I’ve spent a lot of my working life around plants like these, and I kept noticing that buyers don’t pay for them the same way. So I started writing down why. This is that notebook, built from permits, filings, releases, and the deal tape, current as of October 2026. Where a number is soft, I say so. I might be wrong on any call in here, and I’d like to hear where.

Why I sort custom chemistry makers by skill

From the outside, fine chemistry, pharma contract manufacturing (CDMOs), and toll plants look like one market. They share reactors, chemists, and vocabulary. But one plant sells into several end markets, so the end market can’t tell two plants apart.

So I sort plants by the chemistry they’re permitted and equipped to run. If you’re valuing or selling a plant, compare it with plants that run the same chemistry, not plants that serve the same customer. End markets tell you where demand is heading. The skill and the permitted capability behind it tell you what a buyer will pay for the site.

One piece of good feedback I’ve received on this so far: permits are a good way to segment the market, but once you’re underneath them, assessing the capabilities of the team is a key area of further diligence, and probably where the long-term defensibility sits. I agree. The public record can tell you who holds the permit. It can’t tell you how capable the people running the chemistry are, so this guide is a starting point for that work, not the end of it.

The nine skills, and what’s scarce in each

• 1. Fluorine and halogens. The scarce thing is HF, F2 and SF4 handling. Eight named US makers, and none offers HF at custom scale. The money so far is capex, with no disclosed site sale.

• 2. Organometallics and reactive metals. Pyrophoric, air-free work. The one nearby multiple is seller-stated: Honeywell paid 13.3x for Johnson Matthey’s catalyst business.

• 3. Silicon chemistry. Chlorosilanes and hydrosilylation. Fab precursors are up and basic siloxanes are down, and there’s little independent left to buy.

• 4. High pressure, hydrogenation, alkoxylation. Pressure, hydrogen and ethylene oxide permits. One US independent went to an Indian platform in May 2025.

• 5. Specialty polymers, monomers, and CASE. Monomer chemistry and qualification. The one stated multiple is H.B. Fuller’s, under 6x after synergies for adhesive formulators.

• 6. Hazardous chemistry. Nitration, phosgene, cyanide and energetics. Orica paid $640m for Cyanco at 7.5x, buyer-stated.

• 7. High-purity inorganics and reagents. Parts-per-trillion purity and analytical grades. Fujifilm paid $700m for Entegris’s fab acids, while research catalogs are flat.

• 8. Licensed handling. DEA registration, containment and isotopes. Siegfried paid “below 10x” for Noramco’s US sites, its words.

• 9. Modality synthesis. Solid-phase synthesis and purification for peptides and oligos. Samsung Biologics offered CHF 44.31 a share for PolyPeptide, with no multiple stated. The offer was declared successful on October 16, 2026, and closing still waits on regulators.

My ranking: where the evidence and the deal record point

The capability and the qualified customer earn the premium, not the reactors. Here’s how I’d rank the nine for a buyer, and the comparable behind each call.

• Pick 1: a US hazardous-chemistry site with a live, permitted capability. Nitration, phosgene, cyanide, energetics. The comparables are adjacent: Orica’s 7.5x for Cyanco and NewMarket’s ~$700m for AMPAC. The risk case: one permitted US site filed a WARN notice in March 2026 and then sold at an undisclosed price. The permit outlived the business that held it.

• Pick 2: a Western fluorination or fluorine-reagent site. No site sale has printed a price yet. The evidence is capex, and Indian HF could undercut the US reagent step before a first comp prints.

• Pick 3: DEA-registered or high-containment capacity in the US. This is the one direct comparable: Siegfried’s “below 10x” for Noramco’s US sites.

• Tied fourth: organometallics and high-pressure independents with Western customers. Grace stated 9.5x for Albemarle’s fine chemistry sites. The independents sold at undisclosed prices.

• Watch: silicon, polymers and CASE, and high purity. Almost nothing independent is left in silicon, and I found no sale of a US monomer or photoinitiator house. There’s likely better opportunity downstream, in application and formulation.

• Avoid for mid-market entry: peptide or oligo capacity without a contract book. With a contract book the economics work (Bachem’s FY2025 EBITDA margin was 30.9%). A mid-market buyer can’t get that book.

• Pass: capacity sold mainly on reactor time, with no permitted capability or qualified customer behind it. EUROAPI sold its Brindisi plant at €5m of enterprise value.

Ten years of deals, and only ten stated multiples

I logged 60 deals across the nine skills from 2016 to 2026. A buyer or seller stated a multiple on only ten of them, and I print a multiple only where a party to the deal stated it, with who said it. The smallest US multipurpose-site print was about $134m of enterprise value on about $78m of 2024 revenue and about $15m of EBITDA. That’s about 1.7x revenue (my arithmetic on the buyer’s figures) and about 9x EBITDA (the buyer’s figure). It’s one deal, so I wouldn’t build a range on it.

