Mitsui Chemicals Seals ¥1.84 Trillion Deal to Buy Photoresist Maker JSR and Build a Chip Materials Giant

Mitsui Chemicals agreed on Monday, November 9, 2026, to buy JSR, one of the world’s most important makers of the light-sensitive chemicals used to print circuits onto silicon wafers, in a deal worth ¥1.84 trillion, or about $11.6 billion, that would create Japan’s largest integrated supplier of advanced chipmaking materials. The Tokyo-based chemicals group said its board approved the purchase on Monday and signed a share purchase agreement the same day with funds managed by JIC Capital, the investment arm of the state-backed Japan Investment Corporation, which has owned JSR since taking it private three years ago. The Development Bank of Japan will invest alongside Mitsui, putting ¥200 billion into the transaction, and Mitsui plans to fund most of the rest with a ¥1.64 trillion bridge loan from its main banks. The price makes the deal the largest ever in Japan’s chemicals sector, according to Reuters, and more than twice the $4.55 billion paid for Hitachi Chemical in 2020, the previous benchmark for a deal of this kind. For the semiconductor industry, the logic is straightforward: JSR is the world’s second-largest maker of advanced photoresists and the only company offering both types of resist used in extreme ultraviolet lithography, while Mitsui is the dominant maker of the pellicles that protect the masks those resists are printed from, so together they would control two of the most specialised inputs in the most advanced chip factories on earth. The agreement is only the beginning, however, because the deal still needs competition and foreign-investment clearances in Japan and other countries, the final price can still move, and Mitsui’s own shareholders sent the shares down sharply on the day the deal was announced. This is the story of what Mitsui is buying, why it is paying so much, how it plans to pay, and what still has to happen before the two companies become one, as reported on November 9, 2026 — and the Mitsui Chemicals JSR $11.6 billion deal November 2026 still faces more than a year of regulatory review before it can close.

1. The Deal at a Glance

The headline figure is ¥1.84 trillion, or about $11.6 billion at the exchange rate of ¥158.2 to the dollar that applied on November 9, 2026, and it is made up of two parts that tell different stories about what Mitsui is taking on. The equity value of the transaction is ¥1,392.1 billion, which is the amount being paid for the shares themselves, and the remaining ¥447.9 billion covers interest-bearing debt and other items that Mitsui will assume as part of the purchase, so the full enterprise value is considerably larger than the price of the shares alone. Mitsui will acquire all of the JSR common shares held by the two funds managed by JIC Capital, JIC PEFJ1 Limited Partnership and JIC PEF1 Limited Partnership, and JSR will become a consolidated subsidiary of Mitsui Chemicals once the deal closes. The Development Bank of Japan, a state-owned lender, will invest ¥200 billion alongside Mitsui, giving the transaction a quasi-public character that is not unusual for a deal involving materials considered important to Japan’s industrial security. Mitsui disclosed the agreement in a regulatory filing on Monday and said in its own presentation that it intends to position JSR as a core business in its ICT solutions area, the division that serves the electronics and information technology industries. The announcement came five days after Reuters reported, on November 4, that JIC was planning to sell JSR to Mitsui in a deal that could be worth more than ¥1.3 trillion, a figure the final price has now exceeded by a wide margin.

1.1 A Price Worth More Than Twice the Buyer

The most striking number in the deal is not the ¥1.84 trillion price itself but how large it is next to Mitsui Chemicals, the company paying it, because the transaction value is about 2.3 times Mitsui’s own market capitalisation. At the time of the Reuters report on November 4, Mitsui’s market value stood at roughly ¥800 billion, and the company held cash of about ¥217.8 billion at the end of June 2026, so the purchase price is more than double everything the stock market thought Mitsui itself was worth. The price is also about 29.5 times JSR’s latest consolidated core operating profit, a multiple that suggests Mitsui is paying not for what JSR earns today but for what it expects the business to earn as the world’s chipmakers spend more on the most advanced manufacturing processes. Deals of this shape, in which a smaller company buys a larger one with borrowed money, are rare in Japan, where corporate buyers have traditionally been cautious about leverage, and the scale of the borrowing is one reason investors reacted so sharply when the deal was announced. Mitsui has said it expects the purchase to generate about ¥40 billion a year in additional profit through integration by the fiscal year ending in March 2035, a target that sits far in the future and depends on the two businesses fitting together as neatly as the presentation suggests. Whether that promise is realistic, and whether Mitsui can carry the debt in the meantime, are the two questions that will dominate the discussion of this deal for months.

