UBE - Company History

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Financial history 1955–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1897
Origin 地域住民の出資
Founding location 山口県宇部市
Core business at founding Coal mining at the Okinoyama pit
Listed 1949
President Nishida Yuki President since 2025 (age 64, as of 2026)
Current priority M&A · Capacity investment Taking on the high-performance urethanes business and investing heavily in battery materials
Founding
In June 1897 Watanabe Sukesaku and a group of local men in Ube put up ¥45,000 between them and established the silent partnership Okinoyama Coal Mine. No zaibatsu capital was taken in: investors, employees and townspeople were very nearly the same people, and the business began as a jointly run undertaking. On the view that Ube would fall back to being a farming and fishing village once the coal was gone, Ube Shinkawa Iron Works followed in 1914, Ube Cement Manufacturing in 1923 and Ube Nitrogen Industries in 1933, every one of them floated on local money and run alongside the pit. In March 1942 those four companies merged to form Ube Kosan, which listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in May 1949. The name it had carried for eighty years was changed to UBE in April 2022.
The Decision
It has always started the next business, on local money, before stopping the one it was living on. When the energy revolution took away the economics of coal, from 1957 it moved some 7,000 people out of the coal division into chemicals, cement and machinery. The destinations were the very businesses it had been running alongside the pit since its founding years, so the withdrawal was absorbed by transfer rather than by cutting the workforce. For its next volume product it chose chemicals, went on to mass-produce caprolactam, and widened the nylon-feedstock supply chain as far as local production in Spain and Thailand. In September 2020 it agreed a business integration with Mitsubishi Materials, and in April 2022 it transferred the cement business to UBE Mitsubishi Cement and took it out of consolidation. With coal as with cement, it settled where the people and the plant would go before putting the business outside the group.
Today
Revenue of $2.9B (¥462bn), with cement gone, now splits finely across five businesses. Of consolidated revenue in the year to March 2026, Resins & Chemicals is the largest at $1.4B (¥228bn), but its segment profit stops at $51.8M (¥8bn). Ahead of it on profit are Specialty Products, on $321.8M (¥51bn) of revenue and $62M (¥10bn) of profit, and Machinery, on $430.6M (¥68bn) and $39.2M (¥6bn) — scale and return do not rank in the same order. Caprolactam production stops in Thailand in March 2026 and in Japan in March 2027, and domestic ammonia production stops in March 2028. Shutting down by its own hand, one line after another, the volume chemicals it had made for more than sixty years since 1955 sits on the same line as its target of a 65 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions against the 2013 financial year.
Competition
Of the chemical companies that have taken cement out, UBE is the only one that changed its name at the same time. Denka withdrew from cement in 2022, and Tokuyama handed its domestic sales to Taiheiyo Cement, but both kept the names they had. In nylon feedstock, Toray — which signed a nylon technology alliance with DuPont of the United States in 1951 — grew downstream into fibre and carbon fibre, while UBE stayed on the side that mass-produced the feedstock, caprolactam, overseas, and then in the 2020s stopped making that volume product itself. The hole is being filled by acquisition rather than by development. In April 2025 it bought the urethane systems business from LANXESS, adding eleven local subsidiaries to consolidation and standing High Performance Urethanes up as a segment of its own. A company that seeded its next business on local money now seeds it by buying from sellers abroad.

Timeline

1897–1956Machinery, cement and chemicals, seeded before the coal ran out

  1. 1897Okinoyama Coal Mine established as a silent partnership on ¥45,000
  2. 1914Ube Shinkawa Iron Works founded to build mining machinery in-house
  3. 1923Ube Cement Manufacturing founded on limestone and colliery clay
  4. 1933Ube Nitrogen Industries founded around ammonia from gasified coal
  5. 1942Four Ube-born companies self-merge to form Ube Kosan
  6. 1944Nippon Mining's Sanyo Anthracite works acquired
  7. 1949Listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange; coal employs some 12,000
  8. 1951Central Research Laboratory opened
  9. 1955Ube Caprolactam Plant built to supply nylon feedstock to Nippon Rayon

1957–2001A diversified materials company grown on cement and commodity chemicals

  1. 1957Withdrawal from coal begins; some 7,000 people redeployed
  2. 1964Chiba Petrochemical Plant built; New York and Düsseldorf offices opened
  3. 1965Isa cement plant built
  4. 1967Sakai plant built; the Ube mine closed in October
  5. 1968Polymer Research Laboratory opened
  6. 1969Ube Ammonia Industry established
  7. 1982145,000 kW coal-fired captive power station completed
  8. 19861,300 job cuts announced, the first among the big chemical firms
  9. 1994Control taken of Productos Quimicos del Mediterraneo in Spain
  10. 1997Caprolactam and nylon production starts in Thailand; company centenary
  11. 1998Ube-Mitsubishi Cement founded with Mitsubishi Materials
  12. 1999Ube Machinery spun off on to its own account

