Marumae, a maker of vacuum parts for chip and flat-panel equipment, says semiconductor orders across the group now exceed its production capacity. Its results supplement for the year to August 2026 puts the response in numbers: a capital expenditure plan raised to ¥5.6bn for the year to August 2027. The board approved revised Fusion2028 targets on August 21, 2026, covered in an earlier Tokyo Brief report; this supplement adds the capacity picture behind them.
Where the bottleneck sits
The supplement says customers have presented long-term expansion outlooks and asked for more output, and that Marumae is ordering equipment for installation through the second half of 2027. In precision parts, longer delivery times for production equipment are the bottleneck, and the company is hurrying to add staff. In functional materials, strong semiconductor customer demand is held back by hiring. The group's semiconductor orders were a record, and price negotiations are mostly settled.
The earnings summary gives the scale for the aluminium-casting subsidiary KM Aluminium: requests for vacuum chambers run to more than double current volumes toward 2027. The company has started adding casting and heat-treatment equipment, having held back headcount while customers worked down inventory.
Guidance, with a caveat
For the year to August 2027, Marumae guides to sales of ¥28bn, operating profit of ¥6.5bn and net profit of ¥4.2bn. The supplement says customer requests are very strong but it is unclear whether capacity can be added fast enough, so they are not fully in the forecast. Of the ¥5.6bn, ¥3.8bn is at Marumae and ¥1.8bn at KM Aluminium.
Dividend
The board also raised its final dividend forecast to ¥28 a share from ¥26, citing higher net profit and a payout-ratio target of 35% or more under the current medium-term plan. The figures are post-split, after a two-for-one split on April 1, 2026; the ¥38 interim dividend was paid before it. Marumae's earnings summary puts the effective annual dividend at ¥47 on a post-split basis.