1.2 What Mitsui Is Actually Buying

JSR is a Tokyo-based developer and manufacturer of semiconductor materials, and its best-known products are photoresists, the light-sensitive coatings that allow lithography machines to transfer circuit patterns onto silicon wafers. The company also makes materials used in other stages of chip production, as well as display materials and a life sciences business that Mitsui regards as non-core and is reported to be considering all options for. In the fiscal year ended in March 2026, JSR reported revenue of ¥440.7 billion, or about $2.8 billion, core operating profit of ¥62.3 billion, operating profit of ¥40.5 billion and profit attributable to owners of ¥59.3 billion, and it employed 6,951 people on a consolidated basis. Its semiconductor materials sales grew from ¥157.9 billion in the fiscal year ended in March 2024 to ¥196.0 billion in the fiscal year ended in March 2025, a rise that reflects the surge in demand for the most advanced chips used in artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. JSR also owns Inpria, a company based in Corvallis, Oregon, that develops metal-oxide resists for the next generation of lithography machines, and it completed a new extreme ultraviolet photoresist plant in Cheongju, South Korea, on October 5, 2026, only weeks before the deal was announced. What Mitsui is buying, in other words, is not a single product but a portfolio of positions in the most technically demanding corners of the chip supply chain, along with the factories, the customers and the research teams that sustain them.

2. Why JSR Matters to the Chip Industry

To understand why Mitsui is willing to pay more than twice its own market value for JSR, it helps to understand what a photoresist does and why so few companies in the world can make the best ones. A modern chip is built by printing patterns onto a silicon wafer with light, and the photoresist is the chemical layer that records those patterns, hardening where the light hits it and washing away where it does not, so that the exposed areas can then be etched or implanted to form transistors and wiring. The patterns in the most advanced chips are measured in a handful of nanometres, which is smaller than a virus, and the chemistry that can resolve such fine detail reliably, wafer after wafer, is among the hardest problems in industrial science. Only a small number of companies have mastered it, and the market is dominated by Japanese suppliers, with Tokyo Ohka Kogyo in first place and JSR in second, which is why a change of ownership at JSR matters far beyond Japan. The world’s biggest chipmakers, including TSMC, Samsung and Intel, depend on these materials to run their most advanced factories, and any disruption to supply would be felt across the industry within weeks.

2.1 Photoresists, the Ink of Chipmaking

If a chip factory is a printing press, then the photoresist is the ink, and like ink it has to behave perfectly every time or the whole page is ruined. The resist is spun onto the wafer in a layer only tens of nanometres thick, exposed to light through a mask carrying the circuit pattern, and then developed so that the pattern remains as a stencil for the etching and deposition steps that follow. A single wafer passes through this process dozens of times, once for each layer of the chip, so a flaw in the resist at any stage can destroy a wafer worth tens of thousands of dollars. The newest lithography machines, which use extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres, demand resists that are more sensitive, more stable and more precise than anything that came before, and the chemistry has to keep improving as the machines move to higher numerical aperture, a design change that focuses the light more tightly and makes the patterns smaller still. JSR controls an estimated 30 percent share of the worldwide market for advanced photoresists, according to reporting on the deal, and its products are used in the most demanding processes in production today. That market share is the foundation of the company’s value, because a supplier with a third of a market that only two or three companies can serve at all holds a position that is very hard to displace.

