Company history

The business began as self-supply. Sumitomo opened the Besshi copper mine in Ehime in 1691 and needed pit props and charcoal for smelting; rather than buy them, it planted and replanted its own mountains. Serious forestry came after the Meiji Restoration, when the holding grew past 20,000 chobu and modern silviculture was applied at scale. A forestry office was established in 1894 under Iba Teigo, who organised the replanting of the Besshi hillsides that the mine’s own smelter fumes had stripped bare. From about 1917 the company bought and worked forests in Kyushu, Hokkaido and Korea; before the Pacific War it managed some 140,000 chobu, and wartime operations reached Java, Sumatra and Borneo. Defeat erased the Korean and Southeast Asian holdings at a stroke.

In February 1948 the Holding Company Liquidation Commission dissolved Sumitomo’s head office and split its forests into six regional companies — Shikoku, Kyushu, Hokkai, Fuso, Hyogo and Tokai. The dispersal did not hold. Ten months later three of them merged into Fuso Agriculture & Forestry; in February 1951 that company absorbed the Kyushu and Hokkaido firms as Toho Agriculture & Forestry; and in February 1955 Toho merged with Shikoku Forestry to create Sumitomo Forestry Co., Ltd. in Osaka. Seven years and two intermediate mergers had put a single estate back under a single owner.

The reassembled company managed roughly 41,000 chobu across Hokkaido, Shikoku and Kyushu, and lived by growing timber and by collecting and selling domestic wood through a near-nationwide network of five branches and their sub-offices — about a million koku a year and some ¥2 billion of sales. It was, at that point, a forest owner with a trading arm, and nothing more.

Trading alone left the company at the mercy of other people’s demand and other people’s prices. Its answer was to move downstream until the wood it handled had a buyer inside the group. Imports of foreign timber began in 1956; a building-materials desk opened in 1961 and started trading in 1962 as plywood, ceramic, plastic and metal materials spread through construction; and in March 1964 Sumirin Plywood Industry added manufacturing to what had been a merchant’s business. In time the materials arm would cover everything a house consumes, down to sinks, sashes and bathtubs.

Six months later, in September 1964, the company set up Sumirin Land and began selling houses. Japanese housing starts quadrupled from 420,000 in 1960 to 1.86 million in 1972, and the logic was plain: the surest customer for its timber and materials was its own housebuilding division. Listing followed — Osaka Second Section in 1970, Osaka First in 1972, Tokyo First in 1990.

Upstream, the company went to the resource. In September 1970 it formed PT. Kutai Timber Indonesia (65%) with a local partner to make plywood — familiar ground, since Japanese forestry staff had managed Indonesian forests during the war — and production began in 1974. In October 1975 Sumirin Housing Sales opened custom-home operations in Tokyo and Osaka on the conviction that timber-frame houses suit Japan’s climate best. Sekisui House and Daiwa House were already far ahead in steel prefabrication; Sumitomo Forestry entered instead with post-and-beam construction backed by its own forests, mills and materials. Housing starts peaked at 1.91 million in 1973 and fell to 1.13 million by 1983, so it competed not on volume but on price per house: about ¥28 million on average by the early 1990s, against roughly ¥500,000 per tsubo for prefabricated rivals.

As log imports thinned and demand shifted to processed wood products made where the trees grow, the company built two more overseas plants: Nelson Pine Industries in New Zealand for medium-density fibreboard (1984) and PT. Rimba Partikel Indonesia for particleboard (1990). With Kutai’s plywood, the three wood-panel products now had overseas production behind them. At home the housing subsidiaries were merged into the parent by 1987, giving one company the full span from forest to finished house.

The second expansion was into the housing stock rather than new starts. A maintenance subsidiary founded in 1988 was recast in 1991 as Sumitomo Forestry Home Tech for renovation work; the Inos programme (1995) supplied timber-frame technology and materials to local builders in markets the company’s own branches could not reach; a 2003 acquisition brought rental and brokerage; and in 2006 it absorbed the building-materials trader Ataka Kenzai.

Yano Ryu, president from 1999 to 2010, took over as owner-occupied housing starts fell from about 750,000 in fiscal 1973 to roughly 370,000 by fiscal 2003. He abolished executive-referral hiring and handed recruitment wholly to the personnel department, put 110 after-sales managers into 60 locations with 24-hour phone cover to protect a base of 120,000 houses already built, and after a ¥15.4 billion net loss in the year to March 2003 ran a restructuring aimed not at more units but at a leaner cost base — ¥16.4 billion of savings against a ¥15 billion plan. Consolidated sales grew from ¥644.7 billion in the year to March 2002 to ¥911.7 billion by March 2007. Then the financial crisis cut sales by a fifth, and that slump prompted the decisive move: in September 2009 the company took a stake in Henley, a Victorian builder producing some 2,000 homes a year — the first link in a chain of acquisitions that would run for the next fifteen years.

Under Ichikawa Akira (president 2010–2020) the company bought into American housing region by region rather than acquiring one national builder: Bloomfield Homes in Texas (2013), Gehan Homes (2014, now Brightland), DRB in Maryland (2016), Edge Homes in Utah (2017), Mark III in South Carolina and Crescent Communities in the Southeast (2018), JPI (2023). Local brands and local management were left in place. Spreading across regions meant no single local downturn could carry the whole business — the same reasoning that had once spread its forests across Hokkaido, Shikoku and Kyushu. In November 2024 it consolidated Metricon, Australia’s largest homebuilder with roughly ¥700 billion of annual sales, bringing the overseas housing arm to nine groups across the two countries.

Alongside this, the company looked for new ways to use wood at home. Japanese housing starts had fallen some 40% in twenty years, and in 2018 Ichikawa announced the W350 plan for a 350-metre timber high-rise by the company’s 2041 centenary — approached in stages through 100- and 200-metre buildings — after taking a stake in the contractor Kumagai Gumi in 2017 on the view that general-contractor capability was indispensable for large timber structures. A biomass power business begun in 2013, just after Japan introduced feed-in tariffs, gave unused forest thinnings an outlet; by 2025 its seven plants generated the equivalent of about 600,000 households’ annual consumption.

Mitsuyoshi Toshiro, president since April 2020, has extended the forest holding itself — about 48,000 hectares in Japan and roughly 280,000 worldwide — and begun monetising it three ways: timber, biomass fuel and carbon credits. The 2021 “wood shock” exposed how little of Japan’s own resource could substitute for imports, with replanting absent on nearly 70% of felled land. The numbers show how far the centre of gravity has moved: overseas construction and real estate reached ¥1,238.8 billion of segment sales in the year to December 2024 against ¥172.7 billion in the year to March 2016, close to 60% of group revenue of ¥2,053.7 billion. The 1955 reunification bound one estate back together by rearranging legal entities; the 2010s bound unrelated foreign builders together with capital — and turned a Japanese forest owner into a multinational housing group.