Nissin Foods Holdings — Company History

From Chuko Sosha to Chicken Ramen: the first ten years

In September 1948 Ando Momofuku (安藤百福) established Chuko Sosha Co., Ltd. at Shiomi-cho, Izumiotsu, Osaka Prefecture, with stated objects covering the processing and sale of marine products, spinning and other textile manufacture, the sale of western clothing and sundries, and the publishing and sale of books. Capital was ¥5 million, and in September 1949 the firm was renamed Sunsea Shokusan Co., Ltd. and moved its head office to Kita-ku, Osaka. Ando had been born on 5 March 1910 in southern Taiwan; at twenty-two he started a business importing knitted goods into mainland Japan, and went on to run several ventures, among them the manufacture of magic-lantern projectors and of prefabricated barrack housing. During the war, while subcontracting aircraft parts, he was taken away by the military police and was not released until the forty-fifth day, after which he spent sixty days at the Central Hospital in Kita-ku, Osaka. After the war he began salt making and dried-sardine production in Izumiotsu, only to be arrested by the occupation authorities on a complaint from the Osaka prefectural police; by the time he was released most of his property had been confiscated.

In the Sunsea Shokusan years Ando had taken on the chairmanship of a credit union, Osaka Kagin (大阪華銀). The union failed and he lost his entire fortune. All that remained was his house in Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture, and in a shed built in its back garden he set about developing instant noodles. Postwar Japan was short of food, and the government was promoting flour-based eating and putting bread into school lunches; Ando thought that what suited the Japanese was not bread but noodles, and built his product around five conditions for a food of the people — good taste and nutrition, simple preparation, keeping quality, hygiene and a low price. Nearly a year of trial and error produced the flash oil-heat drying method (油熱乾燥法), and in August 1958 he began manufacturing and selling the first application of it, the instant bag noodle Chicken Ramen. That December the head office moved to Chuo-ku, Osaka and the company was renamed Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd.

Volume underwritten by the trading houses, and a national distribution

Chicken Ramen cost ¥35 at a time when a portion of dried noodles cost ¥20, and shops would not take it at first. Ando printed the words sole distributor, Mitsubishi Corporation on the bag to borrow the wholesalers' trust, and pressed for settlement in cash. Sanan Masashi (佐南正司), general manager of the grain and fertiliser department at Mitsubishi Corporation's Osaka branch, asked him to take the name off — but Ando had just placed a large print order for bags carrying it, and even when Mitsubishi's president Takagaki Katsujiro (高垣勝次郎) shouted that he would end the relationship, the bags did not change. Because raw materials and equipment were paid for with promissory notes, cash piled up in hand. In the spring of 1959 Ando poured that cash into 15,000 square metres of land at Takatsuki, near Osaka, bought in a single stroke, and built a plant of 6,600 square metres of floor space to begin volume production.

The plant was completed in December 1959, and Nissin moved its head office to Takatsuki at the same time. The workforce passed 1,000 in 1961. In sales the company placed three trading houses — Mitsubishi Corporation, Itochu and Tohshoku — as general distributors from the start, pushing product through the distribution machinery under each of them and so avoiding the risk of selling on its own account. There was almost no direct selling, and most raw-material purchasing went through the same three houses. Capital rose from $55,556 (¥20m) in March 1960 to $138,889 (¥50m) that August, $277,778 (¥100m) that November and $416,667 (¥150m) in June 1961 — thirtyfold in a little over a year. Television commercials began in 1960, and Sanwa Bank and Mitsui Bank stood side by side as the company's banks. In June 1962 Nissin took over the business rights of Wave Foods and placed its Tokyo plant on that site as the production base for the Kanto region.

