Semiconductor History | KEMET Tower, 15 June 2020 — YAGEO Buys a Century of Capacitor Know-How

At US$27.20 a share, KEMET’s life as a public company ended here on 15 June 2020. From KEMET Tower at One East Broward Boulevard in Fort Lauderdale, the electronic-components supplier announced that YAGEO had completed its all-cash acquisition. The approximately US$1.6 billion equity transaction made KEMET a wholly owned YAGEO subsidiary and removed its shares from public trading. This was more than a purchase of production capacity. Founded in 1919, KEMET carried a century of capacitor engineering, customer qualifications, and manufacturing relationships into a Taiwanese group that had begun with resistors in 1977. The two catalogues overlapped, but they were not identical. KEMET brought ceramic, tantalum, film, and aluminium-electrolytic capacitors together with electromagnetic components, sensors, and actuators; its parts reached demanding automotive, industrial, aerospace, medical, communications, and computing applications. That breadth explains the historical importance of the deal. YAGEO was not simply becoming larger in the familiar high-volume passive-component market: it was buying product families and design-in positions that take years for customers to qualify, especially where reliability matters more than the lowest unit price. The date also separates agreement from completion. YAGEO and KEMET signed their merger agreement in November 2019, but regulatory reviews and shareholder approval still stood between the announcement and the moment KEMET legally became part of YAGEO seven months later. This pin marks KEMET’s headquarters at the time of completion; the public filings do not identify a particular room where closing documents were exchanged. SEC records placed the company on the second floor in June 2020, while KEMET and YAGEO now list the fifth floor at the same address. The glass tower therefore remains more than a historical proxy. In 2026 it is still KEMET’s stated headquarters and YAGEO Group’s Fort Lauderdale sales office, showing that the acquisition absorbed the company without erasing its century-old name. The cover shows generic 10 µF tantalum capacitors, not confirmed KEMET products. They represent one of the component families central to KEMET’s portfolio; no freely licensed photograph of the merger or KEMET Tower was found. Photo: Mataresephotos, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons