Caprolactam at scale — and a global nylon-feedstock network (1997)

From finite coal to an industry that was supposed to be infinite

The core of this decision was choosing commodity chemicals as the pillar to succeed dying coal, and then widening that base from two domestic poles to three continents by producing in Spain and Thailand. Answering a violent shift in the market with sheer scale carried Ube to third place worldwide in caprolactam and, for a time, underwrote consolidated sales above ¥700bn. Yet the further the scale spread, the more earnings came to depend on world market conditions and on supply from the newly industrialising economies. The exposure to the cycle that observers flagged at the time of entry — “don’t overrate this” — appears to have stayed at the core of the business even after it went global.

Today those very commodity chemicals are being shut down in sequence, with decarbonisation and specialty chemistry set in their place as the new theme. A company that set out to turn the benefit of coal into infinite industry now stands at the point of folding that industry as something finite after all. For the ideal that the first president, Watanabe Sukesaku, raised — from finite coal to infinite industry — the test today is whether the next “infinite industry” can be found in specialty and circular materials. Whether this transition succeeds appears to rest on how the memory of scale built worldwide is handed on to the pillar that follows.