances utilized in chip manufacturing, is betting on the supplies marketplace for excessive ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, a technique for making superior chips.

Little identified even in its house nation, Osaka Organic has carved out a important area of interest within the semiconductor trade by supplying corporations that make photoresists, the light-sensitive chemical substances used to etch patterns on wafers.

It already has a 70% share of the marketplace for the argon fluoride (ArF) monomers utilized in photoresists and now goals to develop in chemical substances for EUV resists – an space changing into more and more necessary as the worldwide semiconductor trade is seen doubling in worth within the decade to 2030.

“I am confident that we can compete,” Masayuki Ando, Osaka Organic’s president, informed Reuters in an interview, referring to the EUV resist market.

In some ways, Osaka Organic is emblematic of Japan’s chip-making trade right this moment. The world’s third-largest financial system was as soon as a worldwide large in making chips earlier than ceding dominance to U.S., Taiwanese and South Korean rivals.

But Japan nonetheless retains a lockhold on essential components of the provision chain, similar to chip-making instruments and supplies together with specialised chemical substances prized for his or her purity.

The authorities, nevertheless, needs to see a much bigger footprint for the trade with backing for chip foundry enterprise Rapidus and overseas chipmakers similar to TSMC finding manufacturing in Japan. Last month JSR Corp, a number one photoresist maker, introduced a plan to go personal with funding from a government-backed fund driving hypothesis about potential consolidation within the sector.

Ando stated that the competitiveness of Japan’s materials makers didn’t rely on measurement. “For materials it’s not about chasing scale to reduce costs but about technical ability,” he stated.

Companies with out technical capacity “will be weeded out naturally,” he stated.

The firm’s shares have gained 40% year-to-date.

“(Osaka Organic’s) EUV business is ramping up right now so it can outperform the growth ratio of the EUV photoresist market itself,” stated Yuta Nishiyama, an analyst at Citigroup, who forecasts a market compound annual development price of 30-40%.

($1 = 141.5000 yen)

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