Entering semiconductor dry vacuum pumps, and CMP tools (1987)

The order in which it took on a field not its own

When Ebara reached for CMP tools in 1992, it was not trying to make itself an equipment maker. Having earned trust with vacuum pumps, it was told by a customer that it might as well try the production equipment too, and that, Nambu Isao has said, is where the business began. The change from a company that supplies parts into a company that sells equipment was one Ebara took on at a customer’s request rather than as a design of its own. Internally, semiconductors were ranked behind the environment business; this decision was not carrying the company’s name on it.

The load on the party that accepted it, however, was not light. The scheme of combining the polishing and cleaning sections into one unit was opposed even by the sales department, and for a long stretch the company ground up and threw away wafers worth $632 (¥80,000) apiece; fourteen years passed between entry and the standing of a volume production site in Kumamoto. Most of the corporate projects of the 1980s did not survive as businesses, and CMP tools were the exception. That a business begun because a customer asked for it became the largest source of profit thirty years later is the result of enduring for more than a decade after being asked, and has to be read separately from the merits of the decision to enter.