2002–2024Cutting cement loose and becoming UBE

  1. 2002402 employees take voluntary redundancy
  2. 2003Ube-Nitto Kasei taken into full ownership through a share exchange
  3. 2004Ube-Maruzen Polyethylene established
  4. 2008Tamura Hiroaki becomes president; record consolidated results
  5. 2010Thai operations merged into UBE Chemicals (Asia); Takeshita Michio becomes president
  6. 2014Yamamoto Yuzuru becomes president
  7. 2016European subsidiaries consolidated under UBE Corporation Europe
  8. 2019Izuhara Masato becomes president
  9. 2021Elastomer business spun off as UBE Elastomer
  10. 2022Cement transferred to UBE Mitsubishi Cement; renamed UBE; API Corporation acquired
  11. 2023A net loss reported for FY22, the first year after the cement transfer
  12. 2024A European maker of mechanically recycled resins acquired

Founding Story

1897–1956Machinery, cement and chemicals, seeded before the coal ran out

For its first sixty years the company was a coal business owned by the town it stood in — Okinoyama Coal Mine, opened in 1897 on ¥45,000 raised from Ube residents who dug in the pit as well as funded it. Its first president never expected the seams to last, and the machinery works, cement plant and ammonia works he set up alongside them while the coal was still booming are the reason the company was still there on the day the coal ran out.

A pit begun by townspeople with ¥45,000 of capital

In June 1897 Watanabe Sukesaku (渡辺祐策), who became its first president, and a group of local men in Ube[1] put up ¥45,000 between them[2] and established Okinoyama Coal Mine as a tokumei kumiai, a silent partnership[3][4]. Ube lay far from the financial world of the capital, so there was no way to raise the money other than among local backers, and those backers supplied their own labour on top of their proportional share of the capital[5]. Investors, employees and townspeople were very nearly the same people, and the business began as a jointly run undertaking working the undersea coalfield of the Seto Inland Sea. From the late Meiji years to the eve of the war six pits were in operation around Ube — Okinoyama, Higashimizome (東見初), Motoyama, Sanyo Muen, Nagasawa (長澤) and Nishi-Okinoyama — and by 1949 the coal division alone employed some 12,000 people[6], making this the largest mining company in the region. The governing principle that a company in Ube exists for the people of Ube and should serve the interests of the people of Ube arose naturally from a structure in which partner, investor and employee were one and the same.

Watanabe was talking about the seams running out while the pits were still booming. His creed was that the people of Ube of any one generation should not keep the benefit of the coal to themselves; the benefit of the coal should be converted into industry for the future, so that when the coal was gone an infinite industry would remain and generations of descendants could live well on it[7]. The phrase from finite coal to infinite industry compresses into a single line the idea the founder set out when he opened the mine. Asked years later about the company's management creed, Nakayasu Kan'ichi (中安閑一) put it in the same terms — to raise infinite enterprises out of finite coal and pass them to our descendants[8] — so the habit of seeding the next business before the present one withered had been raised into the corporate creed itself. Not selling coal as coal but turning it into feedstock and fuel for processing industries defined the skeleton of the later diversification early on, and became the common base beneath the whole family of industries founded in Ube.

Machinery, cement and chemicals, seeded a decade apart

Watanabe's thinking took shape as a series of company foundings. In January 1914 Ube Shinkawa Iron Works was set up to build mining machinery in-house[9]; in September 1923, Ube Cement Manufacturing, to exploit limestone and the good clay that came up with the coal[10]; and in April 1933, Ube Nitrogen Industries, built around ammonia[11] — every one of them floated on local Ube money. At Ube Nitrogen the company changed the way ammonium sulphate was made: instead of taking water gas from coke as had been standard, it drew hydrogen directly from coal, the first use of coal gasification for the purpose in Japan[12]. Using the by-products of coal and the harbour on the doorstep, the plan was to seed the three fields of machinery, cement and chemicals at intervals of ten to twenty years. Keeping each as a separate Ube-born company running alongside the others also worked as a defence against the wartime pressure to consolidate, and laid the ground for the merger nine years later in which four Ube-born companies combined with one another.

