Commercialising chloroprene rubber, and joining the Maruzen petrochemical complex (1962)

A cost with no way out, and the price of running two systems

Three thousand kilowatt-hours per tonne of carbide — that figure narrowed the company’s options. A business in which power and carbon set half the cost has nowhere to go when purchased electricity gets dearer. What president Nomura Yosoichi chose in 1962 was neither switching the raw-material system to petroleum nor continuing to bet on carbide, but beginning both in the same year: challenging, as the world’s third producer, a product only two companies could make because of the danger of explosion, while securing 200,000 tsubo of land at Goi.

The two pillars did not grow equally, however. The styrene resins started at Goi saw demand shrink by 20% and became a business requiring its sales and production structure to be reviewed. What remained was the one the company built itself after abandoning a licensing deal as uneconomic. Even that chloroprene rubber ran aground where it had bought the originator DuPont’s equipment, and by 2025 was back at the single site of Omi. The decision to take the plunge, one can see, weighed less than the decision to hold on for sixty years.