Company history

ULVAC was founded in August 1952 in Chuo-ku, Tokyo as Nippon Shinku Gijutsu — Japan Vacuum Engineering — on a sole-agency contract with the American NRC Equipment Corporation, with paid-in capital of $16,667 (¥6m) and one stated purpose: importing and selling vacuum apparatus. Japan then had none of the industries that now consume vacuum technology; it was a laboratory technique. And laboratory apparatus is specified job by job, so a firm that only resells cannot alter a machine to fit an order, cannot service it, and cannot supply its parts. Within three years the founders concluded that a specialist had to design and manufacture. The Omori plant began domestic production in 1955; the 1956 merger with the Toyo Seiki Vacuum Laboratory brought standard-product pumps and chemical apparatus at Amagasaki; vacuum metallurgy followed in 1961, and two subsidiaries in 1962 added materials and thermal-analysis instruments. Ten years after starting as a trading house, the company covered its own field end to end. The English name it chose — ULVAC, from “ULtimate in VACuum” — was a statement about how far it meant to push one technique.

In 1963 the founder-run firm was absorbed by Shinsei Sangyo, a corporation dating from 1929, while keeping the Nippon Shinku Gijutsu name: a postwar start-up buying financial standing and corporate seniority from a prewar shell. In 1968 the head office and its plant moved to Chigasaki, where the head office has stayed ever since. What followed abroad was a long run of joint ventures rather than wholly owned arms — Nippon Reliance with Reliance Electric and Hong Kong ULVAC in 1964, ULVAC North America in 1975, a cryopump venture with Helix Technology in 1981, ULVAC Taiwan and a surface-analysis venture with Perkin-Elmer in 1982, ULVAC GmbH in West Germany in 1987. Each partner supplied a technology ULVAC lacked, into an application of vacuum it already understood. In 1987 the English corporate name was unified as ULVAC JAPAN Ltd.

The turn came in May 1990 with a new plant at Fuji Susono in Shizuoka, built for semiconductor production equipment. The technology was not new to the company — Japan’s first ion implanter in 1974, the world’s first multi-chamber sputtering system in 1985, the vacuum exhaust system for the JT-60 fusion experiment in 1985 — but the scale of the customer was. Deposition and etching put vacuum at the core of a mass-production process, and a chipmaker’s capital budget is orders of magnitude larger than a laboratory’s. Fuji Susono was the factory that matched that order of magnitude, and from the mid-1990s it became the export base for Korea, Taiwan and China.

Semiconductor and display fabrication left Japan for Korea, Taiwan and China, and the equipment maker went with it. ULVAC KOREA opened in Seoul in May 1995 for semiconductor and flat-panel-display tools; a joint venture at Ningbo followed in September of the same year as the entry point into China; a customer-service centre in Singapore and an R&D centre at Hsinchu in Taiwan came in 1998. By its forty-fifth year the company had a presence in every market that mattered to it.

The name caught up last. Overseas the firm had traded as ULVAC since 1987, while its legal Japanese name was still the 1952 one. In July 2001 it was changed to ULVAC, Inc. — a company that now earned a rising share of its revenue abroad finally describing itself the way its customers already did. The other two moves of the period were of a piece with it: in December 2002 ULVAC bought out the American half of its 1982 surface-analysis venture, turning XPS, Auger and SIMS instruments from a sideline of the equipment business into a business of its own, and in July 2003 it opened a manufacturing subsidiary at Suzhou to serve Chinese demand from inside China.

In April 2004, fifty-two years after founding and three years after the renaming, ULVAC listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

The money raised at the listing did not sit on the balance sheet. Roughly $197.9M (¥21bn) from four share issues turned into plant and product lines: the FPD equipment business bought from Fujitsu VLSI in 2005, the Litrex inkjet operation acquired from Britain’s Cambridge Display Technology, an assembly company in Taiwan, 70% of the precision-stage maker Sigma Technos in 2006, the Aichi plant that same year, a branch in India in 2007, a sputtering-target materials plant at Suzhou in 2009. Thin-film solar was added on the same logic — a complete production line delivered with technical guidance to Taiwan’s NexPower, and joint development of mass-production technology with Showa Shell Sekiyu at Atsugi. Consolidated sales rose from $1.5B (¥158bn) in the year to June 2004 to $2.3B (¥241bn) in the year to June 2008.

Then the same assets turned around. In January 2010 paid-in capital was lifted by $84.3M (¥7bn) to shore up the balance sheet after the financial crisis; two years later, in the year ended June 2012, sales had fallen to $2.5B (¥197bn) and the company booked a net loss of $626.4M (¥50bn) — enough to consume in a single year rather more than the capital it had just added. Equipment orders had stopped, and the capacity built for them remained as fixed cost. The equity ratio fell to 14.8% and was propped up with $188M (¥15bn) of preferred shares.

What followed was described in the securities reports as the first restructuring in the company’s sixty years: a tenth of the domestic group’s headcount, the equipment business for large television panels, unprofitable materials lines and peripheral subsidiaries, all cut, with more than $307.4M (¥30bn) of extraordinary losses absorbed across two years. By the year to June 2014 net profit was back to $108.7M (¥12bn). Less visibly, 2012 — the year of the cuts — was also the year a customer asked ULVAC to develop equipment for a step in advanced logic manufacturing that no one had yet solved.

Chinese semiconductor investment produced the best years in the company’s history. Sales climbed from $1.8B (¥192bn) in the year to June 2016 to $2.3B (¥249bn) two years later, with operating profit of $320.7M (¥35bn) — a record on both lines. The 1995 Ningbo venture and the 2003 Suzhou plant took the capital spending of SMIC, YMTC and CXMT directly. Then the cycle turned again: by the year to June 2020 sales were $1.7B (¥185bn) and operating profit $149.8M (¥16bn), down a quarter and more than half respectively from the peak in two years. The swing is the shape of the equipment business.

Iwata Setsuo, president from 2016, chose not to fund that downturn out of research. The vacuum-applications segment — materials, components and service — absorbed part of the swing with steadier earnings, and development spending on silicon-carbide power devices, EV batteries and OLED equipment was held through the trough; a subsidiary at Hefei was added in 2018 to supply FPD mask-blank material inside China. The clearest return on that policy was the logic project begun in 2012. It had been hard going — ULVAC had a record in memory equipment but was late to logic, and, in Iwata’s account, a customer executive told the company the programme would be terminated if it did not deliver. The development team was placed under the president directly and a leader dispatched to an overseas site. After about six years it produced, in 2018, equipment for the metal hard mask step required by EUV-era logic manufacturing — the only such tool in commercial use anywhere. Logic went from about a fifth of orders in the year to June 2019 toward nearly half by the year to June 2022.

In the year to June 2025 ULVAC reported sales of $1.7B (¥251bn), split between vacuum equipment at $1.3B (¥199bn) and vacuum applications at $348.1M (¥52bn); more than 80% of revenue comes from outside Japan, chiefly the semiconductor and display industries of China, Korea, Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Seventy years after it started importing other people’s apparatus, the design is unchanged in principle: let a cyclical equipment business swing, let materials and service steady it, and never stop developing the next tool at the bottom of the cycle.