On September 17, 2026, timed to coincide with the opening of India's largest semiconductor exhibition, SEMICON India 2026, Fujifilm announced it would build a new semiconductor materials plant in India. The investment amount is₹800 crore (about 8 billion rupees; roughly 13.3 billion yen, or about US$83 million, based on ₹1 ≈ ¥1.66 as of September 2026). Some front-end materials, such as photoresist, are areas where Japanese makers have long held a strong global share (though for CMP slurry, overseas players such as U.S.-based Cabot are also strong, and the competitive landscape varies by item). Now those upstream materials themselves are moving toward local production in India. The fact that "materials" — rather than finished semiconductor products or equipment — are being localized in India is both a business opportunity for Japan's chemical and materials makers and a starting gun that forces them to reconsider their own position.
Fujifilm disclosed that it will invest ₹800 crore (about 8 billion rupees, or roughly 13.3 billion yen) to build a new semiconductor materials manufacturing base in India. The investment comes in two stages: construction for the first stage is expected to begin in fiscal 2026 (FY2026), with mass production starting in fiscal 2028 (FY2028). Koji Wada, the company's Managing Director, said, "India has entered a crucial phase in building its semiconductor ecosystem, and there is significant room for us to contribute with the materials technology, know-how, and global structure we have built over decades." The announcement was timed to SEMICON India 2026 (September 17-19, at Yashobhoomi in New Delhi). At the exhibition, the company showcased its materials portfolio, including CMP slurry technology that polishes circuit surfaces to a flatness within 0.4 nanometers.
India has made semiconductors a pillar of national strategy and has been attracting plants under the India Semiconductor Mission (ISM). In July 2026, ISM 2.0, an expanded support scheme, was approved, and the government is trying to broaden the base with subsidies and incentives from downstream assembly and testing through to front-end fabs. But even once a fab is up and running, if the materials it needs — photoresist, high-purity chemicals, polishing agents — are not available locally, the supply chain stays dependent on imports. According to reports, Fujifilm's new base is a candidate for the Dholera investment region in Gujarat, positioned to support material supply to Tata Electronics' wafer fab under construction in the same state, and a memorandum of understanding with local stakeholders was reportedly signed on September 17. With the attraction of finished-product plants largely done, localizing materials has emerged as the next focal point.
This investment is designed to proceed in stages, watching how India's semiconductor industry gets off the ground and how customer demand evolves. Rather than committing the full amount at once, the idea is to thicken supply as fabs come online. The two-stage split is reported as follows.
Unlike equipment, materials directly affect yield through freshness, purity, and logistics management. Whether chemicals and polishing agents can be made near a fab determines the stability of supply, so producing close to fab locations makes sense. Narrowing the first stage to front-end materials can be read as an order of entering an area where demand is easier to predict and central to yield management, building a track record, and then expanding into chemicals.
The "flatness within 0.4 nanometers" figure for CMP slurry shown at the exhibition is the foundation for manufacturing miniaturized circuits with good yield. Front-end materials only get adopted after their formulation is fine-tuned to a fab's manufacturing conditions and verified repeatedly on the production line. That is exactly why having a base near the fab, and finishing the work in close contact with local engineers, matters. Rather than ending the relationship once the product is sold, staying alongside the customer on formulation and quality even after production begins is both a barrier to entry and a strength for materials makers. The decision to locally produce front-end materials in India sharply shortens the distance for that ongoing collaboration.
At SEMICON India 2026, upstream materials and equipment companies announced a string of commitments to India. According to reports, Applied Materials has laid out a $5 billion vision for India through 2035. Note that Prime Minister Modi's remark that "chips are digital diamonds," asserting India's presence in a trillion-dollar semiconductor market, was made at SEMICON India in 2025, a different occasion from the 2026 event covered in this article. Attention that had concentrated on attracting finished-product fabs is now spreading upstream in the supply chain, to materials and chemicals, as seen here. Fujifilm's announcement is being read as part of that trend.
What this case shows is that, for Japanese materials and chemicals makers, shifting from "supplying via exports" to "making locally and staying alongside the customer" has become a real option in India too. Japanese chemical companies are already reconsidering their reliance on China and positioning India as their next production base, and that trend also shows up in the moves by Mitsui Chemicals and Sumitomo Chemical to make India their next growth base. In the paint sector, the case of Nippon Paint doubling its India plant capacity to respond to price competition through local production shows a similar pattern: whether materials can be made locally determines both distance to the customer and price competitiveness. Companies that see an opportunity in semiconductor materials have reached the stage of identifying which fab and which process step their own products connect to, and asking themselves whether they can build a local structure capable of staying alongside the customer through mass-production verification.
Semiconductor supply chains are being restructured, moving upstream from India as the starting point. In back-end processes, there is also a reverse flow of Indian companies winning contracts to assemble automotive chips for Japan, and this localization of front-end materials is the upstream version of that. Once materials can be sourced locally, it will also ripple into fab siting decisions and the expansion plans of component makers, pressuring Japanese materials, chemicals, and polishing-agent companies to decide "when to establish a base in India." The cautious two-stage investment design is a realistic answer for a stage where demand cannot yet be fully read, and is well worth watching as a reference point for the decisions that will follow.
The significance of Fujifilm's ₹800 crore (about 8 billion rupees, or roughly 13.3 billion yen) investment lies less in the size of the figure than in the sequence of "entering via front-end materials, in two stages." It is a signal that the reverse flow of the supply chain — materials following finished products — has become concrete in India. The next move for Japanese materials, chemicals, and specialty-chemical makers is clear: take stock of which fab and which process step your own products connect to among those under construction in India, and check whether you can build a local structure capable of staying alongside the customer through mass-production verification. Now, before demand solidifies, is the time to map out whether exports will be enough or whether you need to go as far as local production.
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