Company history

In July 1960 Uchiyama Yasushi, twenty-nine, left Matsushita Communication Industrial and set up the Tokyo ITV Laboratory in Meguro, Tokyo. His conviction was speed: what a large company needed two years to develop, a small one could have ready in six months. He also had almost no capital — and so he settled on an arrangement that looked at the time like a concession to poverty. Hold no factory. Put every resource into development and leave manufacturing to partner firms. Sixty-five years later that fab-light structure is still the mechanism the company runs on.

The early work was subcontracting. X-ray diagnostic television cameras, sold through Matsushita under the National brand, took the leading share in Japan; industrial cameras were built to order. Uchiyama believed the one ability a manager most needs is the ability to choose which development themes to take on. Renamed Nihon Jido Seigyo in August 1963, the firm brought in Awamura Daikichi from the engineering department of the state telecom monopoly and developed some ten own-brand instruments for measuring magnetic tape.

That measurement expertise resurfaced in February 1975 as a photomask pinhole inspection system — the company’s entry into semiconductors — and in 1976 as 1MD1, the world’s first automatic photomask inspection system, which took the Okochi Memorial Technology Prize among other awards. By 1980 every product it sold was its own design, and the subcontracting era was over. In 1985 it built the world’s first scanning colour laser microscope, the instrument that would give the company its name.

In 1986 Nihon Jido Seigyo took the name Lasertec, and in December 1990 it registered its shares over the counter. Through the 1990s the semiconductor line deepened — the MPM100 phase-shift measurement system (1994), a world first that became the industry’s standard machine, and the MAGICS mask-blank defect inspection series (2000). Alongside it, a colour-filter inspection system developed for liquid-crystal panels in 1993 grew into a flat-panel display business worth roughly half of sales.

The founder did not see most of it. Uchiyama died suddenly in August 1992 at sixty-one, after thirty-two years of concentrating every major decision in himself; there was no succession plan. Awamura took over, and the pattern that followed — engineers promoted from inside, never the founding family — hardened into the company’s way of choosing leaders. The working principle Uchiyama left, make what does not exist in the world, outlived him because it lived in the products rather than in the man.

Two pillars looked, at the time, like textbook prudence: spread the bet across two growth markets. But semiconductors and displays ride the same capital-spending cycle, so the spread diversified nothing — and the colour-filter repair machines that anchored the display side demanded only a level of precision rivals could also reach, which meant price competition. The 2008 crash exposed both flaws at once. With no factory to absorb it, a fall in revenue runs straight to the bottom line, and in the year to June 2009 Lasertec posted a loss on sales of $91.9M (¥9bn) — the worst crisis in its history.

Okabayashi Osamu became the fifth president in July 2009, arriving from a foreign-capital career unlike any of his engineer predecessors, and within months decided to shrink the flat-panel business that made up about half of sales — keeping only the FPD mask inspection line, where technical differentiation was still possible. There were no plant closures and no impairment charges to argue over, because there were no plants. The structure that had begun as a sign of weakness is what made the retreat executable at all.

Everything freed up went into semiconductors. In 2011, with roughly a hundred employees and sales of $147.9M (¥12bn), Lasertec joined a national project under Japan’s NEDO and began developing, alone, inspection equipment for extreme ultraviolet lithography. EUV works by reflection, so transmission-based mask inspection could not be adapted to it; the large equipment makers, unable to size a market that did not yet exist, stayed out. A company this small could commit tens of billions of yen only because concentration had already become its whole strategy — and because its customers, the chipmakers, were telling its engineers directly that Lasertec might be the one firm that could do it.

In March 2017 Lasertec completed ABICS E120, the world’s first defect inspection system for EUV mask blanks; in June 2019 ACTIS A150 extended coverage to patterned EUV masks, giving it the entire EUV mask inspection flow. Since EUV lithography is indispensable to leading-edge chips, that made Lasertec an irreplaceable supplier to TSMC, Samsung Electronics and Intel — a position built on years of accumulated R&D and on the speed of decision that comes with having nothing to write off.

The numbers that followed have few parallels in Japanese manufacturing. Revenue rose from $91.9M (¥9bn) when Okabayashi arrived to roughly $1.7B (¥250bn) in fiscal 2024 — about twenty-nine times — with an operating margin near 48%, and for a period Lasertec was the most heavily traded stock on the Tokyo exchange by annual value. In 2022 it acquired a new development site, INOPA, for about $127.1M (¥17bn), and kept spending ahead of the next generation of inspection, on the reasoning that defects will only get smaller and stranger as devices shrink and go three-dimensional.

In July 2024 Okabayashi moved up to chairman after fifteen years as president and Sendoda Tetsuya, forty-seven, an engineer who had also run sales, took over with a six-year plan targeting ¥400–500 billion of revenue by the year to June 2030. It was a designed handover — the organisation’s answer to 1992, when the founder’s death left no plan at all. But the monopoly carries its own shape of risk: TSMC, Samsung and Intel together account for around 60% of sales, orders in fiscal 2024 fell by more than half to about $660.1M (¥100bn), and a twelve-year run of rising revenue came into doubt. A company that makes the only machine of its kind also depends on the only customers of theirs.