Full withdrawal from fibre, ¥87bn of financial support, and the board’s resignation (2024)

At the end of half a century of life support

What is essential in this decision is that Unitika itself acknowledged the limits of the response it had run since the 1969 merger — plug the deficit with asset disposals and capacity cuts, and leave the structure of the business intact. The three mill closures of 1975 and the ¥37.5bn of financial support in 2014 alike stayed at the level of symptomatic treatment that compressed the size of the loss, and the dependence on fibre remained. The first operating loss since listing, in the year to March 2024, can be read as the figure in which that repetition finally reached its limit. In the choice to let go of the founding trade in its entirety there is a weight of judgement unlike anything before it: regeneration rather than life support.

What this decision also shows, though, is the reality that the rescue of a business and the history of the company that owned it are not necessarily completed by the same hands. The exit from the founding trade and the resignation of the entire board were decided by Ueno Shuji; the rebuilding that follows has been entrusted to his successor Fujii Minoru, to outside capital in REVIC, and to a buyer in Seiren’s chairman Kawada Tatsuo. The memory of 135 years of fibre, one might say, goes on being answered for under its buyer, even after it has left the corporate register of Unitika.