Introduction
The CMP pads market is consolidated. A small number of suppliers account for most global revenue, and one supplier, Qnity Electronics, which inherited the pad business built over several decades by Rodel, Rohm and Haas and DuPont, holds a particularly strong position in hard pads for front-end and interconnect steps. Entegris, which added the CMP pad business of CMC Materials through its acquisition completed in July 2022, and Fujibo Holdings, the leading producer of soft pads for silicon wafer and device polishing, form the rest of the leading group. Behind them, regional producers in China, South Korea and Taiwan have built positions with domestic chipmakers, and several specialist companies serve particular steps, materials or customers.
Competition in the market is driven primarily by performance and qualification rather than by price. Chipmakers select pads on the basis of removal-rate stability, planarization efficiency, defectivity, uniformity, pad life and consistency from lot to lot, and they qualify pads as part of a complete process recipe that includes slurry, conditioner and tool settings. Once qualified, a pad tends to remain in use for the life of the process node, which gives incumbents durable positions and makes node transitions and new fabs the main points at which market shares change. Suppliers compete for these openings through joint development with chipmakers, early access to new products, application laboratories near customer fabs, and integrated offerings that combine pads with slurries, cleaning chemistries and conditioners.
The competitive environment has become more dynamic since 2022. Corporate changes have reshaped the leading group: Entegris integrated CMC Materials' pads and slurries, DuPont separated its electronics business as Qnity Electronics on 1 November 2025, and SK enpulse sold its pad division to the private equity firm Hahn & Co. under an agreement signed in December 2024. Localisation policies have strengthened regional suppliers, especially Hubei Dinglong in China. New fab construction in the United States, Japan, Europe and India has created a wave of qualification opportunities, and new applications such as hybrid bonding and SiC polishing have opened areas where processes of record are not yet fixed. Leading suppliers have responded with capacity investments close to customers and with new pad platforms aimed at advanced nodes and packaging.
Key Player Positioning
The leaders in the market are Qnity Electronics, Entegris and Fujibo Holdings. Qnity is positioned as the leading supplier because of the breadth and depth of its pad portfolio, which spans hard pads such as IC1000, Ikonic and Emblem, soft pads such as Politex, Optivision and Optivision Max, and the Suba family for silicon polishing, and because its pads are the process of record on a large number of steps at leading foundries, memory makers and IDMs. It has a global manufacturing footprint in the United States and Asia, which it extended in 2026 with the opening of a facility in Newark, Delaware, and the acquisition of a site in the Hsinchu Science Park, and it has long-term relationships with major chipmakers, illustrated by its supply agreement with SK hynix in October 2025. Entegris is a leader because it combines pads with one of the broadest CMP consumables portfolios in the industry, including slurries, pad conditioners, filters, brushes and post-CMP cleans, allowing it to offer co-optimised solutions, and because of its strong position in SiC CMP and its global network of technology centres. Fujibo is a leader in soft pads, especially for silicon wafer final polishing, where its products are widely used by the major wafer manufacturers, and it has been expanding capacity in Japan.
The challengers are Hubei Dinglong, Enpulse and KPX Chemical. Hubei Dinglong has grown rapidly as the leading domestic supplier in China, with a broad range of pads for logic and memory steps, expanding capacity and a growing portfolio of slurries and cleaning chemistries that allow it to offer integrated CMP materials to Chinese fabs; its challenger status reflects its strong domestic position and growth, balanced by limited presence outside China. Enpulse, the former pad business of SK enpulse, has built positions with Korean memory makers over a decade of development and holds technology in prepolymer formulation and pore control, and its new ownership under Hahn & Co. gives it the focus of a stand-alone pad business. KPX Chemical, a Korean polyurethane and polyol producer, draws on its upstream chemical expertise to supply pads mainly to domestic customers.
