The DuPont nylon alliance (1951)

Buying technology from outside, and turning it into technology of one’s own

The heart of this decision is that Toyo Rayon, which had walked a single road of rayon, spent a technology-import fee worth one and a half times its capital to buy wholesale, from across the sea, the synthetic-fibre technology it lacked. For a fibre company so soon after the war, a $3 million prepayment was a bet that could not be allowed to fail, and it was no exaggeration when an in-house article wrote that it “bore on the company’s rise or fall.” Chairman Tashiro Shigeki spread the burden over five instalments and, guarding the advantage of moving first, concentrated on mass production — an arrangement resting on a realistic calculation for recovering the bet in a short span of years.

And out of this choice to buy technology from outside grew the self-reliance that would later become Toray’s byword. The DuPont contract was centred on a patent licence and handed over no mass-production technology, so Toyo Rayon had no choice but to raise manufacturing on its own. That very constraint rooted a culture of honing technology in-house rather than leaning on others, and later underwrote the carbon-fibre investment that endured forty years of losses. In 2014 Toray reversed that self-reliance to buy America’s Zoltek — but trace it back and the starting point lies in the 1951 choice to buy technology from outside. Where to obtain technology, and how to turn it into a foundation of one’s own: this remains the decision in which Toyo Rayon gave its first answer to that question.