Fujibo Holdings - Company History

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Financial history 1952–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1896
Founder Tomita Tetsunosuke (富田鉄之助), founding promoter and first chairman
Founding location 東京都中央区
Core business at founding Cotton-yarn spinning driven by water power from the Ayuzawa river
Listed 1949
President Inoue Masatake President since 2022 (age 62, as of 2026)
Current priority Capacity investment · Capital efficiency Expanding output of CMP polishing materials and holding ROIC above 10 per cent
Founding
In March 1896 Tomita Tetsunosuke, Jin Tomotsune and others acted as promoters in founding Fuji Spinning, a cotton-yarn spinner with capital of ¥1.5 million, powered by 2,500 horsepower of water drawn from the Ayuzawa river in Sunto district, Shizuoka prefecture. The Oyama mill began operating in September 1898. In 1903 the company merged Onagigawa Cotton Cloth and Nihon Kinumen Spinning, and in September 1906 it merged Tokyo Gas Spinning and renamed itself Fuji Gas Spinning. In February 1910 it obtained authorisation to run an electricity business alongside spinning, and in February 1914 it merged Sagami Hydroelectric Power, running the supply of power to its own mills and the sale of electricity to outside customers as a single operation. In January 1939, for a move into chemicals, it established Yanai Chemical Industry at Yanai in Yamaguchi prefecture. That subsidiary, set up to supplement chemical-fibre production in wartime, became the parent body of the mainstay business sixty years later.
The Decision
The company changed its main business, and it changed the division the president came from along with it. In September 2005 it split its principal business groups off into separate companies, moved to a holding-company structure and renamed itself Fujibo Holdings. The following year, 2006, Nakano Mitsuo (中野光雄), who had been president of Yanai Chemical Industry, became the twelfth president. From Henshin 06-10 through to Zokyo 21-25 the company drew up four successive medium-term plans, booking restructuring costs and impairment losses in every period, and while it withdrew from textile printing at the Wakayama mill and closed the Toyohama mill it built a new plant at Nyugawa and a plant geared to liquid-crystal glass. In June 2022, after sixteen years in office, Nakano handed over to Inoue Masatake (井上雅偉), who switched the company to a capital-efficiency management holding ROIC above 10 per cent. The people and the equipment that came out of each closed textile site were turned, each time, towards more capacity in polishing materials and chemical industrial products.
Today
Close to eight-tenths of operating profit is earned by a consumable used to polish semiconductors. In the year to March 2026 consolidated revenue was $290.2M (¥46bn) and operating profit $51.2M (¥8bn). The polishing-materials business returned $40.5M (¥6bn) of operating profit on $142.9M (¥23bn) of revenue: less than half the group total in sales, but 78 per cent of operating profit. Chemical industrial products came to $89.2M (¥14bn) of revenue and $8.9M (¥1bn) of operating profit, and the apparel business to $39.8M (¥6bn) and $2.5M (¥400m). Demand for semiconductors used in generative AI lifted polishing-materials revenue from $88.4M (¥13bn) to $142.9M (¥23bn) in the space of two years. In chemical industrial products the company built a third pillar through a run of acquisitions beginning with Tokyo Kanagata in October 2018, and has held that share of the business by adding precision moulds and injection moulding. The polishing pads are built on nonwoven fabric and polyurethane foam, and the nonwoven technology started at the Oita spinning mill in 1981 carried straight across into semiconductor use.
Competition
The industry standard for polishing pads is held by Dow of the United States, and Fujibo Holdings has survived outside that standard. With the Dow IC1000 pad widely adopted, the company has built a record of adoption in leading-edge logic with its own nonwoven-based process, and has held long-term business with customers in the United States, Taiwan and South Korea. Peers that set out from the same Meiji-era cotton spinning went elsewhere: Nisshinbo Holdings moved into electronic components by taking New Japan Radio as a subsidiary through a tender offer, and Shikibo turned the sites of its closed mills over to rental property. What Fujibo Holdings kept was neither land nor another industry, but a consumable in which the manufacturing technique of spinning still works. Troughs in semiconductor investment reach the margins on that consumable directly: operating profit in polishing materials fell from $19.9M (¥3bn) in the previous year to $6.6M (¥1bn) in the year to March 2024.

