Entering polysilicon and fumed silica (1981)

An entry with the deadline fixed first

The opening scale — 200 tonnes a year of polysilicon — says a good deal about the character of this entry. The proposal came not from a business division but from the planning department, and Murakami Shoji pointed at inorganic polysilicon while openly admitting that his own field was organic chemistry and that the theme did not lie there. All the company had to hand was a byproduct feedstock and the purification experience accumulated on soda. Even so it fixed a deadline of two and a half years before anything else, choosing speed over completeness — which conveys how urgently it wanted out of resource-intensive products.

The entry did not produce only good outcomes. Aluminium nitride, commercialised in the same period, stayed stuck in narrow applications and ran below cost for long enough to be called a burden inside the company. Polysilicon itself, once volume was pursued in commodity grade through the Malaysian investment from 2009, ended in withdrawal. What was chosen in 1984 was the single point of high purity; which applications to serve, and how far to chase volume, is a question later managements have had to answer again and again. The choice made at entry did not settle the forks that followed.