Company history

Nisshinbo Spinning was incorporated in February 1907 at Kameido in eastern Tokyo, capitalised at ¥10 million, with Hiranuma Senzo as its first chairman. It arrived at the tail of the Meiji spinning boom, when substituting domestic yarn for imported yarn was national policy. The company put up a first bank of 59,028 spindles immediately and began operating in June 1908, then bought Kyoto’s Teikoku Seishi (13,000 spindles) in March 1910 — and promptly ran into trouble, as the post-boom slump coincided with flooding that damaged the main mill.

The man who turned that into a method was Miyajima Seijiro, brought in as senior managing director in August 1914. He bought Takaoka Spinning (10,000 spindles) in 1915 and Okazaki Spinning (16,000) in 1919, and in the same year built new mills at Qingdao (20,000) and Nagoya (110,000); by 1921 Nisshinbo ran six mills, 230,000 spindles and 1,215 looms. Promoted to president in September 1919, he added Nisshin Rayon in February 1933 to reach from man-made yarn all the way through to finished cloth. Buy what is already running, build alongside it, and bring both to one standard — the pattern was set here.

War then destroyed what he had assembled. Machinery was requisitioned or moved to the occupied territories, and defeat left the company with roughly 20% of its prewar equipment — 179,000 spindles at surrender. Miyajima moved up to chairman in December 1940; the presidency passed through Washio Yuhei to Sakurada Takeshi in December 1945. What survived was not the plant but the way of assembling it.

Rebuilding took a decade: by 1955 Nisshinbo was back to ten textile plants, 538,000 spindles and 6,752 looms. It did not stop at textiles. Chemicals, machine tools, paper and printing were added through the 1950s and 1960s, and capacity kept expanding — the Tokushima plant in June 1958, a listing on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in October 1961, the Fujieda plant in January 1966, and a Brazilian mill in December 1972, its first production base abroad.

In an industry everyone called terminal, Nisshinbo was the profitable exception, and contemporaries put that down to doctrine rather than luck: a 1968 corporate history describes “management on a thoroughgoing liberal-economy philosophy, and the rationalisation of management” as the company’s defining trait, carried in turn by Miyajima, Sakurada and Tsuyuguchi Tatsu. From the October 1964 term it paid a 14% dividend and never once cut it on weak results. By its 60th anniversary the company had capital of ¥4 billion, sales of about $133.3M (¥48bn), thirteen plants and some 10,000 employees; in 1966 it even took on the rescue of Toho Rayon, sending one of its own managing directors in as president. Tsuyuguchi’s summary of the approach, in 1975: “we have always managed with a recession in mind, so that we never have to cut anyone.”

The oil shock of October 1973 ended the era. Crude prices and the rise of Korean and Taiwanese producers pushed the whole Japanese textile industry into structural decline, and Nisshinbo’s management drew the conclusion that governed everything after it — that spinning alone had no future.

The answer to the textile slump was built plant by plant. The Tatebayashi chemicals works opened in November 1981, the Mitsuai machine-tool works in April 1986, the Hamakita precision works in January 1987. By the late 1980s a company with “spinning” in its name was spread across chemicals, precision machinery and automotive components.

The move that mattered most was brakes, and it worked because of a technical lineage rather than a strategic leap. Nisshinbo had made automotive friction materials since before the war, and as Murakami Masahiro later explained it, “spinning and brakes look entirely unrelated, but the reason we won the order was that spinning technology could be transferred to making friction material out of asbestos.” From 1989, when it set up its first Thai subsidiary, the company built an overseas network aimed squarely at supplying brakes to carmakers where they assemble: Thailand in 1996, the United States in 1997, Indonesia in 1998, and Korea’s Saeron Automotive in 1999. Head office moved to Nihonbashi-Ningyocho in Chuo-ku, Tokyo in 1993, and in December 2000 Nisshinbo formed Continental Teves KK with Germany’s Continental.

By the early 2000s Nisshinbo stood on four pillars — textiles, automotive brakes, chemicals and precision machinery. None of it had been designed as a portfolio. It had accumulated, one response to the textile downturn at a time, until a cotton spinner had become a diversified manufacturer without ever announcing that it had.

In December 2005 Nisshinbo took New Japan Radio, a maker of communications semiconductors, into the group through a tender offer — after a fight with an investment fund that had noticed a spinner sitting on unrealised gains and trading below book. Murakami later called that battle “one of the triggers.” In April 2009 the company converted to a holding structure, renamed itself Nisshinbo Holdings, and split textiles, brakes, chemicals, precision machinery and paper into five stand-alone operating companies under Uzawa Shizuka. A December 2010 tender offer then brought in Japan Radio — a 1915 maker of marine, disaster-management and meteorological radio — and in November 2011 Nisshinbo bought TMD Friction, the European brake friction-material leader, for about $564.1M (¥45bn), the largest deal in its history.

TMD delivered position but not profit. The brake segment earned ¥4.2 billion of operating profit in FY11; with TMD’s first full year it swung to a ¥4.3 billion loss in FY12, and stayed in the red through FY16 as European competition and raw-material costs bit. Kawata Masaya, president from June 2013, declared “growth through diversification” while carrying two contradictory tasks: fixing the European brake business he had inherited, and expanding the wireless business around Japan Radio and New Japan Radio. He kept buying — Alphatron Marine in 2013, Tokyo Shirts and Nambu Kasei in 2015 — while the TMD problem was deferred to his successor.

What Kawata did settle was the shape of the group. In April 2017 the paper business went to Daio Paper, ending a line of business Nisshinbo had run for 110 years; that October, Japan Radio was made a wholly owned subsidiary through a share exchange, and in March 2018 Ricoh Electronic Devices was acquired. Exit from the founding-era businesses and consolidation of electronics ran in the same year, which is what makes this the point where the portfolio stopped accumulating and started being edited.

The financial year end moved from March to December in 2018, making that a nine-month period of ¥416.2 billion in sales and a ¥2.5 billion operating loss. Murakami Masahiro became president in June 2019 with a stated intent to go beyond making things and into the services built on what is made. In January 2022 New Japan Radio absorbed Ricoh Electronic Devices and was renamed Nisshinbo Micro Devices, giving the group a single analogue-semiconductor company.

Then, in November 2023, Nisshinbo sold TMD Friction — twelve years after buying it. Murakami described the sale plainly as “a loss cut, made in anticipation of the future business risk from vehicle electrification and European dust regulation,” adding that the point was not to leave brakes but to concentrate on copper-free friction material, where Nisshinbo Brake holds the world’s leading share. The write-off drove FY23 to a ¥20 billion net loss. One month later the group acquired HVJ Holdings and with it Hitachi Kokusai Electric (renamed Kokusai Electric in December 2024), which alongside Japan Radio and JRC Mobility assembled a public-sector wireless business at the centre of the company.

The arithmetic followed quickly. In FY24 wireless and communications reached ¥234.5 billion of sales and ¥7.6 billion of operating profit — the largest single contributor to ¥16.6 billion group operating profit — and Murakami stated the destination outright: “into an electronics company.” He moved to a non-representative chairmanship in March 2025 and Ishii Seiji, an engineer, took over. In FY25 the group turned over ¥502.3 billion with ¥26.4 billion of operating profit, of which wireless supplied ¥17.7 billion — about two-thirds — while micro devices lost ¥5.5 billion on ¥62.4 billion of sales and took roughly ¥6 billion of restructuring charges. Ishii’s framing of the task is “building the ability to earn,” and even the founding textile business is now openly under review: natural cotton alone, he has said, has a limit.