Japan’s TOTO, the world’s third largest ceramic bathroom giant, is ushering in a complete transformation of its business structure. The latest financial report for fiscal year 2025 as of March 2026 shows that the operating profit of ’s advanced ceramics business exceeded that of the core residential bathroom equipment business for the first time, accounting for 55% of the group’s total operating profit, becoming the company’s largest profit engine.
This company, which is world-famous for its smart toilets and sanitary ceramic products, has been in the semiconductor precision ceramics business as early as the 1980s. The core product is an electrostatic chuck necessary for semiconductor manufacturing, which is the core component used to fix silicon wafers during wafer processing.
In chip manufacturing (such as NAND flash memory etching process), electrostatic chucks are used to accurately fix silicon wafers in high temperature, strong corrosion, and strong electric field environments. It requires extremely high flatness (accuracy up to 1/80 of a human hair), purity, heat resistance and insulation. TOTO is technologically advanced in this area and has the highest purity in the industry, forming a strong technical barrier.
Nowadays, the explosive growth of the AI industry has driven a continued surge in demand for high-end chip manufacturing, and has also led to an explosion in demand for semiconductor precision ceramic parts. Data show that the operating profit margin of this business has skyrocketed from 9% to more than 40% in five years.
On May 1st, the Japanese stock market opened, and TOTO’s stock price rose linearly, with the increase further expanding to more than 18%, and the market value exceeded 1 trillion yen.
Analysts believe that the expansion of AI data centers has led to a surge in demand for high-performance memory chips (especially NAND flash memory). Upstream fabs have been expanding production wildly, and the memory chip industry has entered a tight supply and demand or even a "super cycle."
This directly drives orders for TOTO electrostatic chucks, and orders have been scheduled until 2027.
