Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd.
Chemicals
Shin-Etsu is the rare company that dominates two industries most people have never heard of. Founded in 1926 in the Shin-Etsu region of Japan, it is the world's largest producer of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) — the plastic in pipes, window frames, and cable insulation — and also the world's largest supplier of silicon wafers, the thin discs on which every semiconductor chip is built. Roughly one in every three wafers in the world comes from Shin-Etsu.
The silicon wafer business is the crown jewel: making a perfect single-crystal silicon ingot and slicing it into flawless wafers is one of manufacturing's hardest tasks, and Shin-Etsu's yields and quality make it the indispensable supplier to TSMC, Samsung, and Intel. Its PVC business, meanwhile, is built on proprietary technologies that give it cost advantages competitors have spent decades trying to match. The company also makes synthetic quartz, rare earth magnets, and photoresist materials.
With about 25,000 employees and annual revenue near ¥2.4 trillion, Shin-Etsu is famous for its extraordinarily conservative balance sheet — it holds massive cash reserves and avoids debt, yet consistently posts some of the highest profit margins in the chemical industry. For the semiconductor world, Shin-Etsu is the quiet monopoly underneath every chip that gets made.
