The world’s most advanced and delicately fine-tuned semiconductors wouldn’t be possible without the aid of giant steel storage tanks built by a little-known Tokyo company founded in 1927.
Valqua makes specialized, superclean containers for storing essential chipmaking chemicals, and it expects to hit its highest sales ever this fiscal year. It’s by far the world’s largest supplier of such tanks, dwarfing a clutch of smaller competitors in places like Taiwan, and providing almost every tank used by the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., according to Ichiyoshi Research Institute analyst Mitsuhiro Osawa.
Valqua is part of a loose network of Japanese manufacturers that dominate a niche but indispensable segment of the global chip supply chain. Disco, for instance, is the industry’s go-to supplier of silicon wafer cutters, while JSR provides the high-purity chemicals that Valqua stores at chip plants.