Japan's Chip Stocks: Who Makes What

Japan has few companies that make chips, but many that chipmakers depend on. The Japan map on Pacific Tape shows 22 Tokyo-listed chip stocks, taken from Japanese semiconductor indexes and keeping companies whose main business is chips. Nineteen of them sell machines or materials to chipmakers. Only three, Kioxia, Renesas Electronics and Rohm, make chips themselves.

On October 28, 2026, the 22 added up to US$735 billion. Equipment makers were 56% of that, Kioxia 20%, materials suppliers 17%, and Renesas and Rohm 6%.

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Where does each company fit?

Read across a chip’s life, from the bare wafer to the finished package:

Stage	What happens	Japan map companies
Wafers	Pure silicon wafers are made	Shin-Etsu Chemical, SUMCO
Patterning	Masks are checked, light-sensitive films are coated and exposed	Lasertec (mask inspection), Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and Shin-Etsu (photoresists), Nissan Chemical (anti-reflective coatings), Tokyo Electron (coat and develop)
Building layers	Films are deposited and etched, wafers cleaned	Tokyo Electron, Kokusai Electric, SCREEN Holdings, JX Advanced Metals (sputtering targets for wiring)
Inside the tools	Parts and controls that the machines use	Horiba (gas flow control), Rorze (wafer-handling robots), Ferrotec (quartz, ceramics and vacuum seals)
Testing on the wafer	Each chip is probed before it is cut	Tokyo Seimitsu, Micronics Japan (probe cards), Advantest (testers)
Cutting and packaging	Wafers are thinned and cut, chips sealed and mounted	Disco, Tokyo Seimitsu, Sumitomo Bakelite (molding compounds), Taiyo Holdings (solder resist for circuit boards)
Chips	Memory, microcontrollers and power chips	Kioxia, Renesas Electronics, Rohm

Dexerials, the 22nd, makes adhesive films used to mount chips in displays and camera modules; it has no semiconductor segment of its own.

The equipment makers

The two largest, Advantest and Tokyo Electron, are covered in Chip Equipment Makers: Advantest makes testers, and Tokyo Electron makes deposition, coat-and-develop, etch and cleaning tools. The rest are more specialized:

• Disco sells dicing saws, laser saws, grinders and polishers, and the blades and wheels they use, to cut wafers into chips and thin them. Net sales were ¥436.9 billion in the fiscal year ended March 2026, all in one precision-processing segment.
• Lasertec describes its “EUV mask blank inspection systems” as “regarded as the de facto industry standard.” Sales of semiconductor-related products were ¥168.1 billion of its ¥230.5 billion in the year ended June 2026.
• SCREEN Holdings says it provides “cleaning equipment with the world’s top market share”; its results presentation ranks it first in three kinds of cleaning tools for 2025, based on Gartner data. Semiconductor production equipment was ¥486.0 billion of its ¥605.7 billion in the year ended March 2026.
• Kokusai Electric makes batch deposition tools that process many wafers at once, and says it “achieved the top market share in the batch deposition equipment market in CY25,” from its own calculation on Gartner data.
• Horiba makes mass flow controllers that meter the gases used in deposition and etching, and puts its share at about 60% by its own research. Its Materials & Semiconductor segment had ¥156.5 billion of ¥333.1 billion in 2025.
• Rorze makes the robots and transfer units that move wafers into process and inspection tools; chip-related sales were 83% of the year ended February 2026.
• Tokyo Seimitsu offers “probing machines to test the electrical characteristics of chips on wafers, dicing machines to separate individual chips from wafers, and grinders to make wafers thinner and flatter.”
• Micronics Japan makes probe cards, which it says are “mainly used for memory testing on DRAM and flash memory.”

The materials suppliers

• Shin-Etsu Chemical produces “silicon wafers, a key semiconductor material, as well as photoresists, photomask blanks, and encapsulating materials.” Its electronics materials segment was about 40% of its ¥2.57 trillion in sales in the year ended March 2026.
• SUMCO makes only silicon wafers for chips. Its 2025 net sales were ¥409.7 billion.
• Tokyo Ohka Kogyo (TOK) makes photoresists, the light-sensitive coatings that carry the circuit pattern, and high-purity chemicals. It says it has the top global share in chip photoresists, citing Fuji Chimera Research.
• JX Advanced Metals makes sputtering targets, “used to form wiring within semiconductors,” and cites Fuji Keizai for a global share of about 64%.
• Nissan Chemical makes anti-reflective coatings for lithography under license from Brewer Science, and underlayers for EUV resists.
• Sumitomo Bakelite makes the epoxy compounds that seal chips in their packages, and puts its share at around 40% by in-house research.
• Taiyo Holdings makes solder resist, the protective ink on circuit boards. Its board backed a tender offer by a KKR-backed company in March 2026, which Taiyo said on October 9 is expected to start around late November 2026.
• Ferrotec supplies quartz, ceramics, vacuum seals and other parts for chip equipment, about ¥185.1 billion of its ¥288.9 billion in sales in the year ended March 2026.

The chipmakers

Kioxia makes NAND flash memory. “Kioxia invented NAND flash memory in 1987,” it says, and it runs its Yokkaichi and Kitakami plants jointly with Sandisk. Revenue was ¥2.34 trillion in the year ended March 2026. Kioxia Outside Japan covers its Tokyo shares and US receipts, and Who Makes What in Memory puts it next to Samsung Electronics, SK hynix, Micron and Sandisk.

Renesas Electronics “mainly supplies MCUs (microcontrollers), SoC (System-On-Chip), analog semiconductor devices and power semiconductor devices.” Its 2025 revenue was ¥1.32 trillion, about half from cars. Rohm “focuses primarily on power and analog semiconductors,” and cars are its largest market; it posted a net loss of ¥158.4 billion in the year ended March 2026 after write-downs in its silicon carbide business.

When do they report?

Most of the 22 end their fiscal year in March and report July-to-September results from late October to mid-November. The exceptions: Horiba, Micronics Japan, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, SUMCO and Renesas end in December, Lasertec in June, and Rorze in February, while Ferrotec is moving its year-end from March to December. Dates the companies have posted for this season:

Date	Company
October 29	Renesas Electronics
October 30	Tokyo Electron, SCREEN Holdings, Kioxia
November 4	Tokyo Seimitsu, Sumitomo Bakelite
November 5	Rohm
November 6	Taiyo Holdings
November 9	JX Advanced Metals, Nissan Chemical
November 10	Tokyo Ohka Kogyo
November 12	Micronics Japan
November 16	Ferrotec

Disco (October 22), Shin-Etsu Chemical (October 27) and Advantest (October 28) had already reported.

How do these stocks fit with the indexes?

Advantest and Tokyo Electron made up about 21% of the Nikkei 225 on September 30, 2026, but about 4% of TOPIX, so chip stocks move the two indexes very differently; Nikkei 225 vs TOPIX explains the difference. For buying them from outside Japan, see How to Buy Japanese Chip Stocks.