Teijin - Company History

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

Founded 1918
Founder Hata Itsuzo (秦逸三) · Hisamura Seita (久村清太)
Founding location 山形県米沢市
Core business at founding Manufacture of rayon (artificial silk)
Listed 1949
President & CEO Uchikawa Akishige President & CEO since 2022 (age 60, as of 2026)
Current priority Business restructuring · Capital efficiency Sorting out the businesses it acquired and testing whether the capital put into them comes back
Founding
In 1918 Hata Itsuzo (秦逸三) and Hisamura Seita (久村清太), backed by Kaneko Naokichi (金子直吉) of the trading house Suzuki Shoten, established Teikoku Jinzo Kenshi at Yonezawa in Yamagata Prefecture with capital of ¥5 million. Its forerunner was the Yonezawa Artificial Silk Works, a branch plant that Azuma Kogyo had set up at Yonezawa in 1915, and the separation of its artificial-silk department made this the oldest chemical-fibre company in Japan. The Yonezawa plant stayed at experimental scale; volume production came with the Hiroshima works in 1926 and the Iwakuni works in January 1927. In that same year, 1927, Suzuki Shoten went down in the Showa financial panic, but a change of shareholders let the company rebuild its footing and carry on as an independent firm. It was because artificial silk was a growing market that a company which had lost its patron survived.
The Decision
Teijin was quick to give up the trade it was founded on and slow to settle accounts with the businesses it bought. When the acetate fibre it took to volume production in 1955 proved unable to widen its uses, the company signed a technical tie-up with ICI of Britain in January 1957 and entered polyester as Tetoron, and in October 1971 it stopped producing rayon altogether. It set up the Future Business Division in 1968 to look outside fibre, and in 1978, as the synthetic-fibre recession set in, it cut some 2,600 jobs under a retrenchment programme. It took in pharmaceuticals by merging Toyo Jozo in 1992, carbon fibre by taking a capital stake in Toho Rayon in 1999, and aramid fibre by buying the business of Acordis of the Netherlands in October 2000, and in January 2017 it bought CSP of the United States for about $757.8M (¥85bn).
Today
A company that has moved itself into high-performance materials is, in profit terms, still carried by fibre. Against consolidated revenue of $5.5B (¥873bn) for the year to March 2026 it posted an operating loss of $447M (¥71bn) and a net loss of $556.4M (¥88bn). Materials, which holds aramid, carbon fibre and automotive parts, had sales of $2.1B (¥339bn), booked an impairment loss of $393.9M (¥62bn) and was left with segment profit in the order of $632,271 (¥100m). Fibers & Products, which carries the polyester line running back to Tetoron, was the largest with sales of $2.2B (¥350bn) and profit of $108.1M (¥17bn), and Healthcare, built out from the discovery and 2011 launch of Feburic, followed with profit of $84.7M (¥13bn). The structure that is supposed to earn from materials has yet to show up in the numbers.
Competition
Two companies that took the same ICI licence together in 1957 parted ways over the material that came next. Toray, which took the licence jointly with Teikoku Jinzo Kenshi, commercialised the carbon fibre Torayca in August 1971 and carried the losses for some forty years while keeping hold of the decisions on where it was used and what it cost. Teijin brought carbon fibre in from outside through its 1999 capital stake in Toho Rayon, and aramid likewise by buying Twaron from Acordis of the Netherlands in 2000. In aramid it won a position that divides the world with DuPont, but in carbon fibre it never reached Toray, and in the year to March 2026 Materials booked an impairment loss of $393.9M (¥62bn). The materials it bought left it less power over price than the materials it grew itself.

