Japanese metal materials maker Mitsui Kinzoku Co Ltd plans to invest about RM4.87 billion in a new copper foil plant in Malaysia to meet rising demand from the artificial intelligence and semiconductor industries, NST reported.
The board approved the project on 10 November, and the plant will be built near the group’s subsidiary, Mitsui Copper Foil (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, in Shah Alam, Selangor.
“To ensure the continued stable supply of its copper foil products to customers amid the anticipated continued rapid growth of the AI and semiconductor markets, the company has decided to construct a new copper foil plant in Malaysia,” the company said in a notice to the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
The plant will make MicroThin carrier-supported ultra-thin copper foil for semiconductor packaging and VSP electrodeposited copper foil for high-frequency circuit boards. Mitsui Kinzoku put the total at 190 billion yen, covering 14 billion yen for land, 32 billion yen for buildings and 144 billion yen for production equipment and other assets, according to The Edge, which cited Nikkei Asia.
On that split, buildings work out to about RM820 million and equipment to about RM3.69 billion at the exchange rate implied by the RM4.87 billion total. The Edge reported that copper foil also goes into the optical transceivers that convert signals between electrical and optical form in AI data centres.
The new site will lift MicroThin capacity by two million square metres a month by fiscal 2031, with a further two million square metres added by fiscal 2033.
For VSP foil, the plant adds 600 tonnes of monthly capacity in each of fiscal 2031 and fiscal 2032, taking the group’s total to 2,600 tonnes a month. The land being acquired can hold up to 3,600 tonnes a month, and the company said it would consider combined capacity of 5,000 tonnes a month across the new and existing sites as the market grows.
Operations start in phases from April 2031. Mitsui Kinzoku expects operating profit from its copper foil business, part of the engineered materials segment, to reach 3.2 times the fiscal 2025 level by fiscal 2030 and 5.5 times by fiscal 2033.
The investment will be funded from cash on hand, borrowings and other sources. The group said the project would have no material effect on its results for the year ending 31 March 2027 and would add to profit from fiscal 2031.
Mitsui Copper Foil (Malaysia) was set up in 1989 and began commercial production in 1991, making high-precision copper foil for electronics, semiconductors and AI data centres. The company notice gave no jobs figure and no date for construction to begin.