2.2 The Only Supplier With Both EUV Answers

JSR’s most distinctive claim, and the one Mitsui highlighted in its investor presentation, is that it is the only company in the world capable of offering both kinds of resist used in extreme ultraviolet lithography. The first kind is the chemically amplified resist, known as CAR, which has been the workhorse of advanced lithography for years and in which JSR is the second-largest supplier in the world for both argon fluoride and extreme ultraviolet processes. The second kind is the metal-oxide resist, known as MOR, a newer technology designed for the high-numerical-aperture scanners that are beginning to enter production, and JSR’s position in this field comes from Inpria, the Oregon-based company it owns, which is described as the leading developer of metal-oxide photoresists for those machines. Offering both matters because chipmakers have not yet settled on which technology will dominate the next generation of manufacturing, and a supplier that can serve either path is useful to customers whatever they choose. Inpria itself is still small and loss-making, reporting an operating loss of $42.3 million on revenue of $60.06 million in its 2025 fiscal year, but its technology is regarded as strategically important enough that Mitsui is willing to buy it as part of the package. The combination of the established CAR business and the emerging MOR business is, in Mitsui’s telling, what makes JSR irreplaceable rather than merely large.

3. Mitsui’s Other Half of the Puzzle

Mitsui Chemicals is not a chip company, and on its own it would not obviously be a buyer for JSR, but it happens to own the other half of the most sensitive pairing in advanced lithography. Mitsui is the dominant global manufacturer of extreme ultraviolet pellicles, the thin membranes that protect the photomask, the stencil that carries the circuit pattern, from dust and debris inside the lithography machine. A single speck of dust on a mask can ruin every chip printed from it, so the pellicle is not an accessory but a necessity, and the material has to be almost perfectly transparent to extreme ultraviolet light while withstanding intense heat, a combination that only a handful of companies have achieved. Mitsui’s product, sold under the MITSUI PELLICLE name, holds the leading position in this market, and its customers are the same chipmakers that buy JSR’s photoresists, which means the two companies already sell into the same factories, through the same purchasing departments, to the same engineers. That overlap is the heart of the deal’s industrial logic, because it promises a supplier that can offer both the mask protection and the pattern chemistry as a single package.

3.1 Pellicles, the Unsung Shield

A pellicle is a membrane so thin that it is measured in tens of nanometres, stretched across a frame and mounted a small distance above the photomask so that any dust settles on the membrane rather than on the mask itself, where it would be in focus and would print onto every chip. For the older deep ultraviolet lithography that dominated chipmaking for two decades, pellicles were a solved problem, but extreme ultraviolet light is absorbed by almost everything it touches, including the air, so a pellicle for EUV has to transmit more than 90 percent of the light while surviving temperatures that can exceed several hundred degrees. Developing such a material took years of research, and Mitsui’s success in doing so gave it a position in the supply chain that is as hard to replicate as JSR’s position in resists. The pellicle and the resist are used together in every exposure, and a defect in either one ruins the wafer, so chipmakers treat both as critical materials and qualify them through long, expensive testing before they are allowed into a factory. Once a material is qualified, it is very difficult to replace, because changing it means re-testing the whole process, which is why the suppliers of these materials enjoy unusually stable relationships with their customers.

3.2 A Single Supplier for Two Critical Materials

Bringing the pellicle and the resist under one roof would create what Mitsui and the reporting on the deal describe as Japan’s largest integrated supplier of advanced lithography chemicals, and it would also create a company that sells two of the most specialised inputs in chipmaking to the same customers at the same time. For the chipmakers, that concentration cuts both ways, because a single supplier that understands both materials can solve problems that span the two, but it also means that two previously independent supply relationships become one, and the bargaining power shifts towards the seller. Reporting on the deal noted that Samsung Electronics in particular now faces a consolidated single supplier for EUV pellicles and advanced photoresists, a development that matters because Samsung is one of the few companies in the world that operates the most advanced lithography machines at scale. Whether customers welcome the combination or worry about it will become clearer as they comment on the deal in the coming weeks, and their reaction may also shape how competition regulators in different countries look at it. For Mitsui, the attraction is clear enough: it is buying a business that sells into the same factories it already serves, with products that are used alongside its own, and it is betting that selling them together will be worth more than selling them apart.