Enforcing the patent, opening it, and the second-section listing

Instant noodles needed only simple equipment and lent themselves to mass production, so entrants came one after another. There were 130 firms by 1961, supply and demand broke down, and dumping and shoddy goods spread. In June 1962, on obtaining a patent on the instant-noodle manufacturing process, Nissin announced that it would take resolute measures against anyone continuing to manufacture without permission, a warning aimed at about 110 companies. Against Ace Foods, which ignored the warning, it applied to the Osaka District Court for the preservation of evidence. Counting semi-instant products, there were then more than 140 makers nationwide, and the patent affair left them unsure whether to stay or go. Over the question of who had filed first, Chen Rongtai (陳栄泰) of Yamato Tsusho, who maintained that he had developed and applied for the process before Nissin, sought a provisional injunction, calling Nissin's conduct high-handed.

Nissin then opened the patent at the request of other makers, concluding licence agreements with 61 companies. Ando had founded the Japan Instant Ramen Association in 1959, and in 1964 recast it as the incorporated Japan Instant Ramen Industry Association (日本即席ラーメン工業協会), an organisation for raising quality and for coexistence and shared prosperity in the trade, serving as its chairman himself. In sorting out the more than 300 firms in the business, the method was to pair up those who got on with one another, narrow the head makers to about ten, and place the rest under their wings. The number of makers fell to about 50 by the end of 1962, and the dispute with Yamato Tsusho was settled. Ando looked back on it in later years: it was precisely because I made the patent open that this industry came into being (Nikkei Business, 23 February 2004).

On 21 October 1963 Nissin listed its shares on the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges. At listing, capital was $416,667 (¥150m), 3 million shares were listed and there were 930 employees; the largest holders were Ando Momofuku with 1,580,600 shares, followed by Ando Koju (安藤宏寿) with 420,000 and Mitsubishi Corporation with 124,000. In the year to March 1963, Chicken Ramen and Chicken Ramen Plus Curry together accounted for 89 per cent of sales by product, the remaining 11 per cent being Chicken Ramen New Touch. Sales had grown tenfold in three years, on the strength of the two patents and of having Mitsubishi Corporation, Itochu and Tohshoku as selling agents. The officers at listing were Ando Momofuku as president, Ando Koju as executive vice-president and Togami Mineji (砥上峰次) and Arimoto Kazuma (有元一馬) among the managing directors, with a single annual settlement on 31 March. In June 1963, the year of the listing, the company began making and selling Nissin Yakisoba, and the year after the listing capital was raised to $625,000 (¥225m).

A crowded market, and the first detour into rice

In October 1964 the Yokohama plant was completed in Totsuka-ku, Yokohama as an instant-noodle production works; it was to make spaghetti-type new products as well and so widen the range. In March 1966 the joint venture Kyushu Nissin Co., Ltd. was established at Tosu, Saga Prefecture, and that September the company launched Wafu Chicken (和風チキン), followed in August 1967 by Nissin Lunch. A doubling of capital in December 1967 took it to $1.3M (¥450m). By 1968 the instant-ramen trade had 200 makers, annual output of 3 billion servings and sales of $152.8M (¥55bn), with the four big specialists holding close to 70 per cent between them and none of them able to establish a clear advantage. Going back to the 1962 figures, national output had been about $27.8M (¥10bn), with most of the demand concentrated in the Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto and Tokyo-Yokohama conurbations.

Faced with the crowd, Ando turned to rice as a new market. Nissin Lunch, launched in 1967, was his answer, but because he tried to force the opening with ramen technology it remained a half-finished product. Made as the label directed it tasted good, yet an instruction to add one cup of water meant nothing definite when cups vary in size, so quantities differed and the maker's intent never reached the consumer. The decision to withdraw did not come easily, and only after repeated internal argument over whether to press on did the company pull back, taking a loss of $1.4M (¥500m). Instant noodles, meanwhile, had become a fast-turning loss leader in the supermarkets and a fixture of the discount wars, which sharpened price competition further.

