1933Merges Bemberg and Asahi Silk as Asahi Bemberg Silk
1943Absorbs the explosives arm; renamed Nichitsu Chemical Industries
In 1921 Noguchi Shitagau, head of Nippon Nitrogenous Fertilizer (日本窒素肥料), sailed for Europe to buy the patent on the Italian engineer Luigi Casale’s ammonia synthesis process. In September 1923 the company opened an ammonium sulphate works at Nobeoka in Miyazaki: hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, nitrogen separated from the air, the two combined directly — the first industrialisation of the Casale process anywhere, and watched as such. What decided the site was electricity. Company-owned hydroelectric plants on the Gokase River gave cheap, steady power, and by 1927 Nobeoka was making some 60,000 tonnes of ammonium sulphate a year, among the largest works in Japan. On the same European trip Noguchi also bought a viscose rayon process from Germany’s Glanzstoff; Asahi Silk Weaving (旭絹織) had already been set up in 1922 and its Otsu mill started in 1924.
What followed was derivation rather than expansion. Reading ammonia as a raw material to be used further up the value chain, Noguchi licensed cuprammonium rayon from Germany’s Bemberg and founded Nippon Bemberg Silk in 1929; synthetic nitric acid led to explosives, and Nippon Chisso Explosives followed in 1930. In 1931 the Nobeoka ammonia works itself was incorporated as Nobeoka Ammonia Fiber — the year Asahi Kasei counts as its founding. It absorbed the Bemberg and Asahi Silk companies in 1933 to become Asahi Bemberg Silk, added monosodium glutamate and a food business in 1935, and took in the explosives company in 1943 as Nichitsu Chemical Industries. Fertiliser, fibre, explosives and food out of one chemistry and one power source: the pattern Asahi Kasei would repeat for the next century was fully formed before the war ended.
1946Renamed Asahi Kasei Kogyo after the break-up of the konzern
1949Listed in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya
1952Asahi-Dow joint venture with Dow Chemical
1959Acrylic fibre Cashmilon into full production
1960Saran Wrap
1961Miyazaki Teru becomes president; net margin down to 1.3%
The occupation broke up the Nihon Chisso konzern, and in April 1946 the Nobeoka fibre and explosives company was cut loose from the parent and renamed Asahi Kasei Kogyo. Designation as a restricted company, the Deconcentration Law, reparations designation and the purge of its senior management followed in sequence; by 1949 the rebuilding plan had restored most divisions, and the shares were listed in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya that May. One consequence of the split was not sought and mattered enormously: the Minamata works went to Chisso, and the liability for Minamata disease went with it. Nobeoka stayed the operational centre of the company for decades — as late as 1977 it still employed 7,413 people.
Growth in the 1950s came, as before, by derivation and by licence: a 1952 joint venture with America’s Dow Chemical (Asahi-Dow) that began making polystyrene in 1957, the acrylic fibre Cashmilon in 1959, Saran Wrap in 1960. Then polyester arrived. Rayon and Bemberg lost their competitive footing, Cashmilon piled up unsold, and the trade press wrote of overcapacity and an escalating race to add capacity (読売新聞, 25 May 1961). Net margin fell from 8.0% in the good year of 1957 to 1.3% in 1961, far enough that the company put staff on temporary furlough. Miyazaki Teru, who became president that year, later put it plainly: from about 1961 the synthetic fibres came onto the market in earnest, “and seeing that, I thought that if we leaned only on rayon and Bemberg we would eventually be finished” (ダイヤモンド, 29 June 1964).
1967ALC building material Hebel goes into production
1968Sanyo Petrochemical — $277.8M (¥100bn) for Mizushima
1972Hebel Haus launched; the Mizushima cracker starts up
1974Asahi Medical — hollow-fibre dialysers
1982Buys out Dow’s half of Asahi-Dow
1985Yoshino Akira fixes the basic structure of the lithium-ion battery
1992Toyo Jozo merged in; Miyazaki dies in April after 31 years
Miyazaki took over at the trough and began by demoting a vice-president and a senior managing director outright to force a younger board. His method was financial before it was strategic: rationalising the fibre business to secure roughly ¥7 billion of dependable annual profit, then ruling that new ventures could lose money inside that envelope — the “healthy loss-making division.” In July 1968 he founded Sanyo Petrochemical and committed about $277.8M (¥100bn) to a cracker complex at Mizushima — a sum equal to the company’s entire annual sales and more than five times its yearly capital spending, over strong internal opposition. The downstream customers were already there: Asahi-Dow held about 40% of Japan’s polystyrene by 1969, developing grades jointly with the appliance makers, and in 1982 Asahi Kasei bought out Dow’s half for some $168.6M (¥42bn) to own the chain from monomer to product.