In March 1942, as the government pressed companies into combination with their competitors, Ube Kosan was formed by the merger of four firms — Okinoyama Coal Mine, Ube Shinkawa Iron Works, Ube Cement Manufacturing and Ube Nitrogen Industries[13]. The four shared directors and stood on the same ground, organically connected[14], so rather than being combined with outside capital they took the form of a self-merger among four Ube-born companies, and the original pattern of joint local ownership was preserved. In June 1944 the company bought the Sanyo Anthracite works of Nippon Mining and entered anthracite[15]. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in May 1949[16], and in the year to April 1950 sales broke down as $833,333 (¥300m) of coal, $694,444 (¥250m) of ammonium sulphate and $222,222 (¥80m) of cement[17]. Coal was still the mainstay, but the third and fourth pillars were already earning. The headcount said the same thing from the other side — some 12,000 in coal against about 4,000 in fertiliser, 1,000 in cement and 800 in machinery: in its people the company was still a colliery.

Leaving coal by redeploying 7,000 people

In January 1951 the company opened its Central Research Laboratory[18], and in December 1955 built the Ube Caprolactam Plant, moving into volume production of the raw material for nylon[19]. The buyer was Nippon Rayon[20], and the entry was timed to the take-off of the synthetic-fibre market. As the energy revolution destroyed the economics of Japan's collieries, Ube Kosan chose to bring up caprolactam and ammonia — commodity chemicals made in volume — in parallel with the contraction of the coal business. The plan to turn the profits of a dying founding business towards the commodity chemicals that would be the next mainstay took physical form as a production plant just four years after the research laboratory opened. Securing laboratory, plant and customer at the same time was a judgement that put speed first, so as not to be left behind by the synthetic-fibre boom.

The retreat from coal went ahead while opposition ran inside the company. Mizuno Kazuo (水野一夫) recalled that the seams at Okinoyama in Ube, our main mine, were thinning and the economics were deteriorating fast and that the miners at the face and the head-office staff together began campaigning inside the company to move into the Joban coalfield[21]. Management had already written off coal's future, but pushed by the voices from the shop floor it decided to go into Joban. Repeated flooding made the investment a failure[22], and for a time it squeezed investment in the chemical division. Mizuno also said that at a turning point a gap often opens between the two — between the company and its employees[23]. From 1957 the company moved some 7,000 people out of the coal division into the diversified businesses[24], redeploying them into chemicals, cement and machinery at the same time as it withdrew, and it is this that separates it from the other, zaibatsu-affiliated colliery companies, which closed their pits by cutting the workforce. The Ube mine was shut in October 1967[25], and by the 1970s the number of people employed in coal had reached zero[26].

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Notes

  1. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  2. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  3. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  4. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  5. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  6. 歴史をつくる人々 第11 (People Who Make History, vol. 11, Diamond, Inc., 1965)↩
  7. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  8. わたしの経営 (My Management, 1963)↩
  9. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  10. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  11. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  12. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  13. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  14. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  15. 企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968)↩
  16. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  17. 歴史をつくる人々 第11 (People Who Make History, vol. 11, Diamond, Inc., 1965)↩
  18. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  19. UBE Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), company-history section↩
  20. ダイヤモンド (Diamond, 2 October 1956)↩
  21. 日経ビジネス (Nikkei Business, 7 May 1984)↩
  22. 日経ビジネス (Nikkei Business, 7 May 1984)↩
  23. 日経ビジネス (Nikkei Business, 7 May 1984)↩
  24. 日経ビジネス (Nikkei Business, 7 May 1984)↩
  25. 読売新聞 (Yomiuri Shimbun, 27 August 1966)↩
  26. 会社年鑑 (Company Yearbook), Ube Kosan headcount by division↩

References & sources

  1. UBE Corporation (annual securities reports) and the results-briefing materials, the source of the consolidated and segment figures cited above.
  2. Yomiuri Shimbun: 4 June 1955, a diagnosis of Ube Kosan as a problem stock; 25 September 1962, on economic rationality in coal rationalisation; 11 October 1962, on the planned 40,000-tonne ethylene start-up.
  3. My Management (1963), Nakayasu Kan'ichi on the company's management creed.
  4. Diamond (Diamond, Inc.), 1 January 1965, rationalisation and lower costs come first.
  5. People Who Make History, Diamond, Inc., vol. 11, 1965.
  6. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Ube Kosan entry.
  7. Nikkei Business (Nikkei BP), 7 May 1984, the column with Mizuno Kazuo.

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