Company history

The line starts in 1889, when Kurokawa Eijiro and Ueda Ihachi set up Kyoetsu-gumi in Fukui to degum export habutae silk. But the company as such was not founded by an entrepreneur; it was assembled by the state. Fukui’s export silk had been degraded by cut-throat competition until Japanese cloth was losing its name in Europe, and with foreign exchange at stake the government and governor Nakamura Junkuro pushed the prefecture’s refiners together — sixteen mills into Fukui Kenseiren in 1911, and in May 1923 a five-way merger that produced Fukui Seiren Kako, capitalized at ¥2m with 622 employees and five plants.

That origin fixed the character of the business. Seiren did the back end — taking cloth someone else had woven and dyeing it for a fee. What to make was decided by the weaving districts, and later by the synthetic-fibre makers who became its shareholders. The company followed the raw material rather than leading it: silk to rayon from 1929, and after three plants burned in the July 1945 air raid on Fukui, into the synthetics age with process technology as its edge. A 1953 finishing process for Bemberg and acetate cloth earned it a reputation, and in 1956 the Katsumi plant was dedicated entirely to acetate dyeing for Teijin — a line built for one customer, the model it would live by.

It listed on the Osaka exchange in 1962 with Teijin as its largest shareholder and Asahi Kasei second. Equity from the fibre makers bought steady orders and gave away the pricing decision: in the year to May 1968, Asahi Kasei took 36% of sales, Teijin 24%, and the top five customers 78% between them. Seiren held 4.9% of Japan’s synthetic-fibre dyeing — second in a fragmented field where the customer decided how the profit was split. Tokyo followed in 1969, both exchanges promoted it to the First Section in April 1973, and in February that year it took the name Seiren, the colloquial form of seiren, refining — its trade raised to a corporate name just as the first oil shock was about to expose what that trade rested on.

The October 1973 oil shock reached Seiren as a cut in orders. The fibre majors throttled production, and a company whose revenue was the sum of other companies’ plans watched its market shrink with no lever to pull. A section chief named Kawada Tatsuo argued internally that Seiren needed a business of its own. Chairman Kurokawa Eijiro noticed him in a routine appraisal interview and gave him new-business duty — with a handful of subordinates and no company-wide mandate. Inside Seiren he was a heretic; he used the word himself.

In 1975, over the objections of corporate planning, Kawada took the company into automotive interior fabric. Car seats were vinyl then, and textiles were considered unsuitable. More to the point, the move inverted the business: commission dyeing meant holding a customer’s yarn and collecting a fee with no inventory, while seat fabric meant buying yarn, weaving it, carrying stock, and selling a finished product to a manufacturer. Colleagues called him mad. The oil shock helped him — vinyl prices had spiked, narrowing the gap, and Seiren’s napping technology gave its fabric a real price advantage. Sales to Toyota began in 1975, Nissan in 1976, Honda in 1988: every major Japanese carmaker inside a decade or so.

By the year to May 1985, of ¥38.3bn in parent revenue, commission dyeing for apparel was 57%, automotive interiors 31%. While the strong yen was destroying the margins of export-dependent textile firms, Seiren had found demand that was domestic, contractual and insulated from the exchange rate. The industry called it a resurrection. What it actually was, was the first business in the company’s history whose price Seiren set itself.

In August 1987 Kawada became president at forty-seven, handed the company by the founding Kurokawa family. He had been demoted early in his career for criticizing the way it was run, and he never stopped describing himself as an outsider to the mainstream — which is roughly what made him willing to dismantle what the mainstream had built.

The technology followed the same logic as the car seats: stop executing other people’s instructions. From 1987 Seiren developed Viscotec, a computer-controlled electronic printing process that puts colour and pattern onto cloth directly from digital data, without water or dyestuff — the opposite of dyeing to a customer’s spec sheet, and something Seiren could sell as its own product. A dedicated plant at Techno Port Fukui opened in 1990. After the bubble burst, Kawada replaced the corporate slogan with “Do or Die” and made ending the subcontractor mentality an explicit company-wide instruction.

Production followed the customers abroad — the United States in 1986, Thailand in 1994, Brazil in 1997, Suzhou in 2002, and later Indonesia, India, Mexico, Guangzhou and Hungary. In July 2005 Seiren bought Kanebo’s textile business, forming KB Seiren and taking nylon fibre in-house, which closed the last gap in a chain running from yarn through weaving and knitting to dyeing and sewing. The Osaka listing was retired the same month and subsidiaries were folded into the parent. In June 2011, after nearly twenty-four years, Kawada moved to chairman while remaining CEO.

Three engineers have held the presidency since — Tsubota Koji from 2014, Yamada Hideyuki from 2022, and Yuikawa Koichi announced in 2025 — while Kawada stayed on as chairman and CEO, setting the long horizon while the president ran the business. Yamada took over with an explicit brief: turn Seiren from a textile company into an industrial-materials company, and grow the long-incubated new ventures — semiconductor processing materials, components for satellites — into the next pillar.

The reason is visible in the numbers. In the year to March 2025, revenue was ¥159.7bn with an 11.2% operating margin and ¥13.9bn of net profit — against ¥86.3bn and a ¥3.7bn operating profit in 2011, profit multiplied 4.8 times on 1.85 times the revenue. But of five segments, automotive materials alone is ¥109.8bn, 69% of revenue and 78% of segment profit; high fashion, electronics, environmental and living materials, and medical share the rest. Seiren’s integrated line, from yarn to sewn product, is exactly what made it the world leader in seat fabric — and it is a line pointed at one industry.

The succession is unresolved in more than one sense. At the June 2024 general meeting, support for Kawada’s re-election as a director fell to 85%, the lowest of any candidate on the slate — shareholders registering an objection to an eighty-five-year-old still holding the top seat. Meanwhile his eldest son, Kawada Koji, sits as representative vice-president in charge of strategy and marketing. A company created by prefectural fiat in 1923 and remade by a section chief nobody agreed with in 1975 now has to do the trick a third time — replicating its integrated production, at small volume, in electronics and medical — and hand over both the business and the man who built it.