Tokyo Electron to Invest 1.5 Trillion Yen and Recruit 10,000 Employees for Semiconductor Expansion
TapTechNews July 1st, according to Taiwan media Economic Daily, Hideaki Jinbara, president of TEL Miyagi subsidiary of Tokyo Electron, recently stated that the company will invest 1.5 trillion yen (TapTechNews note: currently about 67.983 billion RMB) in the fiscal years 2025 to 2029 and recruit an additional 10,000 employees.
This large-scale investment of Tokyo Electron aims to become the world's largest semiconductor equipment manufacturer, and the amount of 1.5 trillion yen is 1.8 times that of Tokyo Electron's last five-year cycle investment.
The fiscal year cycle of Tokyo Electron is from the previous calendar year April to the current calendar year March. Its semiconductor manufacturing equipment sales in the fiscal year 2024 are 1.8305 trillion yen (currently about 8.2962 billion RMB), and it currently has 18,236 employees.
Tokyo Electron claims to be the world's fourth-largest semiconductor equipment manufacturer, after ASML (annual revenue in 2023 is about 217.178 billion RMB), Applied Materials (annual revenue in 2023 is about 193.079 billion RMB), and Lam Research.
From a detailed classification perspective, Tokyo Electron is the global market share leader in coating, developing, gas chemical etching, diffusion furnaces, and batch deposition equipment, and also the market share second in cleaning, plasma etching, metal film deposition, and prober stations.
Among them, Tokyo Electron has a complete monopoly in high-directional plasma (plasma) etching equipment that is配套 with ASML's High-NA EUV lithography machine, and its prober station is also a key equipment for advanced packaging such as CoWoS and co-packaged optical CPO.
At present, the rapid development of generative AI servers, the increased demand for related logic and memory chips, has led wafer fabs to place additional orders to equipment manufacturers such as Tokyo Electron, and the revenue of AI application-related equipment has reached 30% of Tokyo Electron's overall sales.
In addition, the global digital transformation is accelerating and the semiconductor manufacturing process miniaturization continues. These factors jointly give Tokyo Electron the confidence to actively expand its operating scale to meet customer needs.
Tokyo Electron Miyagi subsidiary has the world's largest plasma etching equipment manufacturing base, and also produces coating and developing equipment used in Samsung Electronics' 3nm and TSMC's 2nm processes, and is starting to develop coating and developing equipment at the sub-1nm level.
The subsidiary is also building a third R & D center, which is expected to be completed and put into use in the spring of 2025.