Katsunosuke Maeda
Profile
Performance in office
Tenure
Tenure
Background
A career employee, he completed the graduate program in industrial chemistry at Kyoto University in March 1956, joined Toyo Rayon and worked mainly in production technology. He became manager of the Ehime Plant in 1979, a Director in 1985 and Managing Director in 1986, and after one year as Managing Director became President in April 1987. The company took "Toyo" rather than "Mitsui" in its name so as not to embarrass the Mitsui family if the artificial silk business failed, and in its early days Toray was "what we would now call a venture business": so Katsunosuke Maeda recalled in 1984, before becoming President.
Selection
He became President in 1987. Up to the previous year, Toray had plunged into one new business after another under the banner of moving away from fibers, with the result that its core textile division was deep in the red and it had been forced to cut new graduate hiring to zero. Maeda called this sudden deterioration "acute pneumonia." He described the situation when he took office this way: "I ended up becoming President at a time when nothing more could be done." In 1975 the weekly Toyo Keizai had run a feature on Toray titled "Mitsui's fallen star."
Initiatives
He traced the slump not to the oil crises or the strong yen but to the company's culture, and began replacing employees who behaved like commentators. He called the stagnation, in which sales only tripled while Japan's GNP grew about twentyfold over 20 years, "big-company disease" and "diabetes." Refusing to follow the trend away from fibers, he kept synthetic fibers as the core business, positioning them as still growing worldwide, and placed carbon fiber and composites, medical products and pharmaceuticals, and electronic and information materials such as optical fiber at the center of new businesses. Consolidated net sales went from ¥976.7 billion in the FY ended March 1992 to ¥941.3 billion in the FY ended March 1996, and ordinary income fell from ¥64.5 billion to ¥40.9 billion. In June 1997 he handed the presidency to Katsuhiko Hirai and became Chairman.
Career
Career
Toray Industries
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| 1987 | President |
| Jun 1997 | Stepped down as President |
References 3
References (Japanese primary sources)
- 日経ビジネス 1991年9月9日号「革命を起こさなければ」
- 日経ビジネス 1984年8月6日号「強さの研究・東レ」
- 日経ビジネス 1997年9月15日号「平井克彦氏［東レ］登場 明るさ忘れず、「繊維トップ」の座守る」