Hubei Dinglong, a business built on printer toner, is increasingly being reshaped by materials that polish and pattern silicon wafers. The Wuhan-based company reported CNY3.66 billion in revenue in 2025, with semiconductor material and chip business contributing 57% of the total, after growing 37.3% year-on-year. Revenue from printing consumables, once its defining business, fell 13% to CNY1.56 billion, according to its annual report. Dinglong’s shift began with an internal question: Could the chemistry used to make printer toner particles be redirected toward chipmaking? “The opportunity came when our toner team found that previous experience in high-purity inorganic synthesis, surface modification and colloid chemistry could be applied to chemical mechanical planarization (CMP) slurry’s nanoscale abrasive particles,” said Zhu Shunquan, General Manager of the company.
CMP materials have long been a weak link constraining China’s advanced chip manufacturing. Zhu said the main bottleneck in developing domestically produced CMP slurries lies in the supply of abrasive particles, a key upstream raw material that accounts for as much as 70% of total slurry costs. The global supply of such materials, however, has long been dominated by a handful of international companies, which have erected formidable market barriers and created closed supply-chain ecosystems through close joint-development arrangements and exclusive agreements, he noted. “This structural imbalance has long left domestic CMP slurry producers with formulas but without the essential abrasive particles needed to put them into production, making it difficult to achieve stable mass production and independently improve high-performance products,” Zhu added.
Against this backdrop, Dinglong moved into the CMP slurry business in 2021, targeting research and development (R&D) toward four core abrasives: high-purity silica, ultra-pure silica, alumina and ceria. Zhu said producing these abrasive particles in-house could give researchers more control over particle size and surface properties, allowing materials to be adjusted for a customer’s process. To date, the company has overcome technical barriers in alumina abrasive particles, a field previously dominated by a single global supplier. Its product has entered mass production at a major domestic manufacturer, with monthly deliveries now running into hundreds of drums, the company said. It has also completed the development of a ceria-based CMP slurry for more advanced memory chips, which is undergoing a key qualification process before being introduced into mass production.
Notably, one of the company’s proprietary CMP slurries had even outperformed an incumbent supplier’s product in a key defect-control metric. “It delivered better scratch control than the incumbent product, helping us secure repeat orders from customers,” Zhu said. Dinglong said it has invested more than CNY1.4 billion in slurry and abrasive-particle operations, the China daily reports.
