Company history

On 1 September 1949, under the approved reconstruction plan for Kanegafuchi Spinning (Kanebo), a new company took over every business the parent held except textiles. Kanegafuchi Chemical Industry started in Osaka with capital of $555,556 (¥200m) and a portfolio that ran from caustic soda, oil pressing, soap, edible oil, yeast and foodstuffs to Western and Japanese paper, enamelled wire, cosmetics and starch. It carried a chemical company’s signboard, but in substance it was the receptacle for the miscellany a spinning firm had accumulated through the war and its aftermath — legally new, yet with businesses as old as Kanebo itself, and not one of them capable of serving as a core. Its shares were listed in October 1949.

The first decade was spent subtracting. Amino acids were discontinued in 1952, starch and Western paper sold in 1953, Japanese paper wound up in 1954; by 1967 only caustic soda and soap survived from the inherited list. Addition ran in parallel — capacity added in soap, electrolytic caustic soda and BHC, and captive power installed — so that the company was cutting and building at the same time. Capital doubled to $1.1M (¥400m) in 1951 and total sales reached $16.9M (¥6bn) in fiscal 1954, but the outline of the firm stayed indistinct, with dividends passed over repeatedly and outsiders still treating it as a Kanebo division nearly two decades on.

What made independence possible was chlorine. In July 1950 the company achieved Japan’s first industrialisation of polyvinyl chloride, reassembling on idle equipment the technique and experience left over from wartime synthetic-rubber research undertaken at the military’s request. Output began at 60 tonnes a month and reached 400 by March 1955. That it rested on the company’s own technology, and that the soda division supplied its own chlorine, are what let PVC be placed at the centre of the business — and the chlorine then branched downstream, into vinyl-insulated wire (1950), the moisture-proof coated paper Kaneproof (1952), ready-to-mould PVC compound (1953) and Kanechlor, a chlorinated diphenyl heat-transfer fluid and plasticiser (1954) that no other Japanese firm made.

The products that would carry the company arrived within a single decade, all of them commercialised on in-house technology: Kanekalon acrylic fibre in 1957, Kane Ace MBS resin in 1964, Kanepearl expanded polystyrene in 1965. By the second half of 1966 polymer chemistry alone accounted for 63% of sales — resins 34%, Kanekalon 14%, wire 15% — and the fats and yeast inherited in 1949 had left the centre. PVC capacity of 6,600 tonnes a month in 1967 put Kaneka level with Zeon at the top of the domestic industry, and its ABS resin led as well, not by meeting rivals head-on but by holding the B-type grade blended with PVC to give transparency and impact strength. As much weight was given to the way it sold: technical guidance to converters was never separated from the sales force, and that habit worked again with each new resin.

In 1967 came the feedstock decision. Comparing the naphtha-based Wulff process with ethylene-based oxychlorination, the company licensed the latter from Stauffer of the United States and put $14.2M (¥5bn) into Takasago. The move was not one firm’s capital spending: with Takasago and then Mitsubishi Petrochemical’s Kashima added to the four VCM centres the Ministry of International Trade and Industry had envisaged, six were built, nearly all completing between 1970 and 1971. Kaneka’s Kashima plant opened in November 1970, its monomer supplied by a company jointly funded with Shin-Etsu, Asahi Glass and Asahi Denka — the era’s standard device for splitting the burden of naphtha procurement and finance. By 1970 PVC had passed polyethylene as the largest-volume plastic in Japan. In December 1970 Kaneka Belgium began European production.

Kanekalon, meanwhile, retreated from the fight it could not win. As Exlan, Bonnel and Cashmilon entered behind it, Kaneka moved the fibre into gaps the specialists ignored — flame-retardant curtains, carpets and bedding, and, treated to behave like human hair, wigs, where by 1967 its fibre was the only synthetic one left in the market. Then in October 1968 its own product caused mass injury: Kanechlor used as a heat-transfer medium leaked into rice oil at Kanemi Warehouse, carrying PCBs and dioxin-family furans into food. Reported victims numbered 14,627 by July 1969; suits followed against Kanemi and Kaneka, and from 1970 against the state. Kaneka eventually settled. Read as a single act of negligence the case is misread — the Kanemi Yusho poisoning stands with Minamata, Yokkaichi, Niigata and Itai-itai as one of the pollution cases that put the whole rush into heavy chemical industry on trial, and the Chemical Substances Control Law that followed in 1974 changed how any new substance reaches the market.