Timeline

1918–1978Founding Teikoku Jinken, breaking free of Suzuki Shoten, and turning into a synthetic-fibre maker

  1. 1918Teikoku Jinzo Kenshi established at Yonezawa with capital of ¥5m
  2. 1926New plant built at Hiroshima
  3. 1927Suzuki Shoten collapses; Teijin continues as an independent company
  4. 1934Mihara plant opened; Yonezawa and Hiroshima closed
  5. 1945Oya Shinzo becomes president
  6. 1947Teijin Chemicals established
  7. 1949Listed on the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya stock exchanges
  8. 1955Enters acetate fibre at the Matsuyama works
  9. 1957Enters polyester under an ICI tie-up, sold as Tetoron
  10. 1962Enters nylon with Allied Chemical; renamed Teijin in November
  11. 1968Future Business Division launched; Tokuyama plant opened
  12. 1971Meta-aramid Conex production starts; rayon production ends
  13. 1978Nagoya plant closed and some 2,650 jobs cut

1979–2011Building a pharmaceuticals business, and buying into aramid to concentrate on high-performance materials

  1. 1980New drug Venilon launched
  2. 1983Teijin System Technology established
  3. 1985Utsunomiya works opened for Tetoron film
  4. 1989Pharmaceutical production begins at Iwakuni
  5. 1995Nylon transferred to a joint venture with DuPont
  6. 1999Advisory board introduced; capital stake taken in Toho Rayon
  7. 2000Acordis's aramid fibre business acquired
  8. 2001Film transferred to the DuPont joint venture; Nagashima Toru chosen as president from five candidates
  9. 2003The Kyorin Pharmaceutical acquisition is withdrawn; Teijin Seiki transferred to Nabtesco
  10. 2011Feburic, for gout and hyperuricaemia, goes on sale

2012–2025Buying an automotive-parts business, rebuilding pharmaceuticals, and reforming capital efficiency

  1. 2013Shift to a holding-company structure
  2. 2015Falls into a net loss for the year ended March
  3. 2017CSP Holdings acquired; the polyester film business is sold off
  4. 2018European interior-material makers including the German Brink group acquired
  5. 2021Domestic marketing rights to four Takeda diabetes drugs acquired
  6. 2021Global acquisitions consolidated into Teijin Automotive Technologies
  7. 2022Feburic comes off patent and generics enter
  8. 2025The review of the business portfolio remains the top management priority

Founding Story

1918–1978Founding Teikoku Jinken, breaking free of Suzuki Shoten, and turning into a synthetic-fibre maker

Teijin was built twice over these sixty years: first as Japan's oldest chemical-fibre company, spun out of a branch plant in Yonezawa under the wing of the trading house Suzuki Shoten, and then — after that patron collapsed in 1927 — as a synthetic-fibre maker that walked away from the very rayon it had been founded to produce. Sales rose from $42.5M (¥15bn) in 1952 to $1.7B (¥346bn) by 1978, but the year that figure was reached the company was shutting a plant and cutting a quarter of its workforce.

Kaneko Naokichi's backing and the birth of a Suzuki Shoten rayon maker

Teijin's founding business goes back to the Yonezawa Artificial Silk Works (米沢人造絹糸所), a branch plant that Azuma Kogyo (東工業) set up in Yonezawa in 1915[1]; its artificial-silk department was separated out in 1918 and became the oldest chemical-fibre company in Japan[2]. Kaneko Naokichi (金子直吉), known as the chief manager of the trading house Suzuki Shoten, supported the technical development work of Hata Itsuzo (秦逸三), a lecturer at Yonezawa Higher Technical School who was researching artificial silk, and of Hisamura Seita (久村清太), a researcher in leather, and in 1918 established Teikoku Jinzo Kenshi (帝国人造絹糸, Imperial Rayon) in Yonezawa, Yamagata Prefecture, with capital of ¥5 million[3]. The division of labour was set from the outset: Kaneko took charge of raising the money and of the overall design of the business, while Hata and Hisamura handled the development of the manufacturing technology for artificial silk. Measured against the technology of the day, the Yonezawa plant at the founding was no more than an experimental production site, and the building of a proper mass-production system had to wait for the later Iwakuni works[4]. As Oya Shinzo (大屋晋三), later president, recalled — artificial silk was extremely promising[5] — the Teijin of its founding years set out as a late entrant standing at the entrance to a growing market.