The niche players are IVT Technologies, FNS Tech, TWI Incorporated and 3M. IV Technologies, known in the market as IVT Technologies, is Taiwan's domestic pad producer, supplying pads for chip manufacturing and advanced packaging, with customers that include TSMC and Micron according to its parent company, and it is expanding capacity; its position is significant in Taiwan but limited elsewhere. FNS Tech is a Korean producer of pads and other semiconductor and display components that serves selected steps at domestic customers. TWI Incorporated is a specialist pad producer focused on particular applications and customers. 3M is a large diversified company with a strong global presence and long experience in abrasives, whose CMP activities include fixed-abrasive pads and diamond pad conditioners; its niche positioning reflects the limited scope of its pad business relative to the leaders rather than its overall scale. Smaller producers in China, the United States and elsewhere, and technology-based entrants such as developers of functional or additively manufactured pads, also compete in specific segments.
Competitor Dashboard
The competitor dashboard rates each company on product portfolio, regional presence, strategic alliances and industry experience in the CMP pads market, using a scale of Low, Medium, High and Very High. The ratings reflect the qualitative positioning of each company and are consistent with its grouping as a leader, challenger or niche player. Table 11.1 presents the dashboard.
The two leaders with the broadest portfolios, Qnity and Entegris, receive the highest ratings across most criteria, reflecting their global manufacturing and application networks, their long-term agreements with major chipmakers and their decades of CMP experience. Fujibo's ratings reflect its leadership in soft pads and its long history in polishing materials, with a narrower portfolio and fewer publicised alliances. Among challengers, Hubei Dinglong's high portfolio rating reflects its range of pads and related CMP materials, while its regional presence is concentrated in China. 3M's very high regional presence reflects the company's global footprint rather than a large pad business, which is why it is grouped as a niche player.
Porter's Five Forces framework is used here to assess the structural attractiveness of the CMP pads market from the perspective of an established supplier. The analysis considers the threat of new entrants, the bargaining power of raw-material suppliers, the bargaining power of buyers, the threat of substitute technologies and the intensity of rivalry among existing competitors. Each force is rated High, Medium or Low according to its expected effect on supplier profitability during the forecast period. The assessment reflects conditions in 2025 and 2026 and takes account of the expected changes over 2026–2032, including the growth of domestic supply in China, the construction of new fabs in several regions and the emergence of new applications in advanced packaging and compound substrates. Because the market is small relative to the semiconductor industry as a whole and closely tied to it, several forces are shaped as much by the behaviour of chipmakers as by the pad suppliers themselves.
Threat of New Entrants (Low)
The threat of new entrants is rated Low. The most important barrier is qualification. A new pad supplier must persuade chipmakers to test its products on production steps, a process that consumes the customer's engineering time and tool capacity and that can take from several months to more than a year on critical steps, during which the entrant earns little or no revenue. Even after a successful qualification, chipmakers usually begin with small volumes on less critical steps and expand only after the entrant has demonstrated consistent quality over many lots. The second barrier is technology. Producing pads with uniform porosity, hardness and thickness across large castings, with defect levels acceptable at advanced nodes, requires accumulated know-how in polyurethane chemistry, curing, machining and contamination control that is largely tacit and protected by trade secrets as well as by patents held by the established suppliers. The third barrier is capital and infrastructure: a credible entrant needs not only a clean manufacturing facility but also an application laboratory with production-class CMP tools, metrology and defect inspection, and field engineers near customer fabs.
The fourth barrier is customer concentration, since a handful of chipmakers account for most pad demand and each has established supplier relationships. Entry has nonetheless occurred in specific circumstances. Chinese suppliers, led by Hubei Dinglong, have entered successfully with the support of domestic fabs that have policy reasons to qualify local materials, and Korean suppliers built positions after 2019 with domestic memory makers. Technology-based start-ups with novel pad architectures, such as functional or additively manufactured pads, may gain footholds on specific steps. These exceptions show that entry is possible where policy or technology creates an opening, but they do not change the overall assessment that the barriers to entry are high and that new entrants pose a limited threat to established suppliers outside localising markets. Even in localising markets, entrants typically gain positions first on mature-node or less critical steps, and the time needed to progress to advanced steps gives established suppliers an opportunity to respond with local investment, pricing adjustments and new products.
