SCREEN Holdings

Full briefing

SCREEN Holdings Co., Ltd. (TSE: 7735) is headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, and is one of the world's leading manufacturers of wafer cleaning and surface treatment equipment. Founded in 1943 as Dainippon Screen Manufacturing, the company rebranded as SCREEN Holdings in 2014. Its semiconductor equipment division competes primarily with TEL (Tokyo Electron), DNS (Dainippon Screen's spin-off), and to a lesser extent SEMES (Samsung subsidiary) in the wafer cleaning space. Wafer cleaning is one of the most frequently performed operations in semiconductor fabrication. A modern advanced logic chip requires over 1,000 individual process steps, of which approximately 30–40% involve a cleaning or surface preparation step. Cleaning removes particles, organic residues, metallic contaminants, and native oxides between each deposition, etch, or implant step to prevent defects from accumulating. SCREEN's flagship product lines include the SU-3200 single-wafer spin cleaner and CELLESTA batch immersion systems. The single-wafer approach — where one wafer is processed at a time in a rotating chamber with chemical and deionized water sprays — dominates at leading-edge nodes where particle budgets are extremely tight. Batch systems remain cost-effective for mature nodes. The company's equipment uses high-purity quartz process tubes and tanks, linking SCREEN directly to the Spruce Pine quartz supply chain. Japan's export control regulations (FEFTA/Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act) classify SCREEN's advanced cleaning tools as controlled items requiring government licenses for export to certain destinations, including China. SCREEN has manufacturing and service centers across Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and the US, with deep integration into the preventive maintenance and process recipe ecosystems of its major customers — creating high switching costs that reinforce its market position.