In February 1926 a new plant was raised in Hiroshima, and in January 1927 the Iwakuni works began operating, shifting the company onto a mass-production footing and carrying it from the experimental stage at Yonezawa into commercial production[6]. That same year, however, the Showa financial panic struck and Suzuki Shoten, the parent company, went under. Teijin could no longer carry on with a management constitution that depended on the group, but the rayon business itself was a growth field for which rising demand was expected on the international market of the time, and the company reconstituted its base through a change of shareholders. Looking back on Teijin in the heyday of artificial silk, Oya Shinzo later said that until 1931 Teijin's real profits exceeded those of every other artificial-silk company put together[7]. After independence the company built a new plant at Mihara in 1934 and set up Dai-ni Teikoku Jinzo Kenshi (第二帝国人造絹糸, Second Imperial Rayon), closing the inefficient Yonezawa and Hiroshima works[8]. By the end of 1937 its rayon-yarn capacity had reached a little over 141 tonnes a day, making it Japan's largest producer of rayon yarn[9]. A structure for running the firm as an independent company, away from the backing of Suzuki Shoten, was now in place, and the ground was laid for the post-war turn into a synthetic-fibre maker.

The imbalance in plant and equipment dragged on for some time. In his 1953 recollection Oya Shinzo said of the company's production sites that alongside the efficient, up-to-date Iwakuni works we also held the old and inefficient Hiroshima works, and the Yonezawa works, which should rather be called primitive[10], speaking frankly of how several generations of equipment had stood side by side from the earliest years through the war period. The momentum of the artificial-silk boom, which had pushed an unknown latecomer into the top ranks of the industry in a short time, is recalled in the same passage as the moment when the company became very good indeed[11]. The coexistence of old and new production equipment shaped the preconditions for post-war capital-spending decisions and for the conversion to synthetic fibre, and made for a starting point at which the question of what to do with the future of the founding rayon business had to be placed at the centre of management.

Oya Shinzo's turn from acetate to polyester

During the post-war rebuilding, Oya Shinzo became president and led the move into synthetic fibres. In November 1955 the Matsuyama works began Japan's first volume production of acetate fibre[12], but its applications on the domestic market stayed within a limited range and the market never expanded to the scale that had been expected. Three years after volume production began, half-year sales were still below the level management had originally hoped for, and the concentrated capital investment in acetate fibre did not translate into growth in Teijin's own revenue. This bitter experience in the early phase of diversifying into synthetic fibres became an undercurrent in the company's technical culture that shaped Oya's decision-making when the time came to enter polyester and nylon.

The period from 1947, when Oya went into politics and left the company, was one reason the turn towards synthetic fibres came late. In his 1965 book Oya described the mood inside the firm at the time: the profits made in the artificial-silk boom were not reinvested in synthetics, they were reinvested in leisure, and he went so far as to write that in those days at Teijin they said you could not get on unless you were good at golf, so everyone from the top down threw themselves into golf[13]. In his 1953 recollection he contrasted Toray's investment in nylon with Teijin's restoration of rayon, and said of his own company's judgement that Teijin, regarded as moderate and sensible, was left far behind in their dust and that this was the first cause of Teijin's decline[14]. This frank acknowledgement of failure by the man in charge became the starting point of the next offensive.

In January 1957 Teijin concluded a technical tie-up with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) of Britain and decided to enter polyester fibre. Within a framework of joint introduction by the industry together with Toray, it began selling under the trade name Tetoron, and polyester, with its excellent dyeability and durability, formed a new domestic market suited mainly to clothing applications. Oya himself later spoke with pride of the choice: I argued for putting polyester fibre first, and decided it. It was truly the solemn, decisive moment of a decision that is the grave responsibility of a manager[15], placing it as a choice made in conscious awareness of the divergence from Toyobo and Mitsubishi Rayon, which in the same period leaned towards acrylic fibre. In 1962 the company also entered nylon through a technical tie-up with Allied Chemical of the United States, and the building of a three-field synthetic-fibre structure went forward. In 1971 it took the decision to withdraw from rayon production, its mainstay business since the founding, abandoning its original trade and completing its redefinition as a synthetic-fibre maker.

The Future Business Division and the trial and error of diversifying beyond fibre

In 1968 Teijin set up the Future Business Division (未来事業本部), a new-business organisation with a high degree of independence, and embarked on an organisational reform for which there were few precedents at the time. It was a design put forward top-down by Oya Shinzo, and it involved gathering around 100 specialists from outside the company as mid-career hires and committing them to a dedicated organisation on the front line of new-business development. In a 1963 interview Oya had spoken openly of a plan to diversify away from fibre: even if we take up something we have never handled at all, the possibility is emerging that we can succeed in a surprisingly short time, and anything at all — within the range where our technology and experience are versatile, we mean to take up whatever is profitable and gives good return on capital[16]. In 1969 he said that unless there is a basic attitude of challenging the possibilities of the future in an aggressive way, future business cannot come into being[17], urging the building of an organisational culture that would take on risk.