The capital needed to build a credible global presence, with plants and laboratories in several regions, is also beyond the reach of most new companies, which limits most entrants to a regional role for the foreseeable future.
Bargaining Power of Suppliers (Medium)
The bargaining power of raw-material suppliers is rated Medium. On one side, the inputs used in CMP pads are concentrated and specialised. Diisocyanates are produced by a small number of large chemical companies, high-purity prepolymers and aromatic diamine curatives come from a narrow group of producers, and expanded microspheres for pore formation are available from very few sources. Pad makers have usually qualified only one or two sources for each critical input, and changing a source requires internal testing and often customer notification or requalification, which gives incumbent input suppliers a degree of leverage. Logistics for moisture-sensitive prepolymers add to this dependence, because regional pad plants often rely on imports of key chemicals that must be shipped and stored under controlled conditions. Input prices are linked to petrochemical and energy markets, so pad makers are exposed to cost movements outside their control, as shown by the increases in raw-material and energy costs that pad makers cited in their 2026 outlooks. On the other side, several factors limit supplier power.
The semiconductor pad market is a very small customer for the large diisocyanate producers, which reduces their interest in exploiting it but also means that their pricing is set by broader market conditions rather than targeted at pad makers. Some leading pad makers produce their own prepolymers or have long-term agreements with input suppliers, which reduces exposure. Raw materials account for a modest share of the value of a finished pad compared with manufacturing know-how, quality control and technical service, so input price changes have a moderate effect on pad margins. And the major input suppliers have strong incentives to maintain relationships with pad makers, which give them a reference position in a high-technology market. On balance, suppliers can influence costs and pose a supply-continuity risk, particularly for smaller pad makers with single sources, but they cannot capture a large share of the value created in the pad market. The balance could shift if chemical regulation were to restrict a key input, such as a particular curative, without a qualified substitute, because the few suppliers of compliant alternatives would then gain leverage, and pad makers are therefore investing in alternative formulations as a precaution.
Bargaining Power of Buyers (Medium)
The bargaining power of buyers is rated Medium. Buyer concentration is high: a small number of foundries, memory makers and IDMs account for most global pad consumption, and the largest of them purchase pads in volumes that make them critical accounts for every supplier. These buyers have sophisticated procurement organisations, benchmark prices across suppliers and regions, seek annual price reductions and increasingly require dual sourcing, all of which strengthen their negotiating position. They also have the technical capability to evaluate alternative pads and, where a credible alternative exists, can use the threat of qualification to extract concessions. However, several factors offset this power. Once a pad is qualified on a step, switching costs are high, as requalification consumes engineering resources and carries yield risk, so buyers are reluctant to change suppliers on critical steps for the sake of modest savings. Pads account for a small share of the cost of a processed wafer, while their influence on yield is large, so buyers place more weight on performance and reliability than on price. On the most advanced steps, only one or two suppliers may be able to meet the specification, which limits buyers' options.
Buyer power therefore varies by segment: it is relatively high on mature-node and high-volume memory steps where several qualified suppliers compete and where local suppliers offer lower prices, and relatively low on leading-edge logic, HBM and hybrid-bonding steps where performance requirements narrow the field. Silicon wafer manufacturers and OSATs, which operate on thinner margins than chipmakers, are more price-sensitive, while the largest foundries are more focused on supply assurance and joint development. Long-term supply agreements, such as the agreement Qnity signed with SK hynix in October 2025, illustrate how the balance of power is managed in practice: the buyer secures volume and continuity, while the supplier secures a multi-year commitment that justifies investment in capacity and development.
