Company history

In October 1971 two Mitsubishi companies merged. Mitsubishi Edogawa Chemical, founded in 1944, made petrochemicals and basic chemicals at Ichihara, Niigata and Mizushima; Japan Gas-Chemical, set up in 1951, made methanol and formalin from natural gas at fields in Niigata and Iwaki. The new company started with about 3,500 employees, ¥15bn of capital and a head office in Marunouchi — and, unusually for a Japanese chemical maker, with two entirely separate raw-material bases: C1 chemistry built on methane, and C2–C4 chemistry built on naphtha.

Through the 1970s and 1980s that base delivered scale. The company took the domestic lead in methanol, formalin and hydrogen peroxide and built world-class polycarbonate capacity, adding hydrogen peroxide production at Kashima in 1978. But the more consequential work was happening off to the side: BT resin, made from bismaleimide and triazine, was developed in 1976, and Ageless, the oxygen absorber for food packaging, was launched in 1977 — the first product of its kind in the world.

From 1981 the company entered copper-clad laminates for printed circuit boards at its Niigata works, and in 1985 BT material was adopted for a semiconductor package substrate for the first time. An MRI contrast agent developed in-house followed in 1987, and in 1989 the fragrance business inherited from Edogawa Chemical was spun out. By its twentieth year the company stood on two sets of three pillars: methanol, formalin and hydrogen peroxide on the commodity side; polycarbonate, laminates and medical materials on the functional side.

Methanol production moved offshore in the 1990s to sit next to cheap natural gas, and the overseas plants became export bases for Asia, Europe and the Americas, with combined capacity passing three million tonnes a year by the late 1990s. Domestic methanol was left to feed the company’s own downstream chemistry rather than the merchant market.

That downstream was increasingly methacrylates. MMA and PMMA — used in circuit-board resins, LCD optical films, automotive coatings and construction materials — were expanded at Niigata and Ibaraki until the company held the world’s number-two share, against Evonik of Germany and Lucite of Britain. In 2003 the Omuta complex in Kyushu was reorganized to concentrate aromatics and functional chemicals.

The 2008 crash forced a reckoning with the commodity half. From 2009 the company trimmed methanol, formalin and hydrogen peroxide capacity, sold part of the commodity operations at Omuta in 2010, and concentrated R&D on three sites. The mid-term plan announced in June 2010 stated the shift explicitly for the first time as company-wide strategy: stabilize the commodity earnings, and grow functional chemicals and electronic materials.

The 2010s were spent following the substrate industry to Asia. Copper-clad laminate supply expanded to package and board makers in China, Taiwan and Southeast Asia, with electronics-materials subsidiaries established in Thailand in 2012 and China in 2018, keeping the company among the top three worldwide alongside Panasonic and Nan Ya Plastics. Optical resins diverged from commodity polycarbonate into LCD films, smartphone lenses and headlamp optics — higher-margin niches where scale is not the whole argument.

The commodity side kept shrinking by choice. The aromatics business — paraxylene and terephthalic acid — was divested in April 2018, and R&D spending was raised toward 4% of sales. When the pandemic-era semiconductor shortage arrived, electronic materials carried the company: consolidated operating profit held around the ¥50bn level from the year to March 2022 onward.

Isahaya Sadanori became president and CEO in June 2024, succeeding Fujii Masashi, with a two-sided problem: sustain growth by concentrating investment in semiconductor and display materials, while managing the profitability of what remains of the commodity portfolio. In the year to March 2025 the company reported ¥773.6bn of revenue, ¥50.9bn of operating profit and ¥45.5bn of net profit. Fifty-four years after the merger, the transformation from commodity chemicals maker to functional materials company is nearly complete — and the fact that the next plan leads with margins rather than revenue is the clearest sign of how the company now defines itself.