Company history

Coal had been dug on the island of Matsushima, off the Nishisonogi peninsula in Nagasaki, since 1781, and worked at real scale by the 1850s. After the workings lapsed around the Meiji Restoration the Koga family, colliery operators from Saga, took over the concessions and by 1912 were raising some 360,000 tonnes a year. Mitsui Mining needed shipping coal loaded through Nagasaki that its Miike pits could not supply, and in January 1913 it bought into the Koga concession and, with Mitsui & Co. and the Koga family, established Matsushima Colliery Co. with capital of ¥2 million — a Mitsui affiliate whose output Mitsui & Co. took and sold on to the power companies. Mitsui interests held 24,000 of the 40,000 founding shares; by 1920, after a rights issue and the transfer of personal holdings into corporate names, the register was down to sixteen names and Mitsui control was settled.

The Matsushima pits were electrified and mechanised and held around 500,000 tonnes a year through the 1920s, but flooding and worsening underground conditions ended them in February 1935 after twenty-two years. The company moved its weight to the Oshima concession in the same island group, bought out Mitsui Mining’s stake in the Oshima colliery, began serious development in May 1935 and was mining by 1936 — just as wartime demands for coal output intensified.

The dissolution of the zaibatsu after 1945 cut the company loose: the Holding Company Liquidation Commission sold the Mitsui-held shares to directors and employees, and Matsushima restarted as an independent firm outside the group. Designated under the government’s priority production policy for coal and steel, and re-equipped, it passed its pre-war peak with about 530,000 tonnes in 1956. In March 1952 it began sinking the Ikeshima mine — an undersea colliery worked outward beneath the seabed from an island off Sotome — which started operating in February 1959 and would carry the company for the next four decades.

Better results took the company public. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange second section in October 1961, moved to the first section in February 1962, added Fukuoka that April and Osaka’s first section in September 1963 — an unusually broad footing for a colliery company, and one that gave it credit standing and a base for raising capital investment. Investment itself had already shifted from modernising Oshima to opening up Ikeshima. In 1969 Ikeshima passed Oshima in output and the two together reached a record 1.81 million tonnes.

That was the peak, and it arrived just as the ground gave way. From the late 1960s Japan’s primary energy shifted to oil, and domestic coal lost on both price and pollution to oil and imports; in September 1969 the company was designated under the coal industry reconstruction scheme as the whole sector contracted. Oshima, its conditions deteriorating, closed in May 1970 after thirty-five years. Successive rounds of national coal policy demanded that mining be accounted for separately from other businesses, and the industry converged on a single survival formula: hive the pits off into a separate company and earn the parent’s profit from trading, building materials and property. Matsushima had already laid the groundwork, setting up a civil-engineering contractor, Matsushima Kensetsu Kogyo, in 1968.

In April 1973, under the fifth national coal policy, the company rebuilt itself in two halves. It renamed the listed parent Matsushima Kosan and transferred coal production to a newly formed subsidiary — which then took the old name, Matsushima Colliery, for itself. The digging company and the selling company were now separate, and the parent was repositioned as a diversified trader: coal and mining supplies, then building materials, property, supermarkets and resorts. Under Takedomi, president from the late 1970s, it returned to profit after a decade of losses. In August 1979 his successor Motoyoshi Setsuji set up an overseas coal development arm and moved on concessions in New South Wales, and in April 1983 the absorption of Mitsui Mining’s building-materials sales business brought the name it carried for the next thirty-five years, Mitsui Matsushima.

Overseas coal became the second leg. A subsidiary was established in Australia in November 1990 and joined the Liddell colliery joint venture in New South Wales in April 1991 — a position it held for the next thirty-three years. Coal was then about 40% of sales, and the design was explicit: hold Ikeshima to about 1.2 million tonnes a year at controlled cost and import the shortfall. Ikeshima had reached 1.58 million tonnes in 1985, among the most efficient pits in the country, but successive policy rounds shrank it. In November 2001 the company closed Ikeshima, forty-nine years after sinking began — one of the last full-scale collieries in Japan, with some 1,200 jobs lost and a heavy mark left on the local economy of Sotome. The Australian mines stayed; the function of digging in Japan was gone.

What followed was a long, unresolved search for what else the company was. Kushima Shinichiro, a Mitsui Bank man brought in during 2005 and made president in 2008, handled the financial repair; a public offering in December 2009 raised capital to ¥8.57 billion. Under Amano Tsuneo, a fuel-trading executive who became president in 2014, the company tried seven diversifications at once between 2012 and 2015 — coal sorting engineering, Indonesian concessions, hotels, renewables, elderly care, plastic packaging, apparel — while divesting others in the same months. Two of the purchases stuck: Hanabishi, a suit maker acquired in 2015, and in February 2017 a manufacturer of photomask blanks for LCD and OLED panels, later CST, which became the profit centre of the industrial-products segment.

In October 2018 the company became a pure holding company, Mitsui Matsushima Holdings, spinning coal sales into a subsidiary as it had spun off production in 1973. Both moves pushed the parent away from coal and left it with one function: deciding what the portfolio should contain. Purchases followed steadily — the shredder and office-equipment maker Meiko Shokai in 2019, a pet-products importer and a maker of measuring equipment for quartz devices in 2020 — and in June 2020 Yoshioka Yasushi became president. A former J.P. Morgan and GCA banker who joined in 2013, he was the third consecutive outsider in the chair after a commercial banker and a trading-house man; with no internal succession, the company had simply staffed its board for deal-making.

The buying then accelerated: Systec Kyowa for a Thai manufacturing base, a move to the TSE Prime market in April 2022, Nippon Catan in overhead power-line fittings that May, and four more acquisitions in 2023 — lifting industrial-products sales from about ¥15 billion in the year to March 2024 to ¥29.6 billion the year after. Meanwhile Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent thermal coal prices soaring, and in the year to March 2023 the company posted operating profit of $272.4M (¥36bn), by far its best ever, against $76.7M (¥8bn) the year before and $179.1M (¥25bn) the year after. A dying business had handed it a fortune to spend.

In March 2024 the Liddell colliery was worked out, ending coal production and sales — thirty-three years after entering Australia, 111 after the company was founded, and more than two centuries after the first workings on Matsushima. Sales for the year to March 2025 fell 22% to $399.8M (¥61bn) and operating profit 70% to $50.3M (¥8bn). The register turned over in a single year: four companies associated with the former Murakami Fund took 37.56% between them, and the top five holders about 42% — drawn by net cash that had swelled to roughly $212.8M (¥30bn), plus listed shares and the unrealised value of the old Ikeshima site, against a much smaller market capitalisation. The company answered with a progressive dividend and large buybacks, and put its cash to work — a lending business acquired in July 2024, a securities-investment arm started that August — while targeting profit of ¥5 billion or more by March 2027. It must now earn that from the operating strength of businesses it bought, not from the price of coal.