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.
1965A loss, and the decision not to be a general drugmaker
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
1965Renamed Hisamitsu Pharmaceutical
1972Promoted to the first sections in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya
1980Reports a loss
1981Nakatomi Hirotaka becomes president; resources concentrated on transdermal drugs
1987US sales subsidiary established
1988Mohrus — the first prescription patch
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.
1995Mohrus Tape, and exporting a culture of sticking
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY2006 · consolidated
Revenue$883M
Net income$124M
Net margin14%
→
FY2009 · consolidated
Revenue$1.3B
Net income$204M
Net margin15.3%
1995Mohrus Tape launched
2000Estrana — the first systemic patch
2005SSP’s prescription business acquired
2008Salonpas Pain Relief Patch approved by the US FDA
2009Noven Pharmaceuticals acquired for about $427.7M (¥40bn)
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.
2010Systemic patches, a pandemic, and leaving the market
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY2010 · consolidated
Revenue$1.5B
Net income$210M
Net margin14.2%
→
FY2025 · consolidated
Revenue$1.0B
Net income$146M
Net margin14%
2015Nakatomi Kazuhide succeeds his father after 34 years
2020SECUADO launched in the United States
2021Pandemic cuts revenue by nearly 20%; HX2025 announced
2024SAGA Global Research Center opens at Tosu; Salonpas turns 90
2026MBO tender offer succeeds; delisting
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.
What the February 1951 merger replaced was not the medicine sold but the registration of the company selling it. Of the three entities bundled together, Tashiro Koki Kogyo handled mining machinery and forgings and had nothing to do with either Asahi Mankinko or Salonpas. Miyaki Pharmaceutical, too, had been set up in May 1944 only to hive off drug manufacturing under wartime controls. Three mismatched companies were wound together in order to convert an unlimited partnership — the form the business had held since December 1903 — into a joint-stock company. Hisamitsu Brothers Co., Ltd., with Nakatomi Masayoshi as president, acquired that day the right to issue shares and raise money from outside.
The right to issue shares, however, was the same thing as the duty to keep explaining results and intentions to outsiders. Eleven years passed between acquiring the right and using it; from the September 1962 listing on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Fukuoka exchange, Hisamitsu has stood on the explaining side every period since. The name changed from the Komatsuya opened at Tashiro in 1847, but the head office never left Tashiro in Tosu, and the Nakatomi family kept running it. And in 2026 the company decided to go private, citing investment abroad. Both the right to issue shares and the duty to keep explaining were given up together, seventy-five years on.
The year it decided not to become a general pharmaceutical company
What the 1981 narrowing discarded was not unsellable products but the path toward becoming a general pharmaceutical company. The ordinary response for a company that had posted a loss the year before is to clear out unprofitable lines or move into another field, and Nakatomi Hirotaka — president from May that year at forty-four — made neither his aim. Salonpas, launched in 1934, was left in place as the flagship, and only the two techniques inside it were extracted: suppressing skin irritation, and raising transdermal absorption. Combined and named the transdermal therapeutic system, they were installed as the company’s core technology.
Defining the company as the formulation technology originating in Salonpas can be seen to have set both its direction and its dead end at once. Precisely because it was defined as the technique of passing drugs through the skin, the company could move its point of sale from the pharmacy counter to the doctor’s prescription, and the prescription anti-inflammatory Mohrus of May 1988 became possible. As long as it holds the same definition, it cannot venture into tablets or injections. It took nearly twenty years to show in the figures: in the year to February 1999, analgesic anti-inflammatory patches were 90% of revenue of ