Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical - Company History

The company dates itself from 1847, when Hisamitsu Jinpei opened a medicine shop, Komatsuya, in the Tashiro district of what is now Tosu, Saga — a centre of Kyushu’s haichi trade, in which pedlars left a box of remedies in a household and returned to collect payment for whatever had been used. A pill was launched in 1869, the shop renamed in 1871, and in December 1903 the business incorporated as an unlimited partnership, Hisamitsu Brothers, with Nakatomi Saburo as its first president; the Nakatomi family has run it ever since. Its signature product, an adhesive plaster called Asahi Mankinko, arrived in 1907 and fixed the shape of everything that followed: a medicine you stick to the place that hurts.

That plaster also had a defect — its black mass left marks on the skin — and solving it produced the company’s defining product. In 1934 Hisamitsu launched Salonpas, a white patch built on a rubber base, its name assembled from its active ingredient, methyl salicylate, and the word plaster. From 1936 Nakatomi Masayoshi, later president, ran a campaign of literal demonstration, going into public bathhouses and applying patches to bathers; radio jingles followed after the war. Salonpas became the Japanese word for a muscle rub, and a town of sixty thousand people produced a brand every household knew. What everyone knew, however, was the product’s name, not the company’s.

The corporate form caught up next. Wartime controls had split the business across separate entities, and in February 1951 three of them — the partnership, a pharmaceutical company set up in 1944 and a forging and mining-machinery company — merged into Hisamitsu Brothers Co., Ltd., the direct ancestor of today’s company and its first joint-stock form. Sales offices opened in Osaka in 1952 and Tokyo in 1957, a Taiwanese joint venture in 1960, and in September 1962 the shares were listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and in Fukuoka, with Osaka following in 1964.

In April 1965 the company took the name of its product and became Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical. Sales offices spread across Japan, a research laboratory opened at Tosu in 1971, the over-the-counter patch range widened, and the listing moved up to the first sections of the Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya exchanges in 1972. But the profits still came from Salonpas and its relatives, sold by television advertising in a mass-market medicine business that was maturing — a growth built on someone else’s tide.

The tide went out around 1980, when Hisamitsu reported a loss. For a mid-sized drugmaker the question was where to put limited resources. In May 1981 Nakatomi Hirotaka, of the founding family, became president at forty-four, and answered it by refusing the obvious paths. He did not cut unprofitable lines or diversify into a new field; he took the two techniques buried inside Salonpas — suppressing skin irritation, and driving absorption through the skin — named their combination the transdermal therapeutic system, and made it the company’s core. Hisamitsu would not become a general pharmaceutical company. It would become the patch company.

The first large return came in May 1988 with Mohrus, a prescription anti-inflammatory patch: prescription medicine carried far better margins than the drugstore trade, and the shift began in earnest. Plants and laboratories followed outside Kyushu, sales subsidiaries opened in Brazil in 1986 and the United States in 1987, and a Vietnamese factory in 1994. By the end of the 1990s the company was reporting eight straight years of higher ordinary profit and seventeen of higher net profit, and was cited as leading all listed Japanese companies in consecutive years of rising sales, profit and dividends.

Mohrus Tape, launched in 1995, changed what the company was. Thin and dry to the touch where the old poultices were wet, it was the first patch approved in Japan for lower-back pain, and it grew at double digits every year until, by the year to February 2002, that one product was about 40% of revenue at ¥28.0 billion. Ordinary profit went from ¥3.9 billion in the year to February 1996 to roughly ¥15.5 billion six years later. Over-the-counter medicines were by then under 30% of sales: the public still thought of Hisamitsu as the Salonpas company, but the earnings had moved to the doctor’s prescription pad.

What kept the hit going was the unglamorous work after launch — a notch in the middle so that elderly patients could peel the backing off, and similar changes fed back from clinics. Nakatomi Hirotaka put the loyalty down to accumulating small improvements in usability and irritation rather than efficacy alone, in a product where an estimated 60–70% of users were over sixty-five. Around the same time he began arguing publicly for taking the patch abroad: products already went to fifty countries, and the company was proposing its own dosage-form categories to Japan’s health ministry and filing technical data with the US FDA in an attempt to make its classification the world’s. The first patch designed to act on the whole body rather than a sore muscle, an oestrogen therapy for menopause co-developed with Novartis, arrived in February 2000.

Two acquisitions then filled the gaps that focus had left. In April 2005 Hisamitsu bought the company holding SSP’s carved-out prescription business — diclofenac in tablets, gels and patches — because two products, however dominant, gave its sales representatives too few reasons to visit a doctor. And in July 2009, twenty-two years after opening a US sales arm that never became a US developer, it launched a tender offer for Noven Pharmaceuticals at $16.50 a share, about $430 million or roughly $427.7M (¥40bn), completing the purchase that August. Noven brought central-nervous-system and women’s-health patches, and a US organisation that Hisamitsu had failed to build for itself.

Subsidiaries opened across Asia through the 2010s, and in May 2015 the presidency changed hands for the first time in thirty-four years: Nakatomi Hirotaka became chairman and his eldest son, Nakatomi Kazuhide, took over at forty-two. Hirotaka retired as honorary chairman in 2020 and died in August 2021, aged eighty-four. The Noven purchase finally showed up as product in the same period — SECUADO, a transdermal antipsychotic approved in the United States in October 2019 and launched in March 2020, delivering a drug once a day to patients who struggle to take pills. Patches for allergic rhinitis (2018) and Parkinson’s disease (2019) followed at home. Sticking things to the skin had reached the central nervous system.

Then the pandemic hit the two pillars at once. Revenue for the year to February 2021 fell nearly 20% to ¥114.5 billion and net profit halved to ¥9.2 billion: patients stopped going to clinics for Mohrus prescriptions, and travel restrictions ended the Chinese tourists who bought Salonpas by the armful at Lunar New Year. The vulnerability was structural — a business resting on the elderly going to the doctor and visitors taking souvenirs home. Hisamitsu held its dividend plan, and in September 2021 published a mid-term policy, HX2025, aimed at spreading the sources of income: a transdermal cancer-pain patch that year, acquisitions and a mail-order subsidiary in 2023, and in February 2024 a new research centre at Tosu, the founding town, pulling scattered laboratories back together.

The recovery took four years — revenue of ¥156.0 billion and net profit of ¥21.8 billion in the year to February 2025, past the pre-pandemic level, with a thirteenth consecutive dividend increase planned. Then, on 6 January 2026, the company resolved to take itself private: an MBO in which Nakatomi Kazuhide’s asset-management vehicle bid ¥6,082 a share, some $2.5B (¥390bn) in total — the second-largest such deal in Japan after Taisho Pharmaceutical’s in 2024. With the insurance treatment of OTC-equivalent drugs under review, the reasoning was that expanding abroad and reshaping the prescription business meant accepting years of lower profit, and that quarterly explanation to the market was in the way. Sixty-four years after listing, the patch company left the exchange.