Housing, the other new pillar, began in failure. Silicalcite technology imported from the Soviet Union in 1962 proved defective as a building material and left ¥3 billion of accumulated losses; Asahi Kasei switched to German ALC technology in 1965 and started making the autoclaved aerated concrete Hebel in 1967. From 1972 it sold Hebel Haus directly rather than through agents, and under Yamaguchi Nobuo — Miyazaki’s secretary of many years, made head of the housing division in 1974 — sales went from ¥7 billion to ¥37 billion in three years by concentrating on high-value homes in the Tokyo region. Medical devices came the classic way, by derivation: Asahi Medical, founded 1974, turned the hollow-fibre technology developed for Bemberg into dialyser membranes, was profitable within three years and led the domestic artificial-kidney market with about 30% share by 1982. In 1985 a researcher named Yoshino Akira, working on a two-year basic-research theme, settled on a carbon anode and fixed the basic structure of the lithium-ion battery.
The proof came in the fibre slump of 1977, when the six other big synthetic-fibre makers all fell into recurring losses and Asahi Kasei alone earned ¥3.254 billion; by then non-fibre lines were 53% of sales and the company called itself a chemical maker rather than a fibre maker (読売新聞, 15 Nov 1977). Miyazaki stayed at the top for thirty-one years, handing each new venture to a trusted lieutenant — Kuroda Yoshihisa in building materials, Yamaguchi in housing, Ogawa Mitsuo at Toyo Jozo, who converted a liquor maker into a pharmaceutical one and was merged into Asahi Kasei in January 1992. He left eight fields behind: fibres, petrochemicals, housing, building materials, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, food and liquor. What he did not leave was any practice of exiting; group profitability stayed thin. When Miyazaki died suddenly on a business trip in April 1992, his successor Yumikura Reiichi said within weeks that the company’s resources were spread too thin, and turned the wheel.
2002Shochu and low-alcohol drinks to Asahi Breweries
2003Acrylic fibre ends; sake to Oenon; holding-company structure
The turn took a decade to work through. Yamamoto Kazumoto, president from 1997, introduced divisional balance sheets and ROE management, and told the company bluntly that it behaved like a collection of small firms sheltering under a ¥1 trillion top line, which softened how hard anyone took the numbers. Once the returns of individual businesses were visible rather than buried in the consolidated total, disposals followed: the food business to Japan Tobacco in 1999, shochu and low-alcohol drinks to Asahi Breweries in 2002, sake and synthetic sake to Oenon Holdings in 2003. In 2001 the company dropped “Kogyo” to become Asahi Kasei Corporation, and in 2003 reorganised into a holding company over seven operating subsidiaries.
It also retreated from its own origins. Rayon production stopped in 2001 and acrylic fibre in 2003 — the two businesses that had come out of Noguchi’s European trip. What set the pace of all this was a self-imposed constraint: Asahi Kasei did not, as a rule, cut staff. It redeployed people, and where a plant could not be closed it changed what the plant made. Compared with the voluntary-retirement rounds its peers ran, the method was slow, and the low profitability persisted for years longer than it needed to; but it left the organisation’s trust intact, and it became the way Asahi Kasei has rearranged its portfolio ever since.
