JSR Bounces Back After Two Years Off Market, CEO Shares Strategic Vision
- JSR delisted in 2024 after being acquired by a government fund for approximately 900 billion yen.
- Revenue for the fiscal year ending March 2026 reached 440.7 billion yen, up 13% from the previous year.
- Operating profit turned positive at 40.5 billion yen, reversing a 20.44 billion yen loss the prior year.
- CEO Tetsuro Hori joined JSR in January 2025, previously serving as CFO at Tokyo Electron.
- The company expresses strong confidence in its resist materials for next-generation semiconductor processes.
JSR may be an unfamiliar name to Taiwanese readers, but you use what it makes every day, indirectly: it is an indispensable supplier of the photoresist materials that go into the world's advanced-node chips, and Taiwan sits at the core of that supply chain. This interview is worth reading not just because one company staged a V-shaped recovery, but because it demonstrates Japan's playbook of a government fund buying out a strategic-materials maker, restructuring it, and relisting.
Start with the numbers. In the fiscal year ended March 2026, JSR posted revenue of 440.7 billion yen, up 13%, and operating profit of 40.5 billion yen, versus an operating loss of 204.4 billion yen the prior year, a genuine V-shaped turn driven by generative-AI demand for high-end resists used in advanced processes. In 2024, the public-private Japan Investment Corporation (JIC) acquired JSR for about 900 billion yen and took it private. Current president Tetsuro Hori joined in January 2025 and took the role in April, having previously served as CFO of chip-equipment giant Tokyo Electron.
Threaded together, Japan's calculation is visible: temporarily take private a firm that controls key materials but is underpriced in the market, install a leader fluent in semiconductor capital operations, use the AI cycle to fix the balance sheet, and relist when the timing is right. The president himself named the hard parts: the LBO loan burden, portfolio restructuring, and the timing and pricing of a relisting.
Two practical takeaways for Taiwanese readers: advanced-node bottlenecks are never only in foundries; upstream resists and specialty chemicals matter just as much, so JSR's turnaround belongs on chip investors' radar. And if this "national-team take-private, restructure, relist" model works, it becomes a template other Japanese strategic industries will copy. Watch JSR's relisting timeline and pricing, and the ramp of leading-edge resists.