Timeline

1896–1945Half a century of a cotton spinner powered by the Ayuzawa river, beginning at the Oyama mill

  1. 1896Fuji Spinning established with capital of ¥1.5 million and 30,000 spindles
  2. 1898The Oyama mill is built in Shizuoka and begins operating
  3. 1901Hamaguchi Kichiemon becomes second chairman after the post-war slump
  4. 1903Onagigawa Cotton Cloth and Nihon Kinumen Spinning merged
  5. 1906Tokyo Gas Spinning merged; renamed Fuji Gas Spinning
  6. 1910Authorised to run an electricity business alongside spinning
  7. 1914Sagami Hydroelectric Power merged
  8. 1922Oita Spinning and two other companies merged; Qingdao mill built
  9. 1927Fuji Electric Power established and the electricity plant transferred to it
  10. 1939Yanai Chemical Industry established at Yanai, Yamaguchi
  11. 1943Teikoku Seishi merged under wartime control
  12. 1945Overseas assets seized; the name reverts to Fuji Spinning

1946–2005Thirty years of textile slump running alongside a search for non-textile business

  1. 1949Shares listed on the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges
  2. 1951The Kozakai mill is built
  3. 1961Fuji Chemicross established for synthetic leather and chemical products
  4. 1963Capital and management stake taken in Ethiopian Cotton
  5. 1970An electronic-apparatus works is opened
  6. 1972Wakayama mill built; capital stake taken in Thai Textile
  7. 1975Ethiopian Cotton nationalised; Fujibo Apparel established
  8. 1979The Kozakai mill is separated out as Fujibo Kozakai
  9. 1981Nonwoven production begins at the Oita mill
  10. 1984The Wakayama mill is separated out as Fujibo Wakayama
  11. 1991Thai Fujibo Textile established
  12. 1995The electronic-equipment works is separated out as Fujibo Electronics
  13. 1999The Yao mill suspends operations
  14. 2000The Washizu mill suspends operations
  15. 2002The entire holding in Thai Textile is sold

2005–2025The holding-company shift, and an earnings structure rebuilt around polishing materials

  1. 2005Holding-company structure adopted; renamed Fujibo Holdings
  2. 2006Nakano Mitsuo becomes the twelfth president
  3. 2007Fujibo Textile and Fujibo Fiber reorganised into a single company
  4. 2008A dividend is resumed for the first time in eleven years
  5. 2013Yanai Chemical takes over the intermediates business from Toyobo
  6. 2014Fujibo Electronics is dissolved
  7. 2017Taiwan Fujibo Precision Materials established
  8. 2018Tokyo Kanagata made a wholly owned subsidiary
  9. 2020Fujioka Mould made a wholly owned subsidiary
  10. 2022Inoue Masatake becomes the thirteenth president
  11. 2022Moves from the TSE First Section to the Prime Market
  12. 2022GFI Holdings and IPM made wholly owned subsidiaries
  13. 2025Shinka 26-30 announced, with a three-for-one share split set for 2026

Founding Story

1896–1945Half a century of a cotton spinner powered by the Ayuzawa river, beginning at the Oyama mill

Fujibo began in 1896 as a cotton spinner built around a power source of its own — 2,500 horsepower of water on the Ayuzawa river in Shizuoka, with the Oyama mill running from 1898. Over the next half-century it grew by merger into weaving, into silk-cotton goods, into gas spinning and into electricity generation, and outward to mills in China and Manchuria, until wartime rationalisation and the seizure of every overseas asset in 1945 cut it back to a domestic spinner about a fifth of its peak size.

A cotton spinner planned as one with Fujikawa hydroelectric power

The beginnings of Fuji Spinning go back to December 1895, when Tomita Tetsunosuke (富田鉄之助), Jin Tomotsune (神知常) and a handful of others acted as promoters[1] of a plan to found a cotton-yarn spinning company powered by 2,500 horsepower of water from the Ayuzawa river, which runs through Suganuma village in Sunto district, Shizuoka prefecture. A 1968 survey of corporate histories records that the plan came to fruition in March of the following year, 1896, as a company with capital of ¥1.5 million, Tomita as chairman and 30,000 spindles[2]. The corporate-history section of the company’s 有価証券報告書 (annual securities report) likewise dates the founding to March 1896[3]. In September 1898, two years after incorporation, the Oyama mill was built in Sunto district, Shizuoka — today’s Oyama town — and began operating[4]. Spinning companies of the Meiji era were founded with state backing as import substitution for cotton yarn, but Fuji Spinning was distinctive in taking the water power of the Ayuzawa, that is of the Fujikawa river system, into its own hands as a power source from the outset, and so carried from its founding the ground on which it would later run an electricity business alongside spinning[5].

