Rorze - Company History

Sakitani Fumio was born in 1945 to a farming family in Ibara, Okayama, fixed radios as a schoolboy, and never left electrical circuits. He dropped out of engineering school, developed a marine Loran receiver in Tokyo, and at 28 came home to work his way through the local semiconductor industry — eight employers in all, covering both front-end and back-end processes, ending as a development manager at Tatsumo. In March 1985, at 40, he set up Rorze in Fukuyama with $41,923 (¥10m) of capital to make motor-control equipment. Neither a semiconductor cluster nor a startup hub, Fukuyama made Rorze an independent from nowhere in particular. The name comes from Lhotse, the 8,516 m peak that adjoins Everest — the mountain that makes Everest look impressive: a company meant to hold up the world’s leading firms from underneath.

The founding rule was severe. Nothing that competitors already sell; only products that would be news worldwide. A stepper-motor driver came in September 1985, an ultra-compact controller in May 1986, and in December 1986 the product that made the company: a clean robot for handling wafers. In semiconductor fabrication, a particle smaller than cigarette smoke ruins a die, so wafers must move without human hands and without shedding dust. Rorze packed its own driver and controller into one twentieth of the volume of rival units, made the electrical and mechanical sections replaceable as a single block, and sealed the arm’s rotating joint with magnetic fluid to stop dust escaping. Customers measured mean time between failures at over eight years.

The first two years lost money on sales of about ¥60 million; the clean robot doubled revenue to ¥130 million in the year to February 1988 as equipment makers adopted it. Cash was precarious throughout — when the Tokyo businessman who had guaranteed a ¥100 million bank loan went bankrupt in 1987, the loan survived only because a banker who believed in Sakitani valued his father’s farmland to the last yen. Rorze demanded payment in advance in return for world-class specifications, took venture-capital money that eventually amounted to a roughly 40% holding, and widened its range: vacuum clean robots in 1989, dual-arm in 1992, then large glass substrates for flat panels from 1993 — a field customers pulled it into, since some 80% of LCD production trouble occurred in substrate handling. In 1996 it went abroad in a single year — Singapore, Hsinchu, California, and in October a factory in Haiphong, Vietnam — and in December 1997 registered its shares over the counter, twelve years after founding.

The Vietnamese plant was the structural decision. Sakitani had compared China and Vietnam and chosen the latter for a workforce that kept delivery dates and for aluminium among the cheapest anywhere; design and sales stayed in Fukuyama, volume manufacturing moved to Haiphong. What that split bought was not merely lower cost but a cost base low enough to survive the violent swings of semiconductor capital spending — the condition on which everything Rorze did afterwards depended.

The rest of the decade was spent following the industry’s generations. A carrier stock station for 300 mm wafers arrived in July 2000 as the industry moved up from 200 mm; a Kyushu plant opened that November, giving three manufacturing sites across Vietnam, Kyushu and Fukuyama. The Korean subsidiary listed on KOSDAQ in November 2003, Rorze itself moved up to the JASDAQ exchange in December 2004, and a Shanghai subsidiary followed in 2008.

Sakitani also tried to build a cluster around himself. A Saturday study group started in the company canteen in 1992 became BISTEC, an association of 34 local firms and individuals founded in September 1993 with him as chairman, aimed at growing semiconductor skills in a region known for textiles and machinery. Business tracked the boom: revenue rose from ¥6.6 billion in the year to February 2002 to $131.6M (¥14bn) in the year to February 2008, with recurring profit of $17.4M (¥2bn).

Lehman hit Rorze where it was thinnest. Revenue fell from $131.6M (¥14bn) in the year to February 2008 to ¥8.4 billion a year later and then to $41M (¥4bn) in the year to February 2010, with a recurring loss of $11.4M (¥1bn) — the worst collapse in the company’s history. When chipmakers stop investing simultaneously, orders for the robots built into their equipment stop simultaneously too, and there was almost nothing else to hold the revenue line: Rorze sold machines and, for the most part, that was the end of the transaction. The weakness of a build-and-deliver model with little service or consumables income was now on the record.

Recovery was slow and repeatedly interrupted. Revenue came back to ¥11.0 billion in the year to February 2011, then sagged through ¥10.3 billion and ¥9.4 billion before reaching ¥14.2 billion in the year to February 2014 — the one-to-two-year oscillation that is the natural rhythm of semiconductor equipment. What blunted it, gradually, was the Vietnamese cost base and a slowly widening base of maintenance and consumables revenue. Sakitani, president since 1985, ran the company through the whole of the downturn; as the thirtieth anniversary approached, the question was who would take it next.

In May 2015 Sakitani moved up to chairman and Fujishiro Yoshiyuki — born in 1980, joined in 2006, head of software solutions by 2009 — became president. He is Sakitani’s son-in-law, an unusual line of succession for an owner-founded venture, and the handover was staged: the founder retired to adviser in 2017. The market caught up quickly. Revenue reached ¥19.9 billion in the year to February 2016 and ¥24.7 billion the year after; Rorze moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Second Section in January 2016 and was designated to the First Section that August, nineteen years after its over-the-counter registration.

Fujishiro pushed the company’s clean-handling and precision-control skills into medicine — a cell-culture device in 2015, an automated CO2 incubator in 2016, and in March 2017 a Tsukuba affiliate taken over outright and renamed Rorze Lifescience. It was a genuinely small start: under 1% of consolidated revenue in the year to February 2018. Meanwhile the core business kept swinging with the cycle — ¥52.2 billion in the year to February 2018, up 2.1 times, then ¥31.4 billion the next year, down 40% — while the manufacturing footprint spread to a second Vietnamese site in Bac Ninh in 2017 and a European base in Saxony in 2019.

Then the AI and advanced-node build-out arrived, and Rorze took all of it. Revenue climbed from ¥37.1 billion in the year to February 2020 through ¥50.8 billion, ¥67.0 billion and ¥94.5 billion, with an operating margin of 28% in the year to February 2023; after a pause it reached a record $831.3M (¥124bn) in the year to February 2025, with operating profit of $213.8M (¥32bn). With that money Fujishiro bought adjacencies — the wafer-cleaning maker EIAS in March 2023, Nanoverse Technologies in the US and the research-services firm Genostaff in 2024 — four acquisitions in all since entering life science. The ownership remains what it was: at February 2025 Sakitani personally held 35.12% of the shares, alongside trust banks and institutions in the ranks below. The company is more concentrated than it looks in another sense too — of 4,402 consolidated employees, 3,063 are in Haiphong and 244 at the Fukuyama parent.