Japan cannot afford your most valuable company in the chips industry. And is mired in debts

JSR Corporation is a company extraordinarily valuable for Japanalthough not in a strictly economic sense. And this company constitutes with Tokyo Electron, RapidusCanon and Nikon The spearhead of the Japanese chips industry. Japan needs them. It necessarily needs these companies to be competitive if you want to recover the relevance that it had decades ago in the already flourishing semiconductor industry.

At the end of the 80s Japan dominated the integrated circuit industry With an overwhelming forcefulness. Nec, Toshiba, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Mitsubishi, Matsushita and other Japanese companies monopolized in 1988 no less than 50% of the chip industry. However, today none of these companies is positioned among the leaders of a sector dominated with iron fist by Taiwanese, American, Dutch, South Korean and German companies.

Despite its world leadership JSR Corporation is spending trouble

This company has something that the other companies that I have mentioned in the first paragraph of this article lack: it holds the monopoly of a crucial sector of the chips industry. This is actually what makes it so valuable to Japan beyond its economic results. And it is that JSR specializes in the production of photorers. Photolithography teams that Design and produce ASML They are responsible, very broadly, to transfer the geometric pattern described by the mask with a lot of precision to the surface of the silicon wafer.

In this area we can observe the pattern as the “drawing” that delimits the distribution of transistors, connections and other elements that make up an integrated circuit. However, before reaching this important step it is necessary A process known as deposition. Equipment manufactured by Tokyo Electron either Apply materials. Its purpose is to prepare silicon wafers for the transfer of the geometric pattern by depositing a fine material of material on them.

Depending on the type of chip that is being manufactured it will be necessary to use one material or another. One of the most used deposition techniques is known as oxidation, and consists of taking advantage of the silicon’s ability to form a fine oxide layer when reacting with water. Its purpose is to protect transistors and other components of external pollution chips. However, before carrying out the transfer of the geometric pattern to the wafer using a lithography equipment it is necessary to pour a liquid capable of absorbing the light and preserving the pattern. This is the function of the photorersista fluid.

During the last two decades all companies specialized in the production of photorers have been Japanese. In fact, Japan since then has the monopoly of this market, which It is currently led by JSR Corporation. This company supplies its photorestoning liquids to most semiconductor manufacturers with which we are familiar, such as TSMC, Intel, Samsung, SK Hynix, Micron Technology or Texas Instruments, among many others.

The surprising thing is that despite the domain it exerts on the market of photorers, JSR is not going well. In 2024 the investment company Japan Investment Corp. bought it for 6,000 million dollars with the purpose of consolidating its growth, but has closed the last fiscal year in March 2025 with losses of 1,450 million dollars. This bad result has had consequences. The company’s board of directors has been completely replaced as the most responsible for an economic result that is not at all in line with the position that this company holds in the market.

However, analysts say that the problem does not reside in the photorriving business; JSR’s bad economic results have been triggered by their subsidiary specialized in The development and manufacture of biopharmaceutical and medical diagnosis products. The new directive dome plans to sell a part of this division to the Japanese company Tokuyama Corp. for approximately 570 million dollars with the purpose of cleaning up its accounts. We will see what happens, but what does not admit discussion is that JSR has a leading role in Japan ambitions linked to the semiconductor industry.

More information | Reuters

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