As petrochemicals matured, Kaneka began seeding pillars outside resin — none of them large on its own. Pharmaceutical bulk production started in 1974 and ubidecarenone, later known as coenzyme Q10, in 1977, with pharma intermediates following in 1983; on the materials side came weatherable MMA film (1978), modified silicone polymer (1979), ultra-heat-resistant polyimide film (1984), medical devices (1986), the subsidiary Kaneka Medix (1993) and LCD-related products (1995). Two of them lasted decades: the silicone polymer as the principal material for construction sealants, the polyimide as an electronics material. Onishi Masami, later president, worked on coenzyme Q10 and antibiotic intermediates in the late 1970s without dedicated plant, and took from it the rule that development succeeds when the theme has been narrowed hard enough. Overseas plants followed the same logic of making where demand was — Singapore 1979, Texas 1982, Malaysia 1995 — building on Belgium and leaving the three bases the company still relies on.

In August 1985 it gave up a retail chain it was winning with. Fontaine, its directly run women’s-wig company, had 140 stores against the 97 of the seventeen-year-old Aderans, but its purpose had never been profit: it was the place a materials maker tested its product, and Kanekalon already supplied about 80% of the world’s artificial hair. Handing the stores to a company better at selling them would raise demand for the fibre itself, and Kaneka went back to being a supplier.

In June 1999 Takeda Masatoshi, a Kanekalon salesman his entire career, became president and stated the company’s shape plainly: secure a majority of a niche market worth around ¥50 billion, and withdraw at once on falling to third. Under that rule the profit structure moved away from petrochemicals, with world-cost pharmaceutical intermediates and food growing into the main beams; in fiscal 1999, the fiftieth year, consolidated net profit was set to reach a record for the first time in a decade, with 99% of affiliates in the black. Yet the same discipline did not stop the company from putting more than $76.4M (¥10bn) into solar cells in October 1998 — a market too small and too unfamiliar to satisfy its own criterion. On employment the line held the other way: no layoffs, said Takeda as his predecessor Furuta Takeshi had, even as pay moved to performance — equal chances, unequal results.

In April 2001 a ministry notification reclassified coenzyme Q10 as a food, and a substance made as pharmaceutical bulk since 1977 acquired a second market twenty-four years on. What moved was the regulation, not the product: fermentation and synthesis skills honed for medicine rode the health-food boom unchanged, and Kaneka Nutrients was set up in North America in 2004 to carry the supply. That September, fifty-five years after its founding, Kanegafuchi Chemical Industry renamed itself Kaneka — dropping the two characters that named the spinning company was an acknowledgement that nothing of that inheritance was left in the business.

What Onishi Masami inherited on becoming president in June 2005 was a dispersed conglomerate: sixteen businesses turning over about $4.3B (¥470bn). He picked three fields with room to grow — functional materials, life science, electronics — and pushed overseas expansion alongside them, each then near 35% of the whole and targeted first at 40%. The structure was then rebuilt around geography and around solutions: regional holding companies for the Americas and Asia in 2012, Europe in 2015, Hokkaido in 2017, with domestic food sales consolidated into Kaneka Foods in 2013; and the sixteen businesses regrouped into four Solution Units — Material, Quality of Life, Health Care and Nutrition — under the KANEKA UNITED declaration, with overseas sales targeted at 60%. A materials maker had changed how it described itself, from selling substances to supplying solutions. In 2023 it dropped the medium-term plan format altogether, renaming its plans three-year “settings” that turn over each year.

Pillars were still added by small purchases rather than large mergers: Cemedine by tender offer in 2016 and wholly owned by 2022, Tobu Kagaku in 2018, the medical-device firm EndoStream Medical in 2024, in a line running back through Eurogentec (2010) and Sun Spice (1973). The solar business, meanwhile, survived by being remade. The thin-film silicon of 1999 did not last, but the volume-production know-how carried into heterojunction crystalline silicon, and the product was recast as a building part — VISOLA roof tiles, GRANSOLA for industry, wall- and window-integrated panels developed with Taisei — and then as a car part, on the roof glass of Toyota’s new Prius PHEV from March 2023, with perovskite tandem production now in development under NEDO’s Green Innovation Fund. Consolidated sales rose from $5.9B (¥469bn) in the year to March 2012 to $5.3B (¥807bn) in the year to March 2025. The rule of the niche still governs — but it presumes such niches keep existing, and as solar’s drift into building materials showed, when the market moves the same rule can argue as easily for expansion as for exit.