Company history

Fuji Spinning was incorporated in March 1896 with capital of 1.5 million yen and 30,000 spindles, promoted by Tomita Tetsunosuke, Kan Tomotsune and a small group of Meiji financiers, with Tomita as chairman. Meiji Japan founded spinning companies as national import substitution, but this one was designed around a specific piece of geography: 2,500 horsepower of water on the Ayuzawa River in Shizuoka. The Oyama mill began running on that water in September 1898. Owning its own motive power, rather than buying it, was the competitive condition the founders cared about — and it set a habit the company never lost.

Trade slumped after the Sino-Japanese War, Tomita stepped down, and Hamaguchi Kichiemon took the chair in 1901; from there the company grew almost entirely by absorbing others. It bought Onagigawa Cotton Cloth and Nippon Silk & Cotton in 1903, pushing from yarn into weaving; merged Tokyo Gas Spinning in 1906 and renamed itself Fuji Gas Spinning; obtained a licence to run an electricity business in 1910; and merged Sagami Hydroelectric in 1914, so that powering its own mills and selling surplus current to outsiders became one integrated operation. The First World War boom paid for a Kawasaki mill (1915), and then for an empire abroad — Chuka Boshoku in 1920, a Qingdao mill in 1922, Manchuria Spinning in 1923.

The 1930s brought more of the same: by the end of the decade the group held nineteen mills, roughly 1.09 million spindles and 9,918 looms. In January 1939 it set up Yanai Chemical Industry in Yamaguchi to support wartime chemical-fibre output — a minor subsidiary that would, sixty years later, become the group’s main business. Then the war took it all back. Plants were sold, leased or stripped for their metal, machinery was shipped to Burma and Sumatra, and by the surrender the company was down to ten mills and 240,000 spindles, about a fifth of its peak. Defeat cost it every mainland and Manchurian asset outright. In December 1945 it went back to the name Fuji Spinning, and the forty-year Fuji Gas era was over.

Textiles were Japan’s foreign-exchange earner under the occupation, and the surviving mills at Oyama, Kawasaki and Washizu went straight back to work. Fuji Spinning listed on the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges in May 1949, returned the Yao mill to a re-established Teikoku Seishi in a legal unwinding of its wartime mergers, and rode the Korean War and the high-growth decades through the 1950s. But the ceiling was visible early, and the company began looking outside yarn: Fuji Chemicrous (1961) for synthetic leather and chemical products, a stake in Ethiopia Cotton (1963), an electronics-components division in 1970, new mills and a Thai textile investment in 1972.

Most of it failed or stalled. Ethiopia Cotton was nationalized in 1975. Then the first oil shock hit the whole industry at once — feedstock costs for synthetics jumped, the exchange rate wrecked export margins, and through the 1970s Korean and Taiwanese spinners closed the technology gap. Fuji Spinning answered with reorganization rather than retreat: it merged Sanko Dyeing (1973), set up Fujibo Apparel (1975) to sell direct, and re-absorbed Teikoku Seishi (1975). None of it, on its own, restored earning power in a structurally depressed industry.

What it did instead, steadily and for fifteen years, was take itself apart into pieces that could be shut down separately. The Nyugawa mill was spun off as Fujibo Ehime in 1977, Kozakai as Fujibo Kozakai in 1979, Wakayama as Fujibo Wakayama in 1984, and a long line of apparel and overseas sewing subsidiaries followed through 1991. Turning each plant into its own legal entity made retreat a decision that could be taken plant by plant. In 1981 one of those plants, at Oita, began making nonwoven fabric — the ordinary-looking capability on which the company’s entire future would eventually rest.

The 1990s were the years the founding business visibly wound down. Fujibo Electronics was spun out in 1995, a quarter-century after the electronics division was created; Fujibo Kozakai was absorbed back in the same year. Thai Fujibo Garment stopped production in 1999, the Yao mill suspended operations in September 1999, the Washizu mill in July 2000. Between 2001 and 2002 the group opened subsidiaries in Korea, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan while shrinking domestic capacity, and sold out of its Thai textile holding entirely — an offshore-and-consolidate move that kept apparel alive without keeping it in Japan.

Underneath that, Yanai Chemical Industry was becoming something else. CMP polishing materials — the pads and slurries that planarize a semiconductor wafer by combining chemical attack with mechanical abrasion — are consumables, and every step down in feature size consumes more of them. The pad itself is nonwoven fabric or polyurethane foam: an applied cloth product, which is exactly what a spinning company knows how to make. Where the industry standard, Rodel’s IC1000 pad (later Rohm and Haas, then Dow), came out of American chemicals, Fujibo entered from the fabric side, with a nonwoven process of its own descended from the Oita line of 1981.

By the year ended March 2004 the group turned over $443.8M (¥48bn) — a set of results in which non-textile businesses were quietly covering for a failing core. Through the same years management worked through which of its scattered non-textile ventures — synthetics, plastics, electronics, chemicals — to keep and which to cut. The question was no longer whether the new business worked, but how much of the old one the company was willing to give up for it.

In September 2005 the operating businesses were split off into separate companies and the parent became a pure holding company, renamed Fujibo Holdings — 109 years after a group of Meiji financiers put a cotton mill on a river. The structure mattered less than the appointment that followed. In 2006 the group made Nakano Mitsuo its twelfth president: a textile-engineering graduate who had spent his career on the functional-materials side and run Yanai Chemical Industry. Choosing a polishing-materials man over a textiles man announced, in the plainest possible way, where the group’s resources were going. The medium-term plan Henshin 06–10 put it as a slogan — “no business without profit” — and the cost came through the accounts: two straight years of restructuring charges and impairments at Wakayama and Toyohama, and a dividend restored in the year ended March 2009 for the first time in eleven years. By then the segment arithmetic was unarguable: in the year ended March 2008 nonwovens earned $23.2M (¥2bn) of operating profit on $83.2M (¥9bn) of sales, against textiles’ $1.9M (¥200m) on $236.1M (¥24bn) — a third of the revenue, twelve times the profit.

From there the gap widened until it was no longer a comparison. In the year ended March 2013 polishing materials earned $52.3M (¥5bn) of operating profit on $138.3M (¥14bn) of sales — a roughly 38% margin — while textiles made $1M (¥100m) on more revenue. Nakano ran four consecutive medium-term plans over sixteen years, shrinking the founding business (which he redefined as “everyday clothing”) while pouring capital into pads, and by the year ended March 2017 polishing materials alone produced more than half of the group’s $60.6M (¥7bn) consolidated operating profit. Around it he assembled a chemicals arm — Yanai took over Toyobo’s pharmaceutical and agrochemical intermediates business in 2013 — and, from 2018, bought mold and injection-molding firms (Tokyo Kanagata, Fujioka Mold, GFI/IPM) to build a deliberate third pillar.

Nakano handed over in June 2022 to Inoue Masatake, another lifer, who inherited a won position rather than a crisis and changed what the company was measured by. Facing a semiconductor downturn in his first months, he kept the ROIC framework anyway, and in May 2025 published Shinka 26–30: a new plant inside the Yanai works aimed at $66.8M (¥10bn) of operating profit, a consolidated payout ratio target of 35% with a 3.5% DOE floor, and a three-for-one stock split from April 2026. The tailwind is real — generative-AI chips have pulled polishing demand up hard — but so is the exposure. In the year ended March 2025 polishing materials were 45% of sales and 73% of operating profit. The concentration that saved the company is now the thing it has to answer for.