Management, however, never defined the specific fields the new businesses were to address or the criteria for withdrawing from them, and through the establishment of subsidiaries and joint ventures with foreign companies more than fifty business areas were opened up — information services, education, energy development, fine chemicals and others. The Future Business Division, launched amid the futures boom that peaked with the 1970 Osaka Expo, was reviewed a year after its founding as a division to be watched over the long term, on the ground that in an age of discontinuity some quite unforeseen business might emerge and turn Teijin's image on its head[18]; but it was then hit by the storms of the dollar shock and the oil shock in the first half of the 1970s and was forced into withdrawal or retrenchment in several of its areas. There was little technical relationship between the various businesses, and the result was that management resources were dispersed inside the company; in pharmaceuticals, though, a degree of continuity and technical accumulation was achieved, and the field of candidates to remain as a pillar outside fibre was narrowed down.

In 1978, as a production-adjustment measure in the fibre business, the company closed the Nagoya plant entirely and pushed through a management decision to cut some 2,650 jobs[19]. The scale amounted to roughly a quarter of its employees, and the sorting and selection of the future businesses proceeded in parallel with the structural contraction of fibre. Industry observers in 1976 held that although the fields it had put its hand to were varied — information services, education, energy development, food-resource development, transport-related industries, fine chemicals — no conspicuous results had come out, and that breaking away from a single leg of Tetoron looked like being pushed back[20]. In the end this became the starting point of a process by which pharmaceuticals was narrowed down as the priority field for the future, and it became the axis supporting the later reshaping of Teijin's business structure. It was the period in which the selection criterion Oya had stated publicly — whatever gives good return on capital[21] — began, ten years on, to take concrete shape as a portfolio of businesses.

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Notes

  1. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 — Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  2. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 — Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  3. Teijin, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  4. Teijin, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  5. ダイヤモンド (Diamond), April 1953, “No Regrets in My Life”↩
  6. Teijin, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  7. ダイヤモンド (Diamond), April 1953, “No Regrets in My Life”↩
  8. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 — Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  9. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 — Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  10. ダイヤモンド (Diamond), April 1953, “No Regrets in My Life”↩
  11. ダイヤモンド (Diamond), April 1953, “No Regrets in My Life”↩
  12. Teijin, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  13. Watashi no Keiei Rinen (私の経営理念) — My Management Philosophy, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1965↩
  14. ダイヤモンド (Diamond), April 1953, “No Regrets in My Life”↩
  15. Watashi no Keiei Rinen (私の経営理念) — My Management Philosophy, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1965↩
  16. 成功の秘訣 — The Secret of Success, 1963↩
  17. 経済人 (Keizaijin), May 1969↩
  18. ダイヤモンド (Diamond), 28 April 1969, on the first year of Teijin’s Future Business Division↩
  19. 日経ビジネス (Nikkei Business), 23 October 1978↩
  20. 週刊東洋経済 (Shukan Toyo Keizai), 4 September 1976↩
  21. 成功の秘訣 — The Secret of Success, 1963↩

References & sources

  1. Diamond (Diamond, Inc.): April 1953, Oya Shinzo's recollection No Regrets in My Life; 28 April 1969, on the first year of Teijin's Future Business Division.
  2. Oya Shinzo's own writings: The Secret of Success (1963) and Watashi no Keiei Rinen My Management Philosophy (1965).
  3. Keizaijin, May 1969: Oya Shinzo on the shape a company should take, seen from a futurological standpoint.
  4. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Teijin entry.
  5. Shukan Toyo Keizai (Toyo Keizai Inc.), 4 September 1976, on Teijin's elaborate strategy for the future and its setback.
  6. Nikkei Business (Nikkei BP): 20 October 1980, on rebuilding the future-business strategy for an aggressive management; 19 June 2017, on the automotive-composites expansion.

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