Making the world work from Moses Lake: MLI logs a record year

MOSES LAKE — You may not know what Moses Lake Industries makes, but the odds are you use something made possible by the chemical company’s products — a cellphone, a laptop or a widescreen television.

“What we do here is we make ultra-high purity chemicals that are used in computer chip manufacturing, in the manufacturing of integrated circuits,” said Brett Hanson, MLI’s vice president for operations. “And our biggest customers are companies like Intel, Samsung and Micron.”

“It’s virtually 100% guaranteed,” Hansen said.

“They’re everywhere, everywhere,” added Hiroyuki Era, MLI president and CEO.

Because of that, the last few years have been good for MLI, and 2020 has been “a record year,” Hansen said. A subsidiary of the privately owned, Kawasaki, Japan-based Tama Chemicals, the company is fairly tight-lipped about exactly what “good” and “record” mean.

“The last five years our sales have tripled. That we can say,” Era said.

Started in 1984 after Tama owner and founder Tsurahide Cho met an engineer from Moses Lake during a trip to Antarctica, Moses Lake Industries began by making “ultra-pure” TMAH — tetramethylammonium hydroxide — used by computer chip makers to etch the tiny grooves in silicon semiconductors — and has, over the years, branched out to create copper and cobalt compounds used in the electroplating portion of making semiconductor chips.

Hansen said MLI has customers that are developing circuit pathways on integrated chips that are as small as 3 nanometers — three one-billionths of a meter — wide. By comparison, Hansen explained, a human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide.

“So as a team, we continue to develop and build our capability, and so I believe that is a big part of what’s making us successful,” Hansen said.

The company recently finished a $17 million expansion of its electrolysis operations that will allow it to boost production by 80%, and it has two more expansion projects slated for this year.

“We continue to invest in the company,” Hansen said. “We hire local contractors, and we buy local as much as we can. So even though we are a global company, a lot of money gets put right back into our community through our employees and projects like this.”

With roughly 400 employees, MLI is one of the community’s largest private employers, and despite the COVID-19 pandemic, workers have kept going out to keep MLI’s production lines humming and even expanding.

“These are the real heroes for us,” Hansen said. “That’s how we’ve been able to have a record year here.”

Commitment to community is also important for what is still a family-owned company, Hansen said, noting that Cho’s son Toshitsura is president of Tama Chemicals. In 2020, MLI has donated $4,000 to the Grant County Sheriff’s Office for its “Shop With a Cop” program, as well as $2,500 each to the Moses Lake Food Bank and the Boys & Girls Clubs of The Columbia Basin, and $5,000 to Serve Moses Lake to help care for the area’s homeless.

“Serve Moses Lake is relatively new for us,” Hansen said. “That’s a really important one, because that’s helping take care of the least fortunate folks in our community.”

Despite being owned by a Japanese company, Era said the founder, Cho, decided to call the company Moses Lake Industries as a way to highlight the company would be a cooperative effort between Americans and Japanese.

“We have to live together here, so that’s what he picked this name as the company name,” Era said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.