Soon after its founding the company fell into poor results under the effects of the First Sino-Japanese War, and the survey records that Tomita stepped down in order to break the crisis, with Hamaguchi Kichiemon (浜口吉右衛門) taking over as second chairman in July 1901[6]. From there the company turned steadily to expansion. Between July and August 1903 it merged Onagigawa Cotton Cloth 小名木川綿布 and Nihon Kinumen Spinning 日本絹綿紡績 in quick succession[7], widening its scope from spinning mills into weaving and silk-cotton goods. On the boom that followed the Russo-Japanese War it enlarged both the Oyama and Hodogaya mills[8], and in September 1906 it merged Tokyo Gas Spinning 東京瓦斯紡績 and renamed itself Fuji Gas Spinning 富士瓦斯紡績[9]. The word gas entered the company name because Tokyo Gas Spinning, the partner in that merger, had also been in the business of making gas lamps. In February 1910 it obtained authorisation to run an electricity business alongside spinning[10], and in February 1914 it merged Sagami Hydroelectric Power 相模水力電気[11], putting the supply of power to its own mills and the sale of electricity to outside customers under a single operation. From the late Meiji into the early Taisho years, securing their own power source for mill expansion was a management problem common to the spinning companies, and Fuji Gas Spinning answered it by absorbing a hydroelectric business.

In January 1915 the Kawasaki mill was built[12], taking the company into Kanagawa prefecture. Demand for cotton yarn had expanded sharply on the wartime boom of the First World War, and this was a phase of adding capacity to meet it. In December 1920 it merged Chuka Boshoku 中華紡織[13], taking in production sites in the Chinese market; in February 1922 it merged three companies at once — Oita Spinning 大分紡績, Nikka Kinumen Spinning and Weaving 日華絹綿紡織 and Toyo Kenshi Spinning 東洋絹糸紡績 — and in November of the same year built a new mill at Qingdao in China[14]. In March 1923 it established Manshu Spinning 満州紡績 and merged two further companies, Kinka Boshoku 金華紡織 and Nihon Boshoku 日本紡織[15]. A quarter-century from its founding, Fuji Gas Spinning had grown into a cotton spinner whose main domestic mills were joined by production sites on the Chinese mainland.

Mergers under wartime control, and the seizure of overseas assets

The merger offensive continued after Kyodo Spinning 協同紡績 was absorbed in March 1925: the Washizu mill was built in November 1929, Toyo Weaving 東洋織布 was merged in October 1934 and Sagami Spinning 相模紡績 in December 1935[16]. In March 1935 the company established Fuji Fibre Industries 富士繊維工業, and as early as December 1939 absorbed it again[17]. The survey records that, having taken in Kyodo Spinning, Sagami Spinning, Fuji Fibre Industries, Meisei Boshoku 明正紡織 and others, the company came to hold 19 mills and equipment amounting to 1,088,444 spindles of various kinds and 9,918 looms, extending as far as staple-fibre plant and bleaching-and-finishing plant[18]. In parallel, in January 1939, it established Yanai Chemical Industry 柳井化学工業[19], laying a marker for a move into chemicals. Yanai Chemical Industry was based at Yanai in Yamaguchi prefecture, and it is the company that would become the parent body of the polishing-materials business within the post-war Fuji Spinning group. At its founding in 1939 its character was largely that of a supplement to wartime chemical-fibre production, but more than half a century later it became the birthplace of the group’s mainstay business.

In May 1941 Meisei Boshoku was merged, and in July 1943 Teikoku Seishi 帝国製絲[20]. Under wartime control the textile industry was being reorganised by government control ordinances, with the banding together of regional spinners directed as national policy. Fuji Gas Spinning took in Teikoku Seishi as an extension of its own merger offensive, but as the Pacific War went on, enterprise rationalisation and war damage shrank the business drastically. The survey records that mills were sold or leased out, machinery was requisitioned and whole plants were moved to Burma and Sumatra[21], so that at the end of the war the company held 10 mills, 240,000 spindles of various kinds, 2,000 looms and staple-fibre plant of six tonnes a day — around a fifth of its peak[22]. The dissolution of the zaibatsu, the family-controlled industrial conglomerates, and the seizure of overseas assets after defeat then shook the group structure further. With the end of the Pacific War in August 1945, the overseas assets — Manshu Spinning, Chuka Boshoku, the Qingdao mill and the rest — were all confiscated[23]. The production sites on the Chinese mainland and in Manchuria, widened over nearly thirty years from the late Meiji era by new construction and merger, were lost in their entirety at the war’s end. In December 1945 the company changed its name back to Fuji Spinning, closing the roughly forty years of the pre-war Fuji Gas Spinning era[24].

