日 기업들 우회수출 등 자구책 마련...中서 에칭가스, 韓서 레지스트 증산 검토

Japanese companies affected by Japan's trade curbs against South Korea appear to be drawing up measures to cope with the new changes.
According to Japanese media,... some are looking for ways to go around the new regulations so they can keep shipping materials to South Korea.
Yoon Jung-min has details.
The Japanese firm Morita Chemical Industries said Friday... that it will start making ultrapure hydrogen fluoride in China via a joint venture company to supply Chinese chipmakers and Samsung's production lines in China.
That's according to an interview Morita gave to the Japanese paper Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the Nikkei Asian Review.
Last month, Tokyo tightened its controls on shipments of three key materials used for making chips photoresist, hydrogen fluoride and fluorinated polyimide.
Morita Chemical said it will also ship the material to South Korea if there is demand.
Its CEO, Yasuo Morita, told the media that they can ship to South Korea from China instead of Japan if similar problems come between Seoul and Tokyo in the future.
Morita also expressed concerns that the export curbs might cause Japanese companies to lose their share in the global market.
According to the same Japanese newspaper, another company, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo, which supplies a material called resist, is looking at ramping up its production in South Korea. The company has been also running production lines in Korea and supplying companies here with EUV resists.
The newspaper said shipments from production lines overseas are exempt from the curbs, but the Japanese government could tighten the exports of related production equipment or raw materials to South Korea and China.
In the meantime, Japan's Mainichi Shimbun said Friday that a Japanese government official admitted that Tokyo had miscalculated the reaction from South Korea to the export curbs, which have stoked anti-Abe sentiment, prompted a boycott of Japanese products and halted sports and cultural exchanges between the two countries.
According to that report, Japan enacted the curbs because it was unhappy with Seoul over the forced labor issue.
Yoon Jung-min, Arirang News.