Where the profit is

Where a listed company breaks out a skill, the capability-heavy work shows the best margins. Dottikon’s hazardous chemistry printed a 34.6% EBITDA margin and Chemours’ refrigerants and fluids 32%, against 5.8% core EBITDA at EUROAPI’s generic API business and 4.0% operating margin at Stepan Surfactants. These aren’t like for like, since group and segment margins blend businesses. The pattern holds anyway. No US independent publishes a margin, so the private middle has to be read from the deals and the permits.

What’s in the full guide

The full guide runs 114 sheets plus a source appendix. Each of the nine segments runs in the same order: opener, size, why it earns more, how they get paid, who plays, deals, what to watch, and my call. Then the back matter: every deal under and over $1bn on one tape, what I’d do by reader (sponsor, owner, banker), the dates between now and next spring that would change my mind, the method, a glossary, and a source ledger with every number dated and linked.

The preview below is ten sheets of the full guide, free to download, and every sheet number matches.

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Electronic chemicals are the consumables a chip factory buys by the barrel: the specialty chemicals, gases, and materials it uses to coat, print, etch, clean, polish, and connect a silicon wafer at almost every one of the hundreds of layers in a modern chip. They are a small slice of what a chip costs. But if any one of them is even slightly impure, the whole wafer, worth thousands of dollars, is scrapped. That asymmetry, tiny cost and total consequence, is why parts of this market earn software-like margins on commodity-sounding chemistry.

This guide cuts the market a particular way. The trade tables slice it by chemistry class: acids, gases, resist, slurry. It cuts it instead by economic behavior, because that is what an investor is actually buying: how deeply a material is qualified into a fab, who captures the value, how concentrated the supply is, and whether a financial buyer can enter at all.

The one-picture thesis: a barbell

Value concentrates at two poles and drains from the middle.

At one pole sit the chokepoints: mask blanks, the EUV pellicle, the ABF film in advanced packaging. These are the richest positions and effectively un-buyable; the parent companies own them. At the other pole sit the specialties (deposition precursors, the packaging materials matrix), which are rich and, crucially, enterable. In between is the commoditizing middle, led by wet chemicals, where value is competed away and where China localizes first.

For a financial buyer, the entire game is to reach the right-hand pole (high moat and open to entry) and to avoid the middle.

The market: about $73B, across eight segments

The semiconductor-materials market runs about $73B in 2025: roughly $45.8B making the chip on the wafer (front-end) and $27.4B cutting it out, stacking, and packaging it (back-end, and growing faster on AI packaging demand). Sizes are directional and scopes differ by source, but the eight investable segments fall out cleanly.

The dashboard: eight segments, scored the way an investor reads them

Every segment on one screen: size, growth, structure, margin, moat, and how open it is to a financial buyer.

• Photoresist: ~$5B, ~5% growth (EUV ~24%). Japan oligopoly. Margin high (~23%+). Moat: qualification lock-in. PE entry: low.

• Advanced packaging: ~$27B pool, ~9%+ (HBM ~21%). Barbell: an ABF monopoly plus a fragmented matrix. Margin mixed (7–50%). PE entry: high.

• Deposition precursors: ~$1.7B, ~10%. Platforms plus a specialist tail. Margin high (>30%). Moat: sole-source molecule. PE entry: high.

• Electronic gases: ~$6.3B, ~5%. Bulk oligopoly plus specialty chokepoints. Margin high (~30–40%). Moat: on-site annuity. PE entry: medium.

• Wet chemicals: ~$5.5B, ~5%. Fragmented, with one HF chokepoint. Margin thin (~9%). PE entry: medium.

• Sputtering targets: ~$1.8B, ~7%. JX-led oligopoly, now public. Margin mid (~20–25%). PE entry: low.

• CMP consumables: ~$3.6B, ~9%. Pads near-monopoly; slurry oligopoly. Margin high (~20–50%). Moat: qualification, no substitute. PE entry: low.

• Mask blanks & pellicles: ~$0.2B (EUV), ~15%. Near-duopoly; single-source pellicle. Margin rich (30%+ EBIT). Moat: extreme. PE entry: none.

The read: moat depth and buyer-accessibility are almost inversely related. The deepest moats (mask blanks, photoresist, CMP) are the hardest to buy, and the most accessible segment, wet chemicals, is the weakest business. The prize is the exception: a segment that is both high-moat and enterable. On this map, only deposition precursors and advanced packaging are both.

Where the profit sits

Margin rises toward the high-purity, single-source positions and collapses in the commoditizing middle. The richest sit at 30%+ EBIT (mask blanks, precursors) and up to 50% (the ABF film in packaging); the commodity floor is wet chemicals at ~9%. Margin and moat travel together, so the accessible-but-thin segments get bought for cash flow, while the accessible-and-rich ones are worth a real multiple.

That’s the map, and the eight deep dives are below. The full guide takes each of the eight segments about sixteen pages deep: value chain, fragmentation and where to hunt, the premium mechanism, how the money is made, who competes, the moat, geopolitics and reshoring, the deals and capital, the one shift to watch, and a Red Team page on what would change the thesis.

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Electronic Chemicals Field Guide (teaser)

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