Sep 20 2004
To further expand the surface protective films for LCD optical sheets, Hitachi Chemical Co., Ltd. has decided to raise the company’s manufacturing capability to 40% increase over the current capacity, by November 2004.
We started the adhesive film operation in 1967, and have developed adhesive films since then for various applications such as building material protection, automobile protection, masking for electronic part plating, and IC wafer dicing. The growth of the adhesive film operation is being driven by the recent surging demand for films that protect the surface of the optical sheets used for LCDs in the wake of the LCD market expansion.
Our surface protective films for LCD optical sheets are produced by coating polypropylene films with lower coefficients of linear thermal expansion with adhesives, and they are used for protecting optical sheets from the stains and scratches incurred in transit or in a pressing process. While they have strong adhesion, with which they can stably stick to even optical sheets that have fine irregularities on the surface, they have insignificant change in adhesion strength over time after assembly and can be easily peeled off. In addition, exercising our ingenuity in the design, and other aspect of material resins, we have substantially reduced “fish-eye” occurrence (a phenomenon where grains like transparent or half-transparent fish eyes are being left in films), which is a defect prone to happen in polypropylene films, and facilitated the visual inspection of optical sheets.
Since we have received many inquiries about our surface protective films for LCD optical sheets following the surge of the LCD market, we have recently decided to invest about 1 billion yen in our Goshomiya Works (Shimodate , Ibaraki) to improve our manufacturing capacity to 40% over the current capability, by November 2004.
Including adhesive films, we have selected the 10 Key Growth Products, into which we will concentrate our managerial resources in order to achieve continual increases in both sales and profit. We will not only reinforce efforts to sell the current optical sheet protection application, but also aggressively develop them for various display applications with this expanded production capacity.
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