1963-1979 On 11 November 1963 Tokyo Electron Laboratories Incorporated was founded by Tokuo Kubo and Toshio Kodaka, largely funded by
Tokyo Broadcasting System (TBS), with a capital of over five million
yen. Later that year, their office opened in the TBS main building and began manufacturing thousands of quality-control and importing
diffusion furnaces made by Thermco and selling Japanese-made car radios. In 1965 the company approached a rapidly growing business in the market,
Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, and agreed to serve as a sales agency for them, increasing their capital to twenty million yen. Tokyo Electron began exporting IC testers,
IC sockets, IC connectors, and other similar computer components. Tokyo Electron in 1986 was described by the
New York Times as a maker of semiconductor manufacturing equipment. In 1990, Tokyo Electron was competing with the Japanese company
Dai Nippon Screen and the American company Silicon Valley Group as the largest producer of equipment to make semiconductors. In 1991, Tokyo Electron was one of five Japanese companies criticized by the
SEMATECH consortium for allegedly withholding new technology from the United States, specifically "precision heating equipment" made by Tokyo Electron Ltd. and
Kokusai. By the early 1990s, Tokyo Electron's American rival
Applied Materials was losing market share, and "sought U.S. government help in the form of an import quota" to the American market. In May 1995, Tokyo Electron Ltd. was Japan's largest vendor of equipment to make semiconductors.
2000-2024 After import controls, Applied Materials by 2001 was double the size of Tokyo Electron, which was its next nearest competitor. In 2004, TEL announced improvements to its plasma etch chamber products. In 2005, Tokyo Electron was still the second-largest maker of chip manufacturing gear after Applied Materials, and above
ASML. In 2006, Tokyo Electron had a research center at the
Albany NanoTech complex, a
nanotechnology center in New York. The company started a venture capital unit in 2006, TEL Venture Capital, based in California. As of 2011, TEL was the largest manufacturer of IC and FPD production equipment. forming a new company to be called Eteris. Eteris would have been the world's largest supplier of semiconductor processing equipment, with a total market value of approximately $29 billion. On 26 April 2015, the $10 billion merger was cancelled due to antitrust concerns in the United States. In June 2023, Tokyo Electron was ranked among the Forbes
Global 2000 list of the world's largest companies, at which point it had around 12,742 employees. In late 2023, it was the largest semiconductor equipment maker in Asia. It was generating 43 percent of its revenue from China. In October 2023, the company announced it had developed new technology to improve advanced
3D NAND flash memory, making it the only competitor to
Lam Research. In February 2024, Tokyo Electron's market cap closed at US$114.6 billion, making it the third-most valuable company in Japan in terms of market cap, beating
Sony Group. It also become the 12th ranked among semiconductor-related companies worldwide in terms of market cap. In 2024, Toshiki Kawai was president and CEO, while Yoshikazu Nunokawa was chairman of the board. == Products and services==