4. How Mitsui Will Pay for It

The financing of the deal is almost as striking as its size, because Mitsui plans to borrow nearly all of the money it needs. The company has secured ¥1.64 trillion, or about $10.4 billion, in bridge financing from its principal lending institutions, a short-term loan that is meant to be replaced over time with longer-term funding, and the Development Bank of Japan will contribute ¥200 billion of its own. Together those two sources cover the ¥1.84 trillion transaction value, and reporting on the deal put the share funded by the bridge loan at about 89 percent of the capital required. Mitsui also filed a shelf registration on November 9 for up to ¥150 billion of common shares, which becomes effective on November 17, 2026, and runs through November 16, 2028, a step that would allow it to raise equity later if it chooses to reduce the debt. The structure means Mitsui will emerge from the deal carrying a very large amount of borrowing relative to its size, and the cost of servicing that debt will depend on interest rates, on the cash that the combined business generates, and on whether Mitsui can refinance the bridge loan on acceptable terms. The final consideration remains subject to adjustments at closing, so the ¥1.84 trillion figure is not yet fixed in every detail.

4.1 A Bridge Loan Worth Nearly the Whole Price

A bridge loan is a short-term facility that a buyer uses to pay for an acquisition quickly and then replaces with bonds, longer-term bank loans or new shares, and the size of Mitsui’s bridge loan, at ¥1.64 trillion, is a measure of how much of the purchase price is being funded with debt rather than with cash the company already holds or with shares issued to the seller. Mitsui held cash of about ¥217.8 billion at the end of June 2026, which is less than an eighth of the transaction value, so there was never a realistic prospect of paying for JSR out of the company’s own resources. The bridge loan comes from the company’s principal financial institutions, which are the large Japanese banks that have traditionally lent to the country’s industrial groups, and the willingness of those banks to lend such a sum is itself a signal about how the deal is viewed inside Japan’s financial system. The risk for Mitsui is that a bridge loan has to be repaid or refinanced within a limited period, and if credit markets tighten or the combined business underperforms, the refinancing could be expensive or difficult. The shelf registration for ¥150 billion of shares gives Mitsui one route to reduce the debt, but that amount is less than a tenth of the bridge loan, so equity alone will not solve the leverage problem, and the company will need the cash flow from JSR itself to do most of the work.

4.2 The Market’s Verdict on the Shares

Investors did not welcome the announcement, and Mitsui Chemicals shares fell by around 13 percent on Monday, trading at about ¥1,500, as the market weighed the scale of the borrowing against the promised benefits. A fall of that size on the day a deal is announced is a clear signal that shareholders are worried, and the worry is easy to understand, because Mitsui is taking on debt worth more than twice its own market value to buy a business whose price is nearly thirty times its core operating profit. Shareholders may also have noticed that the deal was reported as a possibility five days earlier, when Reuters said JIC was planning to sell JSR to Mitsui for more than ¥1.3 trillion, and that the final price of ¥1.84 trillion is substantially higher than that early figure, which raises the question of whether Mitsui paid more than it needed to in an auction run by JIC Capital. The board of Mitsui approved the acquisition after that auction, and the company has argued that the strategic value of the combination justifies the price, but the share price suggests that the market is not yet convinced. Whether the shares recover will depend on the details Mitsui releases in the coming weeks, on the reaction of customers and regulators, and on whether analysts conclude that the ¥40 billion of additional annual profit Mitsui has promised is achievable.

