Deconsolidating cement and renaming Ube Kosan to UBE (2020)

Discarding the name, and settling accounts with where you came from

The character of this decision shows clearly in the bundling of the cement succession and the change of corporate name into the same year. Take down the sign of a diversified materials maker at the mercy of the cycle, and concentrate resources on specialty chemistry — as a logic of efficiency and selection, it can be read as a coherent choice. But what was cut away was the hundred-year pillar that had succeeded coal, and the first year of the transfer came with a sharp fall in sales and a swing into loss. That the founding business was operated on not from a position of strength but while being chased by shrinking demand and market volatility gives the move a certain tension.

Discarding the corporate name was also a choice that thinned, even in outward form, the tie to the region and to the company’s own past. The sense of crisis Watanabe Sukesaku preached — dig out all the coal and the place goes back to being a farming and fishing village — is itself the history of an Ube that kept changing its business, from coal to cement to chemicals. Is the renaming to UBE, together with the exit from commodity production, a transition that extends that history, or a break with it? Whether the company can be confirmed in the figures as a specialty chemicals business appears to be a matter for the years ahead.