Benzaburo Kato
Profile
Performance in office
Tenure
Tenure
Background
He was born in 1899 in Aragaya Village, Shimane Prefecture (now Izumo City). In May 1920 he entered the Department of Industrial Chemistry in the Faculty of Engineering at Kyoto Imperial University and majored in fermentation. In 1923, on the introduction of his supervising professor, he joined Yomo Gomei of Fushimi, and later served as plant manager of Takara Shuzo's Ichikawa Plant. His career was devoted entirely to fermentation technology, and the major shareholders as of June 1955 were corporations such as Hong Kong Transportation Company, Dai-ichi Life and Mitsubishi Trust, with no Kato family name among them.
Selection
In 1948 the company was asked by Chuo Genryo Shusei, the party that had contracted it, to become independent, on the grounds that the Fair Trade Commission had been established. Kyowa Sangyo's restructuring plan under the Enterprise Reconstruction and Reorganization Law was approved on May 31, 1949, and on July 1 of that year Kyowa Hakko Kogyo was launched as a second company, with Kato as its first President. The executives at the launch included Takeshi Kuwata and others as Managing Directors; Kato was 50, and the rest were in their 30s and 40s.
Initiatives
In the summer of 1950 he traveled to the US, where he signed a contract with Merck to manufacture streptomycin and brought in butanol fermentation technology and strains from Commercial Solvents. Butanol and acetone held a 65% domestic share until the switch to petrochemicals. On September 20, 1956 the company announced production of glutamic acid by fermentation; two days later it was urged to tie up with Ajinomoto, and it signed a contract to hand over all fermentation-made glutamic acid to Ajinomoto. This is where the two pillars of antibiotics and amino acids were put in place.
Career
Career
Kyowa Chemical Laboratory
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| 1937 | General Manager |
Kyowa Hakko Kogyo
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| Jul 1949 | President |
| Aug 1969 | Stepped down as President |
| Aug 1969 | Stepped down as President |