Designing Cup Noodles as a food the whole world could eat

In 1966 Ando went to a supermarket in Los Angeles to sell Chicken Ramen. There was no bowl for the tasting, so the American he was dealing with broke the noodles up, put them into a paper cup, poured hot water over them and ate them with a fork. Watching noodles eaten without chopsticks or a bowl, Ando conceived of noodles that could be eaten with one hand. Instant ramen had the advantages of convenience, taste, nutrition, hygiene and low cost, but it required chopsticks and a pot to cook in, and in countries where chopsticks are not used it was not accepted. The search for something that could be eaten in the same form anywhere in the world ended at Cup Noodles. For the container he took expanded polystyrene, then used only for tuna boxes, and thinned it from two centimetres to two millimetres.

To make Cup Noodles an international product, Nissin spent close to two years on market research. The results from a panel of 20,000 were pessimistic on the whole, and in Japan in particular there was a strong view that putting noodles in a cup and eating them while walking offended against good manners and morals. Younger respondents, however, said they would be glad to eat it, and monitors abroad said in numbers that it was tasty and easy. Ando staked the future on that response and put Cup Noodles on sale in September 1971 at ¥100 apiece. With the standard price of a bag of noodles at ¥30, wholesalers fought shy of ¥100 as far too dear, and the product did not ride the existing wholesale channels. Nissin used television commercials to explain the method of preparation directly to consumers, and demonstrated and sold it in the Ginza pedestrian precinct, which had only just begun.

For production the company turned over land at Toride, Ibaraki Prefecture that had been secured for building a rice plant. From March 1971 it invested $2.8M (¥1bn) in a dedicated works, which began operating on 16 October that year as the Kanto plant. Cup Noodles was a product assembled from four patents, and its production equipment required heavy capital, so the company reckoned that followers would not appear easily. In the event the moulding of cups from a special heat-insulating paper could not keep pace, and the first-phase plan of 200,000 servings a day could not be carried out. Output stood at only about 40,000 servings a day in January 1972, and Nissin assumed no contribution to sales or profit for the period, putting almost all of it into product sampling and marketing. For the ingredients it built a freeze-dried food plant at Osafune, Okayama Prefecture, costing $1.3M (¥400m) and producing 5 tonnes a month, and in March 1972 established Nissin F.D. Foods Co., Ltd. in Setouchi in the same prefecture.

Recovering abroad, failing at rice, and the battleship products

Overseas operations began with Nissin Foods (U.S.A.) Co., Inc., set up at Gardena, California in July 1970. The Los Angeles plant was built to start up in February 1972, but first-year sales came to only 50,000 servings. The noodles were too long and the smell of the soy-sauce flavour did not suit Americans, so the company shortened the noodles and reworked the recipe to move soy sauce into the background. Accounts balanced in the fifth year, profit came in the sixth, and from the seventh growth doubled year on year. In 1977 it sold 180 million servings in the United States, and set a target of 350 million for 1978. In the same period Nissin licensed its technology to United Biscuits of Britain, reversing the direction of a processed-food technology flow that had until then run on imports.

The second attempt at rice was Cup Rice. In the autumn of 1974, with commercialisation in sight, Nissin spent $10.2M (¥3bn) a full year before the formal announcement on a volume plant of 50 tonnes a day inside the Shiga works. It set a sales target of 20,000 tonnes and $66.9M (¥20bn) a year, and in 1975 launched seven varieties — prawn pilaf, salmon chazuke, gomoku-zushi, dry curry, Chinese stew, sekihan red rice and chicken rice. Yet in the year to March 1980, five years after the full launch, Cup Rice sales were $882,262 (¥200m), about one hundredth of the original plan. A selling price of ¥200 a portion was too high measured against the received idea that rice is a cheap thing. Cup Noodles had sold as a quasi-staple; Cup Rice ran head-on into rice, the staple itself.