5. JSR’s Second Sale in Three Years

The deal is JSR’s second change of ownership in three years, and that history matters because it explains both why the company was for sale and why the price is so high. JIC Capital, the investment arm of the Japan Investment Corporation, a public-private fund, bought JSR and took it private in 2023, removing it from the stock market so that it could be restructured away from the scrutiny of public shareholders. Private equity ownership of that kind is usually temporary, with the buyer aiming to improve the business and then sell it on within a few years, and the sale to Mitsui is the exit that JIC has been working towards. The auction that JIC ran for the company drew interest from Mitsui and, according to reporting, produced a price well above the figure that was circulating when the sale was first reported, which suggests that more than one buyer saw value in JSR’s position in the photoresist market. For JSR’s employees and customers, the change means a third owner in three years, and the stability of the business will depend on how quickly Mitsui can integrate it and how much of the existing management and research capability it retains.

5.1 From Public Company to Private Equity

JSR spent decades as a listed company before JIC took it private, and its history as a public company shaped the business that Mitsui is now buying, because the photoresist division was built up over many years of research spending that public shareholders funded without immediate returns. JIC’s ownership gave the company room to invest in new capacity, including the extreme ultraviolet photoresist plant in Cheongju, South Korea, that was completed on October 5, 2026, and to develop the metal-oxide resist technology that Inpria is working on, without having to justify each quarter’s spending to the market. The private equity period also allowed JSR to consider the future of its life sciences business, which Mitsui regards as non-core and is reported to be considering all options for, a decision that would have been harder to take while the company was listed and its shareholders were watching every division’s performance. The sale to Mitsui completes the cycle that began in 2023, and the price that JIC has achieved, at ¥1.84 trillion including debt, is a measure of how much the value of the semiconductor materials business has risen as the world’s chipmakers have raced to build capacity for artificial intelligence. Whether JIC’s return on its investment will be seen as a success depends on the price it paid in 2023, which has not been disclosed in the reporting on this deal, so that calculation cannot yet be made from public information.

5.2 A Business That Kept Growing

Whatever the ownership, the underlying business kept growing through the private equity period, and the figures Mitsui published with the deal show a company whose most important division is expanding quickly. Semiconductor materials sales rose from ¥157.9 billion in the fiscal year ended in March 2024 to ¥196.0 billion in the fiscal year ended in March 2025, an increase of about a quarter in a single year, driven by demand for the advanced resists used in the newest chip factories. The company’s overall revenue reached ¥440.7 billion in the fiscal year ended in March 2026, with core operating profit of ¥62.3 billion, and those figures were achieved while the company was investing in new plants and in the metal-oxide technology that has yet to make a profit. The growth matters for Mitsui’s case, because the price it is paying can only be justified if JSR keeps growing at something like its recent pace, and the demand for advanced chips used in artificial intelligence gives some reason to think it might. But growth in a cyclical industry is never guaranteed, and the semiconductor market has a long history of sharp downturns that follow periods of heavy investment, so the question is whether the demand for the most advanced processes will hold up long enough for Mitsui to earn back what it is paying. The answer will not be known for years, and it is one of the main uncertainties hanging over the deal.

6. What the Combined Company Would Look Like

If the deal closes, Mitsui plans to make JSR a core business in its ICT solutions area, the division that serves the electronics industry, and to combine the two companies’ products in ways that neither could achieve alone. The plan, as described in Mitsui’s presentation, is to use the two companies’ customer bases and product lines together, selling Mitsui’s pellicles alongside JSR’s advanced photoresists for the front-end processes that print circuits onto wafers, and selling Mitsui’s ICROS Tape alongside JSR’s thick-film resists for the back-end processes that package finished chips. The front end of chipmaking is where the circuits are printed, and the back end is where the individual chips are cut from the wafer, tested and packaged, so the combined company would be present at both ends of the production line in a way that neither company is today. Mitsui has also said it will make mutual use of the two companies’ customer relationships, which means introducing JSR’s products to Mitsui’s customers and Mitsui’s products to JSR’s customers, a cross-selling opportunity that is easy to describe in a presentation and harder to realise in practice, because chipmakers qualify each material separately and do not change suppliers quickly.

