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Taiwan-based Yageo, one of the world’s largest makers of electronic components, continues to hunt for investments and acquisitions of other manufacturers after two purchases welcomed by equity investors this year, company chairman and founder Pierre Chen said in a recent interview.
“Supply chain efficiency is becoming increasingly important for major global companies,” Chen said at the Yageo Foundation headquarters in Taipei. “Our strategy will continue to improve our solution to serve our global customers,” said Chen.
One path will be organic expansion, while a second path is “through acquisition” for technology or products that are in high demand but would take a long time to develop internally, Chen added.
Shares of Yageo have risen nearly 80% in the past year after it completed the purchase of 87% of Shibaura Electronics, a Tokyo-listed global leader in temperature sensor technology and manufacturing, in October. Yageo, whose clients include Apple, announced plans in September to acquire a stake of up to 28% in Anpec Electronics, a Taiwanese designer of power semiconductor chips.
The surge in Yageo’s shares has taken its market capitalization to NT$489 billion, or more than $15 billion, and Chen’s fortune to $8.9 billion, according to a Forbes estimate that includes his art collection.
Yageo’s approach was “a great strategy because they are making some of these acquisitions at exactly the right time” given the strong AI-related demand for electronic components, said Dan Nystedt, vice president at family office investment firm Tri-Orient Investments in Taipei.
Yageo’s latest investments are part of a long-term Chen acquisition strategy that has helped grow the company – founded in 1977 as a manufacturer of resistors – into a one-stop supplier of components ranging from capacitors to sensors, manufactured in its network of 66 factories worldwide.
Among its purchases, Yageo bought France’s Schneider Electric’s Telemecanique Sensors business in 2023 for the equivalent of $788 million. In 2020, it paid $1.6 billion to acquire US electronics components maker Kemet, attracting customers from “high-end applications”, mainly in the automotive industry. In 2019, it spent $740 million on US electronics manufacturer Pulse, which specializes in design-in and custom magnetic products.
Taiwanese companies have done relatively well with Japanese investments, Nystedt noted. “The Taiwanese have been very lucky with their mergers and acquisitions in Japan. Japan is not an easy place to do a merger and acquisition,” he said. Previous Taiwanese investments in Japan include Apple supplier Hon Hai Precision’s purchase of a majority stake in Sharp in 2016.
For its part, Yageo was optimistic about the current business environment in its latest quarterly financial report in October. Yageo called customer inventory levels “healthy” despite geopolitical uncertainties, noting that “demand for AI-related products continues to grow.” Revenue in the first nine months of 2025 rose 5.8% from a year earlier to NT$96.6 billion, while net profit rose nearly 8% to NT$16.8 billion.
Yageo is conveniently located in Taiwan, one of the busiest technology centers in the world and home to chip giant TSMC. Growing demand for state-of-the-art AI chips pushed GDP up by more than 8% in the third quarter compared to a year ago – the best performance in fifteen years. Nvidia is one of the most important Taiwanese customers.
The new Japanese takeover of Yageo received support from regulators who see the benefits of foreign investors helping unlock company value, Chen said. Yageo’s investment also had the support of a Shibaura leadership team that monitored synergies with its Taiwanese partner’s global distribution network, he said. While many electronics companies in Japan make a single part for a Japanese customer, Yageo’s large global distribution channels “can help them reach many customers they have never touched before. This is a win-win situation,” he said.
“If we can find a good product or technology, we can strengthen our strategy” to build on the one-stop approach with other investments or acquisitions, Chen said. “We will take the US and Europe into account” as well as Japan, he said.
Strong demand for components outside AI companies could further help prices at Yageo and other industrial suppliers next year, Tri-Orient’s Nystedt said. “It’s just a matter of there being so much built. Luckily, the AI data center trend was here by 2023, because most of the electronics industry was kind of dead at that point. And by 2024, not much had really happened because of the anemic growth of the smartphone and PC industries.”
“If we had a strong PC upgrade cycle or a strong smartphone upgrade cycle, you would have a lot more trouble finding certain capacitors and other parts. It’s all going to data centers now,” Nystedt said. “Anyone selling parts will give them to them first. No one else pays as much money as they do.”
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