In August 1972 Nissin was designated to the first sections of the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges. The instant-ramen trade at this time had 100 firms nationwide and annual output of 3.5 billion servings, of which some 60 belonged to the keiretsu of the five largest makers, and the top five together took about 82 per cent of total demand. Nissin's share was 22 to 23 per cent on annual supply of 700 million servings with 500 employees, and it laid out regional production and regional selling with 18 exclusive plants nationwide on top of its three works at the head office, Yokohama and Kanto. In February 1973 it established Nissin Dart Co., Ltd. at Ritto, Shiga Prefecture as a joint venture with Dart Industries of the United States. The Shiga plant and the Food Research Institute were completed in September 1973 and the Shimonoseki plant in August 1975, and in April 1977, on completion of the head-office building, the head office moved to its present site in Yodogawa-ku, Osaka. As of 1978 the mainstays were Cup Noodles, Donbei, Men Hatchin (めん八珍) and U.F.O., each on a scale of $49.8M (¥10bn) or more, and the policy was not to bother with small items. In March 1980 annual sales reached $441.1M (¥100bn).

The eldest son dismissed, and the start of the Ando Koki era

In 1981 Ando Momofuku installed his eldest son Ando Koju as president, only to dismiss him in all but name in 1983, two years into the term, and take the chairmanship and presidency himself. Momofuku said that when he warned Koju about being frequently away from the company and missing important internal meetings, the answer came back that if it had come to that he would rather resign. Koju for his part replied that his father let no one speak at board meetings, and that while he was abroad on business his father had altered the articles of association to strengthen the chairman's powers. In 1985 Momofuku passed the presidency to his second son, Ando Koki (安藤宏基). Koki was born in October 1947 in Osaka Prefecture, graduated from the faculty of commerce at Keio University in March 1971, joined Nissin in July 1973 and became a director in May 1974.

Koki had thought up the product name Demae Iccho while still reading commerce at Keio, and after graduating studied marketing in the United States before joining Nissin on the development side. When he took his father a yakisoba in a disc-shaped container, Momofuku objected that it took up too much space on the shelf and that the name was no good, but agreed once the equipment investment, estimated at ¥150 million, was cut to ¥50 million — and this U.F.O. was a hit. In 1985 Nissin was earning $628.9M (¥150bn) a year from ramen, and Cup Noodles, developed in 1971, accounted for 40 per cent of sales. The collapse of the credit union he had chaired before founding the company had left its lesson, and Nissin ran as a rule without borrowing. In March 1988 the Tokyo head-office building was completed in Shinjuku, Tokyo and the Tokyo branch was renamed the Tokyo Head Office; that October the Central Research Institute, housing the Food Research Institute and the Food Safety Research Institute, was completed at Kusatsu, Shiga Prefecture.

The method of pressing with patents did not change abroad. When Toyo Suisan moved to begin producing cup noodles in the United States, Nissin sued in the local courts, claiming that this touched its own patents; Toyo Suisan sued in turn to have the Nissin patents invalidated, and the two were locked in litigation. On 20 February 1979, in a personal letter signed by executive vice-president Togami Mineji, Nissin proposed two things: that both sides withdraw their suits, and that Toyo Suisan, having entered the United States, pay what the letter called a greeting fee. The sum named was $434,783 (¥100m), but when Toyo Suisan said it would make this known to the Japanese ministries and to the other firms in the trade, Nissin gave way, and a settlement was reached on terms allowing each side free use of the other's patents. In most of the litigation over cups, Nissin was the plaintiff.

Brand managers, and Raoh, the last to arrive

In the spring of 1990 Nissin introduced a brand-manager system. What had been two people, one for bag noodles and one for cup noodles, became eight by brand — Cup Noodles, Raoh, Donbei, Yakisoba U.F.O., Demae Iccho and others — with production, selling, new launches and responsibility for profit on the brand in question all resting on one person. Koki set them against each other inside the company: it is only to be expected that Raoh eats into some of our other products. Cannibalisation is fine; the one being eaten is the one at fault (Nikkei Business, 10 May 1993). By 1995 there were ten brand-manager offices for ramen alone and 14 counting yoghurt and confectionery, with profit centres placed at nine branches so that the business was managed on two axes at once. Each manager had sales and profit targets, and annual pay rose on meeting them. The channel Nissin put its weight behind through this system was the convenience store: in 1993 the split of sales by channel was 36 per cent convenience stores, 30 per cent mass retailers and 34 per cent other shops.