6.1 Front-End and Back-End, Under One Roof

The front-end combination is the more important of the two, because it brings together the pellicle and the photoresist, the two materials that are used together in every exposure of the lithography machine. A chipmaker that buys both from the same supplier can work with a single partner when a defect appears, rather than having to determine whether the fault lies in the mask protection or in the resist chemistry, and that single point of accountability is genuinely valuable in a process where the causes of failure are often hard to trace. The back-end combination is less obvious but still real, because the tapes and thick-film resists used in packaging are also specialised products, and selling them alongside the front-end materials gives Mitsui a broader relationship with each customer. The risk in both cases is that integration is harder than it looks, because the two companies have different cultures, different research traditions and different ways of working with customers, and the history of large mergers in the chemicals industry is full of combinations that promised synergies and delivered less than expected. Mitsui has set itself a target of about ¥40 billion a year in additional profit from integration by the fiscal year ending in March 2035, a date nine years away, which is a long time to wait for a return on a purchase of this size.

6.2 The American Subsidiaries in the Deal

The deal also brings four JSR affiliates into the Mitsui group as specified subsidiaries, and their locations show how global the semiconductor materials business has become. Inpria Corporation, based in Corvallis, Oregon, is the developer of the metal-oxide resists for high-numerical-aperture lithography, and it is the most strategically important of the four because its technology may determine who supplies the next generation of chipmaking. KBI Biopharma, based in Durham, North Carolina, is part of the life sciences business that Mitsui regards as non-core, and its future is one of the open questions in the deal. JSR North America Holdings, based in Sunnyvale, California, is the holding company for the American operations, and JSR Life Sciences, also based in Sunnyvale, is the other part of the life sciences business. The presence of these American subsidiaries means the deal will need clearance from regulators in the United States as well as in Japan, and the American operations are also the part of JSR that is most exposed to the political tensions surrounding the semiconductor industry, because the United States has been tightening its controls on the export of advanced chip technology to China. How those controls affect a Japanese-owned supplier with American subsidiaries is a question that the regulators will have to answer during the review process.

7. The Regulators Still to Convince

The deal cannot close yet, and the companies have been clear that it remains subject to competition-law and foreign-investment approvals in Japan and in other countries where the combined business operates. Those reviews exist because the combination brings together two suppliers that each hold a leading position in a market with very few competitors, and regulators will want to satisfy themselves that chipmakers will still have a choice of suppliers and that prices will not rise as a result. The reviews also reflect the fact that photoresists and pellicles are now treated as strategically important materials, because they are essential to making the most advanced chips, and governments have become more willing to scrutinise deals involving them on national security grounds. Mitsui has said it expects to complete the acquisition in the second half of the fiscal year ending in March 2028, which runs from October 2027 to March 2028, but it has also said the schedule could change depending on the regulatory procedures, so the timetable is a target rather than a promise. Until the approvals are granted, the two companies must continue to operate independently, and they cannot begin the integration work that the ¥40 billion profit target depends on.

7.1 Competition and Security Reviews

Competition regulators look at whether a merger will reduce choice or raise prices, and in this case the question is complicated by the fact that the two companies do not compete directly with each other, since one makes pellicles and the other makes photoresists, so the usual test of overlapping market shares does not apply in a simple way. Regulators may instead look at whether the combined company could use its strength in one product to force customers to buy the other, or whether it could raise prices for both because customers have nowhere else to go, and those are harder questions that take longer to answer. Foreign-investment reviews add a second layer, because the deal involves a state-backed seller in JIC Capital and a state-owned co-investor in the Development Bank of Japan, and because the materials involved are considered sensitive by governments that are competing to secure their own semiconductor supply chains. The United States, the European Union, Japan and South Korea all have review processes that could apply, and each of them will look at the deal from its own perspective, which means the companies may have to satisfy several different sets of concerns before they can close. The outcome of those reviews cannot be predicted with confidence, and the history of large semiconductor deals includes several that were blocked or abandoned after regulators objected.

