China’s push for self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacturing has benefited companies across the supply chain. The latest to get a boost is Hubei Dinglong, which supplies materials essential for the chip making process. Its Shenzhen-listed shares have surged nearly 116% over the past year, propelling cofounders Zhu Shuangquan and Zhu Shunquan into the three comma club.
Shuangquan, the company’s 61-year-old chairman, and his 57-year-old brother Shunquan, who serves as CEO, own stakes of roughly 15% each. Forbes estimates the siblings are worth $1.3 billion apiece based on Friday’s closing price of 64.19 yuan. Hubei Dinglong didn’t respond to a comment request regarding the pair’s billionaire status.
The Wuhan-based company is China’s key player in chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), a process to flatten the surface of silicon wafers so that circuits can be printed and chips can be stacked. The company says it is China’s only supplier that covers the full range of CMP materials, from the semi-liquid known as slurries for flattening to the cleaning fluid for removing any residue after the process.
Since the U.S. imposed chip-related export controls on China in 2022, Dinglong has expanded into materials for lithography, a major hurdle for China’s self-reliance in semiconductors where ultraviolet light is used to print circuits onto silicon wafers. In lithography, Dinglong manufactures photoresist, a chemical that captures the circuit design, though its most advanced products can only be used in lower-end chip manufacturing.
Earlier, the company also expanded into materials for advanced semiconductor packaging. Its products include temporary bonding adhesive, a specialized glue used to stick silicon wafers to a block of glass so that they can be ground down to be finer than a human hair before being stacked to make chips such as high-bandwidth memory.
In the first quarter of 2026, Dinglong’s net profit surged 78% year-on-year to 251 million yuan ($36.9 million) on revenue that rose 24% to 1 billion yuan, driven mainly by its CMP materials business. Dinglong said its advanced chip packaging materials and photoresist ventures are still in their early phase, though they have entered “the stage of stable, small-batch supply.”
While a comprehensive breakdown of revenue wasn’t available for the first quarter, Dinglong in 2025 made more than half of its 3.7 billion yuan revenue from semiconductor-related businesses. Other than materials for CMP, advanced packaging and lithography, the company also makes those for OLED display screens. The rest of the sales came from materials and components for printers, such as toners; the company divested some of its printer-related business to focus on semiconductor materials. During the period, about 70% of its revenue was generated domestically.
Prior to Dinglong, Shuangquan and Shunquan were managers at state-owned enterprises Hubei International Economic and Foreign Trade and Hubei International Economic and Technical Cooperation, respectively. In 2000, the brothers cofounded Dinglong in the hopes of reducing China’s dependence on imports. They started with chemicals used in printer toners, a segment that was dominated at the time by Japanese and Western chemical giants. Thereafter, the company expanded into other printer consumables and became a major supplier of chemicals for color printing in China.
Shuangquan and Shunquan took Dinglong public on the Shenzhen stock exchange’s tech-focused ChiNext board in a 458 million yuan IPO in 2010. Two years later, they pivoted to CMP materials, aiming to replicate their success in the printing sector by targeting the dominance of foreign incumbents. In an interview with state-owned newspaper Securities Times in February, Shunquan recalled the expansion was sparked by the team’s discovery that CMP materials had some chemistry elements in common with toner materials.
In a separate interview with state-owned newspaper Changjiang Daily in 2019, Shuangquan shared their secret of success. “In the early days of starting a business, aside from an idea, a burst of drive and an insight into a market or an innovative product opportunity, Chinese private enterprises had nothing. They relied solely on a ‘burn the boats’ spirit to get things moving,” he noted. “Dinglong will never lose this drive. There is a much larger world out there waiting for us to conquer.”
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Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zinnialee/2026/05/08/brothers-become-billionaires-from-supplying-chemicals-to-chinas-semiconductor-industry/