In March 1949, under a government ordinance, the Yao mill was returned to the re-established Teikoku Seishi[25], and part of the assets taken in through wartime mergers were legally separated out. In May of the same year the company listed its shares on both the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges[26], putting in place the capital base to catch the expansion of textile demand in the post-war recovery. Under the Allied occupation textile goods kept their standing as the leading earner of foreign currency, and the spinning companies recovered their results within a few years of the war’s end. Fuji Spinning too restarted cotton-yarn production by running the mills left to it at home — Oyama, Kawasaki, Washizu and others. Half a century from its founding, the cotton spinner set up by the Meiji business establishment had arrived, through both wartime consolidation and the seizure of its overseas assets, at a fresh start as a domestically based spinning company.

Where the founding legacy meets the post-war reorganisation

As a result of the merger offensive pursued through the Meiji and Taisho years, the pre-war Fuji Gas Spinning had grown into a large spinner holding more than a dozen production sites at home and abroad — Oyama, Kawasaki, Washizu, Oita, Qingdao, Manchuria. By the survey’s account its starting point lay in the founding of 1896, promoted by Tomita Tetsunosuke, Jin Tomotsune and others with Tomita installed as chairman; Hamaguchi Kichiemon, as second chairman, carried the company through the hard years after the First Sino-Japanese War[27]; and on the boom that followed the Russo-Japanese War it committed to enlarging the Oyama and Hodogaya mills and to merging Tokyo Gas Spinning. Renamed Fuji Gas Spinning, the company ran the operational integration of spinning companies and the absorption of an electricity business in parallel, and held a central place in the Japanese spinning industry as one of the leading mills of the Meiji business establishment. In the Fuji Gas Spinning years, successive managers — Wada Toyoji (和田豊治), Shikamura Yoshihisa (鹿村美久) and Hori Bunpei (堀文平) — are said to have led the course of merger and expansion.

The wartime merger offensive was pursued as the other face of the government’s textile control ordinances. The merger of Meisei Boshoku in 1941 and of Teikoku Seishi in 1943 were both reorganisations carried out in line with the wartime ordinance on the rationalisation and consolidation of textile enterprises[28]. Yanai Chemical Industry, established in 1939, was set up with the character of supplementing chemical-fibre production capacity under wartime conditions, but from the post-war recovery through the 1950s it was redefined as the subsidiary handling chemicals and dyestuff-related business. That the founding year of Yanai Chemical Industry — the parent body of the semiconductor polishing-materials business half a century later — is 1939[29] shows the long path by which a wartime marker laid down in chemicals came in the end to lead to the core business of the post-war company.

The seizure of overseas assets immediately after defeat meant, for Fuji Gas Spinning, the loss of roughly a third of its assets by scale. The combined assets of the mainland and Manchurian sites — Manshu Spinning, Chuka Boshoku, the Qingdao mill, Kinka Boshoku, Nihon Boshoku — accounted at the war’s end for a substantial share of the group’s total assets. The return of the Yao mill in 1949 lay on the same line, as assets taken in through wartime consolidation were legally separated out again. The return to the Fuji Spinning name in December 1945 and the listing on the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges in May 1949[30] mark the point at which, having lost its overseas assets and worked through the legal tidying at home, the company put in place a structure for facing the capital markets afresh as a domestically based textile company.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  2. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  3. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  4. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  5. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  6. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  7. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  8. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  9. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  10. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  11. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  12. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  13. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  14. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  15. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  16. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  17. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  18. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  19. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  20. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  21. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  22. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  23. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  24. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  25. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  26. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  27. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  28. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  29. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩
  30. Fujibo Holdings, annual securities report (corporate-history section)↩

References & sources

  1. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the entry on Fuji Gas Spinning.
  2. Fujibo Holdings (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history section and the segment and results disclosures from FY03 to FY24.

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