Company history

Teijin is Japan’s oldest chemical-fibre maker. It was founded in 1918, at the height of a boom in rayon — “artificial silk” — when Kaneko Naokichi, the celebrated head clerk of the Suzuki Shoten trading house, put money and a business plan behind two researchers: Hata Itsuzo, who had studied artificial silk while lecturing at the Yonezawa Higher Technical School, and Hisamura Seita, a specialist in leather. The three set up Teikoku Jinzo Kenshi — Imperial Artificial Silk — in Yonezawa, in the mountains of Yamagata, with ¥5 million in capital: Kaneko carrying the financing and the shape of the venture, Hata and Hisamura the manufacturing. A late entrant to a market where imports were dear and demand for a domestic substitute ran deep, the company climbed quickly toward the front rank.

In 1926 it moved from the experimental works at Yonezawa to full mass production at a modern plant. Then, in 1927, the Showa Financial Crisis brought down Suzuki Shoten itself, and Teijin lost the patron it had leaned on. Rayon, though, was still a growth market, and through a change of shareholders the company reconstituted its base and carried on as an independent firm — so profitable in these years that, as Shinzo Oya later recalled, until 1931 its real earnings exceeded those of every other rayon maker combined. By the end of the 1930s Teijin held Japan’s largest rayon-yarn capacity. Cut loose from Suzuki Shoten, it now had to decide for itself, from its own resources, whether to defend its founding trade or move on to the next one — the question that would shape everything after the war.

Reconstruction after the war brought Shinzo Oya to the presidency, and with him a decision to leave the founding trade behind and build the next business alongside Teijin’s own chemistry. The first attempt disappointed: in 1955 the company began Japan’s first mass production of acetate fibre at its Matsuyama plant, but its uses proved narrow and the market never grew as hoped. Oya was candid about why Teijin had fallen behind — the profits of the rayon boom, he wrote, “were reinvested not in synthetics but in leisure,” in a company where, he added, everyone from top to bottom had thrown themselves into golf. That unsparing reading of Teijin’s own complacency became the starting point for the offensive that followed.

In January 1957 Teijin tied up with Britain’s ICI and entered polyester, selling it under the Tetoron brand — a fibre whose dyeability and durability opened a large new market in clothing. Oya took personal ownership of the call, later describing the decision to lead with polyester as “the solemn, decisive moment of a manager’s gravest responsibility,” and a deliberate parting of ways from rivals such as Toyobo and Mitsubishi Rayon, which had leaned toward acrylics. In 1962 the company added nylon through a tie-up with America’s Allied Chemical, completing a three-fibre line in synthetics, and that same year it took the name Teijin. Finally, in 1971, it walked away from rayon — the business it had been founded on — closing the pivot from artificial silk to synthetic-fibre maker.

The reinvention did not stop at fibres. In 1968 Oya set up a semi-autonomous Future Business Headquarters, hiring in some hundred specialists from outside to chase new ventures wherever the company’s technology might reach — information, education, energy, fine chemicals, more than fifty fields in all. But it was launched with no clear targets and no rule for when to quit, and the oil and currency shocks of the early 1970s forced retreats across much of it. Of everything it touched, only chemicals and pharmaceuticals accumulated enough to keep. Then, in 1978, a synthetic-fibre slump forced the reckoning: Teijin closed its Nagoya plant and cut about 2,600 jobs — roughly a quarter of its people — drastic surgery that stanched the losses but left the deeper question of how to rebuild growth unanswered.

The candidates the Future Business Headquarters had narrowed down now became Teijin’s second act. In February 1980, after roughly a decade of continuous research spending, the company launched its first drug, Venilon, a treatment for severe infection; the strategy, management said openly, was to concentrate on medicine rather than diversify in every direction as before. By 1982 the tilt was plain in the numbers — more than a third of technical graduate hires were going to pharmaceuticals and annual R&D there had reached about $12M (¥3bn), a lavish allocation against the segment’s still-small sales. The logic was adjacency: the organic-synthesis chemistry mastered in fibres carried directly into drugs.

That patience produced Teijin’s biggest medicine. Febuxostat, synthesized in 1991, reached the market in May 2011 as Feburic — a gout and hyperuricaemia drug with a new mechanism of action, the first in about forty years, whose stronger lowering of uric acid won it approval for hyperuricaemia itself, not gout alone. Sales peaked near $348.6M (¥38bn) a year, making it the pharmaceutical arm’s largest product. From basic research to launch had taken some twenty years — a payoff, in its way, of the patient investment culture the fibre business had bred.

Alongside medicine, Teijin pushed into high-performance materials by acquisition rather than by building. In 1999 it took a stake in Toho Rayon, gaining carbon-fibre capacity, and installed an outside advisory board — the former DuPont chairman John Krol among its members — to weigh in on the president’s performance and long-range strategy. In October 2000 it bought the Twaron para-aramid business from the Dutch firm Acordis, buying its way to the front rank of the world aramid market and taking on an existing customer base rather than expanding its own lines. The move turned Teijin decisively away from commodity fibre and toward high-performance materials — the base on which it would later push into automotive parts.

The two businesses built in the good years now needed defending. In January 2017 Teijin agreed to buy the American auto-parts maker CSP for about $757.8M (¥85bn), reaching past raw-material supply to finished structural parts and the sales channels of the North American carmakers — glass-fibre composite components it could make light and cheap by injection moulding. More European interior-parts makers followed, folded by 2021 into a single Teijin Automotive Technologies. But across these cross-border deals came trouble concentrated in the United States: weak plant productivity, hard-to-fill labour, and a steady need for further investment that pressed on the whole group’s returns.

Medicine faced its own cliff. Feburic’s patent expired in 2022, and with no strong drug of its own ready to replace it, Teijin paid about $1.2B (¥133bn) — its largest-ever outlay in the business — for the Japanese sales rights to four Takeda diabetes drugs, which held sales roughly steady and all but offset the loss. Yet those products sit in the mature phase of their life cycle, and the diabetes market is expected to shrink over time; the purchase bought time, not intrinsic growth, and the question of a lasting engine for the drug business stayed open.

These strains laid bare the pattern the company had run on for decades: quick to enter a new field, but slow to test its exits and whether capital would ever return, Teijin had spread into more businesses than it could win and carried a low-return constitution as the price. Akishige Uchikawa, president since 2022, has tried to break the habit — putting the verification of capital returns first, narrowing new investment to the fields where Teijin is genuinely strong, and turning resources toward proving out, or cleaning up, the businesses already on the books. The work now is less about adding new ventures than finishing the ones the old instinct began.