NS Solutions - Company History

In October 1980 Nippon Steel set up Nittetsu Computer Systems — “NICS” — in Chiyoda, Tokyo, wholly owned, with ¥50 million of capital, to carve out the operation of its own core systems. By the late 1970s the steel industry ran its business on IBM mainframes, and Nippon Steel’s internal systems — mill operations, order management, sales — were among the largest in Japan. No outside systems house could readily supply that capability, so making a subsidiary of it preserved the accumulated expertise while opening it to the outside market, with the parent as a guaranteed customer. Regional subsidiaries followed the mill network from 1985, and through them the business widened from steel-town suppliers to mid-sized companies generally.

The real spin-out came in April 1988, when the company took over Nippon Steel’s information and telecommunications systems division and renamed itself ENICOM, with capital of ¥2.2 billion. In the same six months the parent also created three joint ventures — with Itochu, Hitachi and IBM Japan. That a single steelmaker launched four IT companies in half a year is a measure of how large corporate IT spending had become in Japan. Registration as a systems integrator with MITI followed in December 1988, a telecommunications licence in 1991, and the first two data centres in 1992 and 2000.

In April 2001 the company acquired Nippon Steel’s electronics and information and communications division, raised capital to ¥6.5 billion and became NS Solutions Corporation. The three joint ventures of 1988 became its own subsidiaries at the same moment, and the parent’s IT function — split four ways for over a decade — was gathered under one roof. The reason was commercial rather than administrative: to take a cross-industry contract through a single window, the pieces had to be in one company.

In October 2002 NS Solutions listed on the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, raising capital to ¥12.9 billion, and in the same month opened its first overseas company in Shanghai. Sales settled into a ¥150–170 billion range through the 2000s, split between running Nippon Steel’s systems and outside integration work, and the company built out data centres roughly every five years while pushing consulting and managed operations alongside them.

Overseas expansion ran with the parent’s. A US company came in 2006, a financial-engineering specialist was bought in 2008, and between 2011 and 2014 subsidiaries were established or acquired in Singapore, Thailand, the UK and Indonesia. The revenue base held steady through the post-Lehman slump — evidence that the mix of contracted operations and integration work was less cyclical than the steel business it came from.

When Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal merged in October 2012, the subsidiary followed with a name of its own, and followed again in April 2019 when the parent became Nippon Steel Corporation — hence NS Solutions in English throughout, and Nittetsu Solutions in Japanese today. In April 2017, with the transfer of employees from the Sumitomo side’s systems company complete, NS Solutions became the sole contractor for every system in the merged steel group.

Under Shashiki Munetaka, president from 2012 to 2019, the company settled into a two-axis model — group work and outside integration — while building the three pillars of IoT, cloud and data centres. Sales grew more than 10% between the years to March 2015 and March 2018, from ¥218.5 billion to ¥230.9 billion, and IFRS was adopted for the year to March 2019.

Morita Hiroyuki, president from April 2019, framed the business around supporting customers’ own digital capability — developing their people and passing on tacit knowledge — just as corporate DX spending in Japan took off. Revenue kept climbing through the pandemic dip: ¥255.1 billion and ¥25.3 billion of operating profit in the year to March 2019, ¥270.3 billion and ¥29.8 billion by the year to March 2022. The head office moved to Minato in 2020, and the listing moved to the Prime Market in April 2022.

Tamaoki Kazuhiko became president in April 2023 and named two themes: generative AI, and helping customers bring development in-house. The second is the more consequential, because it inverts the company’s own origin — a business that began by selling a steelmaker’s in-house systems capability to the outside world now sells other companies the ability to stop outsourcing. Rather than piling up more contracted projects, it combines forty years of cross-industry method with AI-assisted productivity, and it bought the expertise: TechsEngine Solutions in April 2024 and OSP Solutions that October.

The year to March 2025 set records — ¥338.3 billion of sales, ¥38.5 billion of operating profit at an 11.4% margin, ¥27.0 billion of net profit — and in January 2025 the company added listings in Nagoya and Fukuoka, a signal about its regional subsidiaries as much as about liquidity. About 20% of sales still come from the Nippon Steel group; raising the independence of the outside business is the task that remains.