Company history

The First World War cut Japan off from imported caustic soda, and in 1915 Furukawa Gomei Kaisha — the holding partnership at the centre of the Furukawa zaibatsu, which also owned Furukawa Mining, Furukawa Electric and Yokohama Rubber — began researching how to make it by electrolysis. In January 1917 the research body, the Tokyo Denka works, was reorganized into Asahi Denka Kogyo with capital of ¥1 million, to produce caustic soda electrolytically. The name meant to “raise up the electrochemical industry like the rising sun”; in practice the company was the Furukawa group's chemical arm, with resins and insulating compounds for Furukawa Electric's cables spoken for inside the group before it had a market outside it.

Electrolysing brine yields hydrogen whether or not anyone has a use for it, and in 1917 almost no one did. Rather than waste it, Asahi Denka went looking for a feedstock cheap and plentiful enough to consume it, found fish oil, and in 1919 entered hardened oils — an industry only a few years old. An inorganic chemicals company had reached into organic chemistry within two years of its founding, less by design than by following a process that had two outlets. The Ogu plant started up in 1918, Toyosu followed in 1922, and in December 1927 the company bought and absorbed the oils-and-fats business of Nihon Yushi, which the post-war slump had left in trouble — margarine, shortening and glycerine arriving not by construction but by purchase. Widening the business by acquiring what a distressed firm could no longer run became a habit here.

From soda and hardened oils the product list spread — soap, hydrochloric acid, glycerine, fatty acids, liquefied chlorine, sodium silicate — and in April 1932 the company entered synthetic resins with phenolics, a third chemical field beside the inorganic and the oleochemical. Agrochemicals went the other way: in November 1928 that department was spun out as Nihon Nohyaku, a separation that would be undone ninety years later. Wartime meant military chemicals; in 1947 a sales company, Yoko Sangyo, was set up to carry products to market, and in May 1949 the shares were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The dissolution of the zaibatsu freed the company from Furukawa control while leaving the Furukawa trading relationships intact.

Listing in May 1949 gave the company access to capital markets just as post-war demand for chemicals returned. The question it faced was what to do with the process skill it had: electrolysis had taught it to make things to a high purity, and purity is worth little in a commodity where price decides. Asahi Denka concluded that the advantage would pay better in small volumes of high-function product than in tonnage.

In 1955 it began producing stabilizers for PVC — additives that give a general-purpose resin heat resistance, light resistance and processability — and that line became the origin of the polymer-additives business it still leads. In 1962 it formed Adeka Argus Chemical with Argus Chemical of the United States, extending from polymer additives into lubricant additives. Foods ran alongside: industrial margarine and shortening, then emulsifiers and dough improvers, an unusual thing for a chemical company to own but a natural extension of the oleochemical processes it had bought in 1927.

In March 1979 the main processes at the Ogu plant — the site that had started up in 1918 — were shut and moved to the Kashima and Chiba works on the coastal industrial belt around Tokyo; Ogu production stopped altogether in April 1990. Kashima and Chiba became the base for functional chemicals: polymer additives, lubricant additives, surfactants.

From the 1970s the company followed semiconductors into a third field. Through the late 1980s and 1990s it industrialized the high-purity chemicals used in semiconductor processing — CVD precursors, etchants, cleaning fluids — and built supply into the major device makers worldwide. It was the same argument as in 1955, applied to a harder specification: compete on purity, not on tonnage. Polymer additives, foods and electronic materials now stood as three pillars.

In May 2006 Asahi Denka Kogyo renamed itself ADEKA, unifying logo and corporate colour around red as it pushed the business overseas, and consolidated head-office functions at Higashi-Ogu in Arakawa, Tokyo — on the ground where the first electrolysis plant had stood.

As device nodes shrank from 10nm to 7nm to 5nm and 3nm, demand grew for high-purity CVD and ALD precursors, cleaning fluids and high-k materials, and ADEKA took a place among the leading global suppliers of semiconductor process materials — in some grades the largest. The centre of gravity of the company shifted towards electronics. Kori Akio became president in June 2011 and Shirozume Hidetaka, from chemicals sales and corporate planning, in June 2017; under Shirozume the traditional trio of polymer additives, lubricant additives and food ingredients was rebuilt around semiconductor materials as the growth driver.

Two moves defined the reshaping. In 2018 ADEKA spent about $181.2M (¥20bn) to take 51% of Nihon Nohyaku — the agrochemicals firm it had spun off in 1928 — to give a life-science business the synthesis skills and the regulatory know-how it lacked; and in April 2025 it sold Uehara Foods, acquired in 2005 and by then insolvent, to Kobe Bussan for $4.7M (¥700m). Buy what extends the hand you hold, sell what does not. From fiscal 2023 the company ran ADEKA VISION 2030, naming semiconductor materials, mobility and the environment as the three next-generation fields and lifting R&D spending towards 4–5% of sales. In June 2023 Shirozume's title changed to president and executive officer as the separation of execution from oversight was tightened.

The year ended March 2025 set records — sales above ¥400 billion and operating profit above $274M (¥41bn) — carried by the first wave of demand from generative-AI hardware. The structure that produced them is also the problem: electronic materials swing with the semiconductor cycle, and how far the steady earnings of additives and foods can damp that swing is an open question. So is whether the mobility and environmental fields of VISION 2030 — lithium-ion battery materials, hydrogen and carbon-neutral materials — become a second growth engine behind semiconductors in the 2030s.