Fresh-type cup ramen was commercialised by Myojo Foods in July 1991, with Toyo Suisan and Shimadaya Honten following. All of them had trouble with the firmness of the noodles measured against real ramen, and sales did not grow even when prices were cut in effect. Nissin had set up a 13-strong development team reporting directly to Koki inside the Shiga development laboratory in the spring of 1990, and for the two years until the finished product emerged in May 1992 it worked on nothing else, without long weekends or the Obon break, resting only on Sundays. The crux was how to reconcile two opposed requirements: alkaline kansui water to give the noodles their bite, against the complete sealing by acidification that long keeping demanded. Nissin Raoh went on sale in the Tokyo area in September 1992, one year and two months behind Myojo, at a suggested retail price of ¥250, the same as the firms that had gone first and ¥100 above a conventional instant cup noodle. Even so it recorded sales of $58.5M (¥7bn) in the first six months, and from November 1992 it held first place by value across roughly 1,800 FamilyMart stores in the Kanto region.

The instant-noodle market in 1992 came to 4.75 billion servings, of which Nissin held 34.5 per cent, followed by Sanyo Foods with 15.6 per cent, Toyo Suisan with 15.5 per cent, Myojo Foods with 9.1 per cent and Acecook with 7.6 per cent. The market was worth about $3.8B (¥480bn) on a maker-shipment basis, and in cup noodles alone Nissin held close to 40 per cent, with Cup Noodles by itself earning $552.6M (¥70bn) a year. Growth in volume, however, ran at only 1 to 2 per cent a year over the decade, and the operating margin had fallen from 8.0 per cent in the year to March 1989 to 7.3 per cent in the year to March 1993. Outside instant noodles the company took stakes in quick succession in York Co., Ltd. (ヨーク本社) in July 1990, Piggy Foods Co., Ltd. in January 1991 and Cisco Co., Ltd. (シスコ) in February 1991. Annual sales reached $1.8B (¥200bn) in March 1993, and in November 1995 cumulative domestic sales of Cup Noodles passed 10 billion servings. In October 1996 the Shizuoka plant was completed at Yaizu, Shizuoka Prefecture as an integrated noodle works, and in November 1999 the Instant Ramen Museum opened at Ikeda, Osaka Prefecture.

Late abroad, and the acquisition of Myojo Foods

The building of bases in Asia spread out from the establishment of Nissin Foods Co., Ltd. in the Tai Po district of Hong Kong in October 1984. In March 1989 Nissin took a stake in Beatrice Foods Co., (HK) Ltd. (now 永南食品有限公司), and in December 1994 its first production base inside China (珠海市金海岸永南食品有限公司) began operating. Even so, as of 2004 Nissin was still behind Toyo Suisan in the United States and its share in China stood at only 3 per cent. In 1998 it reached a basic agreement to take a stake of more than 30 per cent in Indofood, Indonesia's largest instant-noodle maker, and the deal fell through soon after. In 2003 it settled on a tie-up in China with Uni-President of Taiwan, and that too was returned to a blank sheet. Its own funds were ample: consolidated equity stood at 70.4 per cent of assets in the year to March 2003, and cash and deposits were above $1.4B (¥160bn). Momofuku said: for anything where the return is clear, we can put out ten or twenty billion yen (Nikkei Business, 23 February 2004).

