“The market for electronics gas and equipment in Japan in 2012 saw a rapid succession of selloffs by semiconductor and liquid crystal producers, as well as financial tie-ups with foreign companies. There was also a continuation of the status of the appreciated yen. (The value of the yen remained high too.) Due to this production lines were consolidated or shut down, resulting in a decrease of 10% in the demand for gas and 30% for gas related equipment.

As part of this business, electronics materials gas and gas related equipment are exported to countries such as Korea, Taiwan by trading companies. Because this accounts for a quite high ratio of 70-80% of the business, when it comes to use in Japan there was a drop of 20% for gas and a huge drop of 50% for equipment.

In February of 2012 Elpida Memory filled a petition under the Corporate Rehabilitation Law, effectively going bankrupt. In May of this year its plan for restructuring was approved but the company wound up completely under the auspices of the US firm Micron. In July, Sharp sold off its Sakai plant to Hon Hai (better known as Foxconn) of Taiwan, reemerging as Sakai Display Products. It was removed from the Sharp consolidated statement. In April of this year Fujitsu sold off is Microcontroller and Analog Business to Spansion. With this, and in addition to Sanyo Semiconductors which was sold to On Semiconductor, former major plants have been transferred to foreign capital. Also, Iwate Fujitsu was sold to Denso and Renesas Northern Japan Semiconductor to Fuji Electric. Hitachi, NEC, and Fujitsu have basically disappeared from the semiconductor industry. Semiconductors and LCDs in Japan, rather than being the targets of capital investment, are experiencing consolidation and shutdowns one after another. This has dealt a direct blow to the electronics gas market. This has had a great effect in that nitrogen onsite facilities are being removed or reduced in scale in rapid succession, while installation of gas related facilities is being lost. What has been hardest hit in the electronics materials gas business is silane (SiH6). Simultaneous production of large LCDs and thin film silicon solar cells at the Sharp plant in Sakai has vanished, so that the initial demand on the order of 1,000 tons of SiH6 a year has also disappeared. This is because liquid crystals succumbed to Korea and China while PV power generation went over to crystalline solar cells. Because of this, in September of last year Taiyo Nippon Sanso was compelled to withdraw from the SiH6 joint venture it had with Evoniks. It is not only Japan which has been at the mercy of these moves. This situation has also reached US and Korean SiH6 producers.

In 2013, the Taiwanese firm TSMC has been actively engaged in capital investment, while the Korean firm Samsung Electronics is moving along with the construction of a new plant in Xian, China so that some signs of recovery have been visible for a while now. For liquid crystals, production of the small size types for use with smartphones is moving along nicely. For semiconductors, including MEMS, there is small production for a large number of products but in terms of production it appears that the bottom has been reached.”