Threat of Substitutes (Low)
The threat of substitutes is rated Low. CMP has been the standard technique for global planarization in semiconductor manufacturing since the 1990s, and no alternative technology currently offers comparable planarity, throughput and cost across the range of materials and steps where pads are used. Alternative planarization approaches, such as etch-back processes, spin-on dielectrics, electrochemical mechanical planarization and plasma-based smoothing, are used in specific situations but have not displaced CMP for mainstream steps, and in several cases new architectures have replaced etch-back with CMP rather than the reverse. Within CMP, the main substitution risk is between pad types and designs rather than against the pad itself: fixed-abrasive pads, functional pads that react with polishing fluids, and additively manufactured pads change the type of pad used but remain within the pad market. Abrasive-free and slurry-light processes may change the balance of value between pads and slurries, potentially increasing the pad's share. A further form of substitution is the reduction of pad consumption through longer pad life, which reduces the number of pads used per wafer without removing the need for pads.
For substrate polishing, alternative techniques such as ion-beam finishing or plasma-assisted polishing exist for specialised applications but are not cost-competitive at volume. In advanced packaging, some flows can avoid CMP by using different bonding approaches, such as thermo-compression bonding with micro-bumps, but the move towards finer pitches favours hybrid bonding, which requires more CMP rather than less. The low threat of substitutes is one of the most attractive structural features of the market. It means that the market's growth is tied to the growth of semiconductor manufacturing itself, and that suppliers can invest in pad development with confidence that the underlying process will remain in use throughout the forecast period and beyond.
Intensity of Competitive Rivalry (Medium)
The intensity of rivalry is rated Medium. The market is concentrated, with a leading supplier holding a strong position in hard pads, a small group of other established suppliers sharing much of the remaining value, and regional suppliers serving domestic markets. Concentration tends to moderate rivalry, as do differentiation and switching costs: suppliers compete primarily on performance, quality consistency, technical support and supply assurance, and price competition on qualified steps is limited by lock-in. Growth also moderates rivalry, since a market that expands with wafer output and process complexity allows suppliers to grow without necessarily taking share from one another. However, rivalry is increasing in several areas. In China, domestic suppliers compete aggressively on price and service for positions at local fabs, and brokerage research on Hubei Dinglong has highlighted the rapid expansion of its capacity, which adds supply to the market. At new fabs in the United States, Europe, Japan and India, suppliers compete for initial qualification, knowing that positions won during the ramp may last for decades. In emerging applications such as hybrid bonding and SiC polishing, where processes of record are not yet fixed, suppliers compete through new pad platforms and joint development.
Established suppliers have responded with investments in capacity close to customers, new product launches such as Qnity's Emblem and Optivision Max platforms, and integrated offerings combining pads with slurries and cleaning chemistries, as Entegris does across its CMP portfolio. Ownership changes have also altered the competitive set, with Qnity's separation from DuPont in November 2025 creating a focused semiconductor materials company and the acquisition of SK enpulse's pad business by Hahn & Co. in 2025 placing a major Korean producer under private equity ownership. Overall, rivalry is intensifying at the margins of the market while remaining moderate in its established core. Over the forecast period, the balance between these tendencies will depend on how quickly regional suppliers progress to advanced steps and on whether new applications consolidate around a few pad platforms or remain open to multiple suppliers.
Threat of New Entrants: Low; Long fab qualification cycles, tacit polyurethane process know-how and the need for application laboratories near customers.
Bargaining Power of Suppliers: Medium; Concentrated sources for diisocyanates, curatives and microspheres, offset by the small share of raw materials in pad value.
Bargaining Power of Buyers: Medium; Highly concentrated chipmaker demand, offset by high switching costs and the yield impact of pad performance.
Threat of Substitutes: Low; No alternative matches CMP for global planarization; new architectures and hybrid bonding add CMP steps.
Intensity of Competitive Rivalry: Medium; Concentrated and differentiated market, with rising competition in China, at new fabs and in emerging applications.
