Diversifying into chemicals, environment and electronics in-house (1962)

A row of businesses, stacked one at a time

There is no flashy acquisition in this diversification, and no new company either. A plant was built, a division was placed, a product was added — and that procedure simply continued for fourteen years. It was slow, and it did nothing to prevent the loss of the year to March 1975. Even so, during this period a route ran through the company by which the problems its own factories carried were reassembled into products: capital spending on pollution control became flue-gas desulphurisation equipment; colour matching on the dyeing floor became a colour management system. The technology a textile company needed to earn outside textiles came up from the shop floor rather than being bought from outside.

In the figures, the non-textile divisions passed ¥10bn seventeen years after entry, in 1979. It took considerably longer still from there. In the year to March 2025 the chemicals segment recorded ¥66.0bn of revenue and ¥5.0bn of operating profit — roughly half of the group’s ¥10.3bn. Textiles in the same period recorded ¥48.5bn of revenue and ¥70m of operating profit. The urethane foam business begun at Neyagawa in November 1962 had, sixty-three years later, become the side that supports the founding trade.