At the end of October 2006 the American investment fund Steel Partners launched a hostile tender offer at ¥700 a share for Myojo Foods, one of the major instant-noodle makers. Myojo had held its place since the 1960s as one of the four big specialists alongside Nissin, Acecook and Sanyo Foods — a competitor. Asked to intervene, Nissin began a counter-tender on 16 November at ¥870 a share, ¥170 above Steel's ¥700. Steel's offer failed, with no shareholders having tendered when its acceptance period closed on 27 November, and Nissin and Myojo reached a basic agreement on 21 December. A share exchange effective 31 March 2007 made Myojo a wholly owned subsidiary, and its listing was cancelled on 27 March. The Japan Fair Trade Commission held that the case — a combined share of about 35 per cent in bag noodles and about 60 per cent in cup noodles — would not substantially restrain competition, citing the bargaining power of retailers over price and the competitive pressure from adjacent markets.

The milestones of scale continued: consolidated annual sales of $2.5B (¥300bn) in March 2001, and cumulative worldwide sales of Cup Noodles of 20 billion servings in August 2003. In May 2005 Nissin established a food-safety research and development company (日清（上海）食品安全研究開発有限公司) in Minhang, Shanghai, and in 2007 the founder Ando Momofuku died. In June 2008 Nissin made Nikki Foods Co., Ltd. a wholly owned subsidiary. That October it moved to a holding-company structure, changing its name to Nissin Foods Holdings Co., Ltd. and establishing Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd., Nissin Chilled Foods Co., Ltd., Nissin Frozen Foods Co., Ltd. and Nissin Business Support Co., Ltd. by incorporation-type company split. Ando Koki became representative director, president and chief executive of the holding company. In January of that year Nissin had raised instant-noodle prices by 7 to 11 per cent, and domestic sales volumes in the instant-noodle market fell by roughly 20 per cent immediately afterwards. That experience stayed with the company: when wheat prices rose again in 2011, it announced an increase in North America from July while holding off on any rise at home.

The third generation, tidying the joint ventures, and the Hong Kong listing

In January 2009 Nissin Foods Holdings took a stake in Angleside Ltd., the holding company of a Russian instant-noodle maker. In September 2011 it opened the Cup Noodles Museum Yokohama at Minato Mirai in Yokohama, formally named the Momofuku Ando Invention Museum Yokohama. In February 2014 it took a stake in Bonchi Co., Ltd., and in March that year the new research centre the WAVE was completed and consolidated annual sales reached $3.8B (¥400bn). In April 2015 Ando Noritaka (安藤徳隆) became president of the operating company Nissin Food Products. Noritaka is Momofuku's grandson and Koki's eldest son, and he was appointed at 37. He set out the aims of a 100-year brand company and Beyond Instant Foods, reaching past instant noodles into neighbouring lines such as chilled, frozen and health foods, and spoke of a determination to make it a company that lasts 300 years (Nikkei Business, 31 May 2022). In April 2016 Nissin concluded a Relationship Agreement with the British food group Premier Foods plc.

In 2015 Nissin Foods Holdings dissolved its joint venture with Ajinomoto over Nissin-Ajinomoto Alimentos of Brazil. That company had grown out of a firm founded in 1965 by a manager of Taiwanese origin; Ajinomoto invested in 1972 and Nissin in 1975, making it a joint venture split evenly between them, with Nissin handling development and production and Ajinomoto sales and marketing, and it had come to hold 65 per cent of the Brazilian instant-noodle market. It was Nissin that opened the subject, proposing discussions to Ajinomoto in December 2014. Ajinomoto sold its entire holding for $268.6M (¥33bn), and at the end of October the company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Nissin. The joint venture's operating profit for the 2014 financial year was about $20.7M (¥3bn), second in size to China's $27.3M (¥3bn) as an earner for the group. Nissin had set out an overseas ratio of more than 50 per cent of sales by 2025, and lifting it from about 20 per cent in the 2014 financial year remained the task.