7.2 A Closing Date More Than a Year Away

The target of closing in the second half of the fiscal year ending in March 2028 means that more than a year will pass between the announcement and the completion of the deal, and a great deal can change in that time. Interest rates could move, making the bridge loan more expensive to refinance, the semiconductor market could turn down, reducing JSR’s earnings and making the price look higher in retrospect, or a regulator could demand that the companies sell off part of the business as a condition of approval. The long timetable also means that Mitsui’s share price will be judged on the deal for many months before any of the promised benefits appear, and the 13 percent fall on the day of the announcement may not be the last movement if investors remain unconvinced. For JSR’s customers, the long wait creates its own uncertainty, because they need to plan their supply chains years in advance and they will want to know whether the company they have qualified as a supplier will still be the same company, with the same products and the same support, after the deal closes. The companies have said little about what will happen during the waiting period, beyond the fact that they will continue to operate separately, so customers, employees and investors will be watching for further announcements as the regulatory process unfolds.

8. What Happens Next

The next steps in the deal are procedural but important, and they will determine whether the agreement announced on November 9 becomes a completed acquisition or remains an ambition. Mitsui and JSR will file the merger notifications and foreign-investment applications that the regulators require, and those filings will set out the case for the deal in detail, including the market shares, the customer relationships and the arguments about why competition will not suffer. At the same time, Mitsui will have to manage the financing, deciding when and how to replace the ¥1.64 trillion bridge loan with longer-term funding, and whether to use the shelf registration for up to ¥150 billion of shares that becomes effective on November 17, 2026. The company will also have to explain the deal to its shareholders, to JSR’s customers and to its own employees, three audiences that will each ask different questions and will each need to be convinced that the purchase is worth the price. The answers to those questions will emerge gradually over the coming months, in regulatory filings, in earnings presentations and in the comments of customers and competitors, and they will determine whether the deal is remembered as a bold strategic move or as an expensive mistake.

8.1 The Numbers Mitsui Has Promised

The clearest test of the deal will be the numbers Mitsui has attached to it, and the most important of those is the target of about ¥40 billion a year in additional profit from integration by the fiscal year ending in March 2035. That figure is a long way off, and it depends on the two businesses combining smoothly, on customers accepting the combined offering, and on the market for advanced chips continuing to grow, so it should be treated as an aspiration rather than a forecast. The other numbers are more immediate: the ¥1.84 trillion price, the ¥1.64 trillion bridge loan, the ¥200 billion from the Development Bank of Japan, and the ¥150 billion shelf registration for new shares, all of which are fixed or filed and can be checked against the company’s announcements. JSR’s own figures are also now public in detail, with revenue of ¥440.7 billion and core operating profit of ¥62.3 billion in the fiscal year ended in March 2026, and those figures will be the baseline against which the performance of the combined business is measured. If the combined company can grow JSR’s semiconductor materials sales at anything like the pace of the last two years, when they rose from ¥157.9 billion to ¥196.0 billion, then the price may come to look reasonable, but if growth slows, the debt will weigh heavily on Mitsui for years.

8.2 What to Watch Next

Several developments will show whether the deal is on track, and they are worth watching in the order in which they are likely to happen. The first is the regulatory process, and the key signals will be the filing of merger notifications in Japan and other countries, any requests from regulators for more information, and any indication that a review has moved into a deeper phase, all of which would suggest that the timetable is slipping. The second is the financing, and the key signals will be any announcement about replacing the bridge loan, any use of the ¥150 billion shelf registration, and any change in Mitsui’s credit rating, which would show how the market views the company’s ability to carry the debt. The third is the reaction of customers, and the key signals will be comments from TSMC, Samsung and Intel, the chipmakers that buy the most photoresist and pellicles, about whether they welcome a combined supplier or worry about one. The fourth is the future of the life sciences business, and the key signal will be any announcement about selling or spinning off KBI Biopharma and JSR Life Sciences, which Mitsui regards as non-core. The fifth is JSR’s own performance, and the key signal will be its results for the current fiscal year, which will show whether the growth in semiconductor materials sales is continuing. None of these developments has happened yet, and the deal’s fate will depend on all of them, so the coming weeks will provide the answers.

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