Entering semiconductor equipment by repurposing photoengraving (1975)

Re-seeing the company as a combination of technologies, not products

The core of this decision was not retreat or retrenchment in the face of crisis, but aiming the technology already in hand at a different industry. In a year when a plateauing printing market and the oil shock had pushed the core business into the red, Dainippon Screen Manufacturing pointed the positioning, coating and surface-treatment skills honed in photoengraving toward the semiconductor manufacturing process then coming into being. Entering semiconductors looked like a leap in terms of products, but in terms of the technology inside it was continuous ground. Ishida Tokujiro’s reading — that even if the company could not beat the specialists head-on, it could win through the power of integration, of bringing its accumulated skills together — was a way of re-grasping its own strengths not by the names of products but by a combination of technologies.

That said, it took close to twenty years for this shift to bear fruit, and along the way came the boom-and-bust swings peculiar to semiconductors. It was largely because the company could keep channeling the profits earned by its legacy photoengraving machines into the new business that it could swap the pillar of its business without relying on outside capital. Raising the next pillar in a different industry while the existing business is still turning a profit — the 1975 entry offers one answer to the question of how a company with a mature core business should seed a new one. Layered onto it is this company’s generational experience that even when the words “photoengraving” disappear, the technology survives.