A US subsidiary, and the 1992 merger that built the North American supply base (1987)

Until the same quality came out next door to the customer

Reading the 1987 move into the United States as an overseas shift forced by the strong yen and the semiconductor friction gets the order wrong. Exports were then about 3% of total sales — there was never enough export volume to be pushed out by anything. The core of this judgement lies in a supply pattern: holding a material that degrades easily close to the customer’s production line. The company proved that pattern at home first, and then extended it across the Pacific. Its prototype was the 1984 plan to divide Japan into a handful of blocks and deliver resist freshly made.

The extension did not, however, run to the drawing. T.O.K. International, set up in Oregon in 1989, was absorbed into Ohka America within three years, and the American structure had to be rebuilt once. Ten years passed between the first base and the point at which semiconductor photoresist could actually be made in Oregon. The wall of surrounding technology and environment that President Ito Takeo had worried about could not, it seems, be cleared merely by placing a company there. Going abroad turned out to be the work of making the same quality reproducible in another place.