The ¥210bn tender offer for Mitsubishi Rayon (2009)

Choosing to expand in the middle of a crisis

What sits at the heart of this acquisition is that it reached for the next pillar precisely when earnings were at their worst. With losses in commodity petrochemicals at a record and the group itself posting a net loss, it committed roughly ¥210bn to take a world-leading position in performance materials — turning to attack not with the wind at its back but against it, which tells you a good deal about the character of the decision. President Kobayashi's line that you cannot survive unless you are number one in the world can also be read as a declaration of route: not matching Middle Eastern producers on scale, but winning local battles on high value-added products.

Even so, the business it absorbed did not simply become a stable harvest. MMA swung with the market, and the vertically integrated picture of petrochemicals and performance materials was reorganised again and again in the years that followed. A single large acquisition does not complete and conclude itself; it keeps having its meaning re-examined inside a rhythm of expansion and clean-up — and in that you can sense the structural weight carried by Japan's largest integrated chemical company. How an aggressive move made in a crisis is judged over a span of decades remains, on the evidence, an open question.