Company history

SCREEN began in 1868, in the first months after the Meiji Restoration, as a small Kyoto copperplate-printing shop — Ishida Kyokuzan Printing, founded by Ishida Saijiro to serve the sudden demand for type and print. The workshop refined its craft and by 1918 was supplying its own proprietary Ishida-brand film to printers at home and abroad. But the second-generation head, Ishida Keizo, looked at the 1920s spread of photographic printing and concluded that a business built on copperplate engraving had no future. The precision part of photographic printing — the glass screen — was imported in its entirety, and the etching it demanded was finer than anything Japanese industry could then achieve; from the moment Keizo began his own research in 1926, the work stretched on through years of trial and error.

It took eight years. In 1934 the company developed, on its own, an “etching method for halftone screens for photoengraving,” took out the patent, and won a ¥7,000 industrial-research grant from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry — a public vote of confidence in the technology’s promise. To industrialize it, it set up Dainippon Screen Manufacturing in 1937, though establishing stable mass production proved so hard that roughly twenty years passed between the decision to enter and a working line. In 1943 the operation was reorganized as a joint-stock company and began supplying glass screens for military use. That precision-etching skill — chemically cutting an exact image — is the single thread that runs, unbroken, from prewar photoengraving through television shadow masks to semiconductor equipment, tying more than 150 years of company history to one technical axis.

After the war, Dainippon Screen rebuilt around photoengraving equipment and grew with the modernization of Japan’s printing industry. It opened the Horikawa plant in Kyoto in 1953 — the site of today’s head office — and listed on the Osaka Securities Exchange in 1962. Then, in 1963, it began co-developing color-television shadow masks with Sony, carrying its etching skill into precision components for consumer electronics — the first proof, as a business, that the technology of photoengraving could be transplanted. Shadow masks were indispensable to the color CRT, and Dainippon Screen expanded alongside Sony’s television sales. Copperplate printing to photoengraving to television parts was not scattershot diversification but a continuous evolution held together by one craft — and the leap into semiconductors would sit on the same line.

In 1975 Dainippon Screen developed a wafer etching machine — a wet-etching tool — and began serving the semiconductor industry, starting its transformation from a printing-equipment maker into a maker of semiconductor production equipment. The three base skills it had accumulated in photoengraving — positioning, coating and surface treatment — transferred straight across to semiconductor tools, so its barrier to entry was low relative to the integrated-electronics giants also crowding in. It productized the EMW-322/411 cleaning tools in 1977 and followed with spin coaters and spin developers in 1978, quickly building a supply record inside chipmakers’ production lines.

The shift showed in the numbers. Capital spending more than quadrupled between the late 1970s and 1980 as resources were steered into semiconductor equipment, and sales grew more than sixfold across the decade to 1983. In 1994 sales of electronics equipment overtook printing equipment — the point at which the semiconductor business displaced the founding trade as the company’s mainstay. Crucially, the whole crossing was self-funded: profits earned in printing were recycled into semiconductor R&D, so the pillar of the business was swapped without recourse to outside capital. While the integrated-electronics makers who had entered alongside it struggled to make their equipment arms pay, Dainippon Screen’s ability to bankroll its own research out of the legacy business became, in the end, a source of competitive strength.

By the early 1990s it held about 22% of the cleaning-equipment market and led it, but the field was crowded with mid-size rivals, and Tokyo Electron entered in 1993. President Ishida Akira judged that the coming 300-millimeter wafer standard would decide the industry’s whole structure. In 1997 the company announced the batch-cleaning FC-3000, and in 1998 it committed $140.6M (¥18bn) to a new plant at Taga — a forward bet on first-mover position, made just as a silicon-cycle downturn was becoming real and drawing doubts inside and outside the company. The downturn duly arrived: for fiscal 1998 Dainippon Screen sank to an operating loss of $100.1M (¥13bn) and a still larger net loss. Ishida kept investing anyway, and in 2001 it opened Fab.FC-1 at Hikone and began full volume production of 300-millimeter cleaning equipment. It was the only cleaning-equipment maker able to build a dedicated 300-millimeter mass-production plant; as the weaker mid-size firms fell away, the oligopoly closed — and the downturn bet had rewritten the competitive map in its favor.

With the 300-millimeter gamble paying off, Dainippon Screen made semiconductor cleaning its core and reorganized to concentrate resources there. In 2002 it split off the printing-equipment business, cutting its centuries-old founding trade loose from the parent so the company could focus on semiconductor tools. It expanded capacity at Hikone through the 2000s, and though the 2008 financial crisis pushed it back into a net loss, results recovered quickly as chip demand returned. Eiji Kakiuchi, who led the move to a holding structure, later reflected that what had pulled the company through its crises was human ties — turning yesterday’s enemies into friends — and that a business whose core had shifted from printing to CRTs to semiconductors survives by never forgetting the lessons of the past and continuing to try, even when innovation erases the very trade it lives on.

In October 2014 it renamed itself SCREEN Holdings Co., Ltd. and moved to a holding-company structure, parceling its semiconductor, graphic-arts, display-manufacturing and printed-circuit-board businesses out to operating subsidiaries. By 2022 it held roughly 48% of the world market in batch cleaning and 33% in single-wafer cleaning — the oligopoly Ishida’s late-1990s forward investment had set in motion, now fully realized as the 300-millimeter era arrived and the $140.6M (¥18bn) bet was recouped many times over. In the year ended March 2024 the company reached record results, sealing its place as the winner of the shakeout. From 1868 copperplate printing through prewar glass etching, postwar shadow masks and, from 1975, semiconductor equipment, roughly 150 years of moving one craft into successive markets had held to a single axis: chemically processing a precise image. President Toshio Hiroe, appointed in 2019, framed the goal as a tougher group built around that accumulated equipment expertise.

The company that had swapped its businesses out of its own pocket — printing profits into semiconductor equipment, never leaning on outside capital — reached a turning point in 2024, when for the first time it set a policy of returning at least 30% of consolidated profit as dividends. It split its stock two-for-one that year, carried out a buyback of up to four million shares in 2025, and lifted the annual dividend to a record $2 (¥308). The pivot redirects the cash piled up by the semiconductor boom away from reinvestment alone and toward shareholder returns.

Yet the reinvestment reflex has not gone. The medium-term plan “Value Up Further 2026” holds up a one-trillion-yen revenue target for the coming decade and rests on doing both at once — expanding capacity and returning cash. For a maker whose fortunes rise and fall with the silicon cycle, that is the standing test: to build ahead of the peak without being crushed by fixed costs when the wave recedes.