2024Calliditas acquired; withdrawal from PTT Asahi Chemical decided
2025Medium-Term Plan 2027 — ROIC 6%, ROE 9%
The room the disposals created went, from 2012, into acquisitions abroad — and the method changed with it. Where Miyazaki had derived new businesses out of technology the company already held, Asahi Kasei now bought businesses other people had already built: ZOLL Medical in 2012 for about $2.3B (¥181bn), Polypore in 2015 for about ¥210 billion, Sage Automotive Interiors in 2018, Veloxis in 2020, Bionova in 2022 and Sweden’s Calliditas in 2024 — roughly ¥700 billion in a decade. Defibrillators, post-transplant immunosuppressants and an IgA nephropathy drug on one side, lithium-ion battery separators on the other. Out of it came the three-segment shape the company runs today: Material, Homes and Health Care. In 2019 Yoshino’s 1985 anode won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
The other half of the decade has been demolition. The Mizushima ethylene centre — the core of the ¥100 billion bet of 1968 — was shut in February 2016; even so, Asahi Kasei booked a $415.6M (¥58bn) impairment on commodity petrochemical and resin assets in the year to March 2024, decided in November 2024 to withdraw from PTT Asahi Chemical in Thailand, and in January 2026 began reviewing the whole western-Japan ethylene structure, with derivative production to end around fiscal 2030. Against health-care assets bought for ¥700 billion, commodity chemistry could no longer earn its capital back. The Medium-Term Management Plan 2027, published in April 2025, sets ROIC of 6% and ROE of 9% as the tests. Kudo Koshiro, president since 2022, meanwhile talks of reviving the company’s nobushi — rough-warrior — spirit and its appetite for risk: the same disposition that built what is now being taken apart.
A postwar start that gave up the name to keep the business
Dropping the Nichitsu name did not end with the repainting of a signboard. The Nobeoka operation had been a separate legal entity since 1931, when the ammonium sulphate works was spun out as Nobeoka Ammonia Fiber, but its power and its raw materials still ran back through the Nippon Nitrogenous Fertilizer line. The 1946 change of name can be read as the procedure that severed that connection in name as well — moving a company holding ammonium sulphate, fibre, explosives and food across to the side that had to stand on its own feet.
It is hard, though, to say that Asahi Kasei Kogyo chose this separation. The reason for the new name was the dissolution of the zaibatsu, and the restricted-company designation, the application of the Deconcentration Law, the reparations designation and the purge were all conditions imposed from outside. Where the old Nippon Nitrogenous Fertilizer lost more than 80% of its overseas assets and was wound up in 1950, Nobeoka was able to move toward restoring its plant largely because of a difference of location — the works had stayed inside Japan. The work of management in this period lay in deciding what to keep within a frame that had been set for it.
The light and the shade of tolerating losses by design
The heart of this decision was not writing off the prospects of the founding fibre business, but deliberately taking on the risk of new ventures on the back of the earning power of the existing one. Refusing to treat losses as the enemy, and going so far as to call the red ink of a new business “healthy” so long as it did not break the company’s finances, was an unusual idea in the management of a large Japanese company at the time. That Miyazaki already felt a sense of crisis in an era of generous dividends and a firm share price is what supported the scale and the speed of the investment that followed.
The method carried a side effect all the same: it blurred the criteria for withdrawal. Positioning the losses of a new business as “healthy” made it hard to draw the line on how long they would be tolerated, and this fed into the low profitability and the delayed disposals that Asahi Kasei Kogyo carried in later years. Given how quickly the shift to selection and concentration proceeded once Miyazaki had died, the decision of 1961 was at once the starting point of Asahi Kasei Kogyo as a diversified company and the judgment that sowed the problem it would spend decades facing.
Being long-wished-for and being right are decided separately
The figure of ¥100 billion lay outside the very test Miyazaki himself had set: that a choice “must be within your own strength.” It matched the company’s annual sales, exceeded five times its yearly capital spending, and met strong opposition inside the company. That he could push it through anyway seems to owe to two things coinciding — the memory of supply insecurity in the years when Asahi Kasei bought its monomer from Mitsubishi Chemical Industries and others, and the fact that the minimum-scale standard had risen to 300,000 tonnes, closing off the room for a plan of its own. Here the yardstick of “within your own strength” is used as a reason to step over it.
What passed, however, was the intention to enter, not the shape of the plan. The single-company 120,000-tonne concept was not approved; it was rebuilt as a rotation shared with competitors, and construction and operation of the Mizushima cracker were held by Mitsubishi Chemical Industries. April 1972, when Sanyo Ethylene started up, was the month the ethylene industry received approval for a recession cartel. From the oil shock of the following year, this plant turned into the centre of what came to be called an “oil-soaked” constitution, and the thing that had to be shed shifted from fibre to petrochemicals. That something was long wished for, and that it was right as an investment, are questions that have to be examined separately.
Commercialising a material and entering an industry were two separate decisions
The key to this judgment is that “commercialising a material” and “entering the housing industry” are two separate decisions stacked on top of each other. The thoroughgoing diversification begun in 1961 produced the material Hebel, but whether to fashion it into a detached-house brand was another question altogether. Had Asahi Kasei stopped at selling the material to others it would have ended as one division of a building-materials maker; by stepping into housing and taking on construction and sales as well, it acquired a source of earnings whose cyclical rhythm differs from that of fibres and petrochemicals.