In December 2017 the Hong Kong subsidiary Nissin Foods Company Limited listed its shares on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. The purpose of the listing was to speed the growth of the China business, recasting decisions such as product development, which had until then been taken in Japan, so that they were left to the local company. The Chinese instant-noodle market had shrunk by about 15 per cent, from a peak of 43.6 billion servings in 2012 to 37.2 billion in 2016, as the spread of food-delivery services took demand away. Nissin's Chinese subsidiary stood sixth with 2.8 per cent of instant noodles as a whole, while holding second place with 19.8 per cent in high-quality noodles priced above five yuan a unit. In the five-year medium-term plan running to the 2020 financial year, Koki placed the confectionery and cereal business and the chilled and beverage business as the next pillars, setting a target of lifting each from sales of $459.4M (¥50bn) to $551.3M (¥60bn) to more than $936.5M (¥100bn) by 2020.

The first new plant in 22 years, and the turn in pricing

In August 2018 Nissin began operating some of the lines at a new instant-noodle plant at Ritto, Shiga Prefecture. It was the first new instant-noodle works in 22 years, since the Shizuoka plant completed in 1996, and the total investment came to $593.3M (¥66bn). The plant was built with a materials works attached and with inspection and delivery automated, and was designed to need roughly half the staff of a plant of comparable size. Most food makers since the beginning of the Heisei era had squeezed capital spending to produce profit; ageing existing plant and the rising cost of labour were what prompted this investment in rationalisation. Nissin Foods Holdings set a plan to bring the new works into full operation by December 2019. The saving of labour reached the office side as well: in April 2023 the company introduced a conversational artificial-intelligence tool, NISSIN-GPT, and began using it for such work as drawing up proposals for retail displays.

Pricing turned in 2015, when Nissin raised the prices of instant bag noodles, instant cup noodles and instant cup rice by 5 to 8 per cent for shipments from 1 January 2015. Three days after the announcement Toyo Suisan followed, and Sanyo Foods and others came after. It was the first increase across the whole trade in the seven years since January 2008, and where the earlier one had been driven mainly by the surge in the wheat market, this one was put down to the weak yen and rising distribution costs. Instant noodles are bulky and cheap by the unit, so the logistics cost of each one is relatively high; and a structure in which almost 100 per cent of raw materials are imported deepened the effect of the weak yen. The increases lifted earnings, and operating profit for the year to March 2024 came to $483.8M (¥73bn), 31 per cent above the year before — but in that same year, 2024, the Japan Fair Trade Commission warned the company that its repeated demands that retailers raise cup-noodle prices risked breaching the Antimonopoly Act.

Consolidated sales rose from $4.6B (¥506bn) in the year to March 2021 to $4.8B (¥669bn) in the year to March 2023, $4.8B (¥733bn) in the year to March 2024, $5.2B (¥777bn) in the year to March 2025 and $5.0B (¥788bn) in the year to March 2026. Operating profit went from $505.6M (¥56bn) in the year to March 2021 and $395.7M (¥56bn) in the year to March 2023 to $484.5M (¥73bn) in the year to March 2024 and $497.2M (¥74bn) in the year to March 2025, before falling to $393.9M (¥62bn) in the year to March 2026. Profit attributable to owners of the parent likewise grew from $371.7M (¥41bn) in the year to March 2021 to $367.5M (¥55bn) in the year to March 2025, then fell to $287.1M (¥45bn) in the year to March 2026. Segment sales for the year to March 2026 were $1.5B (¥242bn) at Nissin Food Products, $1.0B (¥164bn) in the Americas, $658.8M (¥104bn) in chilled and beverages, $606.3M (¥96bn) in confectionery, $473.6M (¥75bn) in China and $305.4M (¥48bn) at Myojo Foods, with profit in the Americas falling from $126.3M (¥19bn) the year before to $67M (¥11bn). Capital spending was heaviest in the Americas at $206.8M (¥33bn). Employees had grown to 17,988. Ando Koki is representative director, president and chief executive, and Ando Noritaka representative director, vice-president and chief operating officer: father and son running the company together.