At the same time, Miyazaki himself acknowledged that this business was an outlying enclave, off the line of Asahi Kasei’s usual account of diversification as technologies connected by a single thread. What made the enclave hold was the way the market was cut — concentration on the Tokyo metropolitan area and on two-generation houses, both reasoned backward from the properties of the material — and it was that hold which kept housing from being sold in the age of selection and concentration. Including the way the falsification of pile-driving data in 2015 shook the record of a business built on trust, half a century since entry shows that the success or failure of a diversification hangs on what is built after the entry.
The value of keeping hold of a technology’s origin
The core of this decision lies not in a business strategy settled at a management meeting but in a technical choice made by a single researcher inside the basic-research themes he was reassigned every two years. Choosing a carbon material for the anode was not, at the time, understood as a managerial move that would decide whether the battery could be mass-produced or commercialised at all. Yet it is precisely this technical judgment that became the asset which survived the rises and falls of Asahi Kasei’s battery business over the following three decades and more.
The implication of the case is that, having taken the setback of a dissolved joint venture on the mass-production side, the company nonetheless kept hold of an intangible asset — the basic patents — and that this bore fruit in the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Even when outrun by competitors in the speed of commercialisation, holding on to the origin of a technology has a value of its own. With the development race over all-solid-state batteries entering a new phase, Yoshino’s own question — how to position sustained investment in basic research — still carries weight, and not for Asahi Kasei alone.
From “healthy losses” to capital-efficiency management — how to read the turn
The core of this decision is that the successors set out to replace the very structure of decision-making — concentrated for thirty-one years in one man, Miyazaki Teru — with the objective yardstick of capital efficiency. “Healthy losses” had been the force that pushed diversification forward through a period of steady growth, but once growth stopped, the same idea risked turning into a device that concealed the inefficiency of individual businesses. Without the accidental trigger of Miyazaki’s sudden death, there is no telling how much later this turn would have come.
That said, the ten years it took from the introduction of divisional balance sheets to the completion of the food and liquor disposals is also the consequence of Asahi Kasei choosing a route that rearranged its businesses while protecting employment. This staged method of transfer carried forward into the later three-segment structure of Material, Homes and Health Care, and then into the growth strategy of overseas M&A from the 2010s. From thirty-one years of “expansion” to thirty of “selection and concentration” — this turning point can be seen as having set the frame of the Asahi Kasei that followed.
Yoshida Yasuyuki, the executive vice-president heading the new medical business project, said that “M&A too will be done without spending time” eight months before the acquisition was agreed. Health care then consisted of two areas, pharmaceuticals and blood purification, with sales of ¥116.4 billion in the year to March 2011 — less than a tenth of the group. To raise a third pillar in-house, the way the artificial kidney had been raised, would take decades to reach a scale worth calling a pillar. The $2.21 billion was the price of skipping those years. The verdict at the time that it was too expensive makes sense as an appraisal of the assets, but it left out the appraisal of time.
Buying and then growing, however, has no end point. Once inside the group ZOLL made acquisitions of its own — Cardiac Science, then Respicardia — and each time the earnings briefings turned to how much goodwill amortisation would take out of profit. As the company explained in November 2019, “the contribution will come from fiscal 2020 onward”: the effect of an acquisition does not appear in the year it is made. The decision to buy a third pillar and set it in place did not conclude at the moment of installation; it took the form of a burden carried forward into every period since.
Each heading links to the full Japanese analysis — background, decision and outcome, with sources.
This is a condensed English edition. The full, source-by-source history — with the detailed narrative, financial tables, shareholders and executives — is maintained in Japanese: 日本語版（詳細）— Asahi Kasei full history in Japanese →
Yomiuri Shimbun — 読売新聞: 25 May 1961 (“fears of oversupply” as the synthetic-fibre makers race to add capacity); 15 Nov 1977 (every major fibre maker in the red except Asahi Kasei).
Diamond — ダイヤモンド, 29 June 1964: “The seed-sowing for the leap is finished” — interview with Miyazaki Teru.
Kasen Geppo — 化繊月報, March 1967: “Asking Asahi Kasei president Miyazaki Teru.”
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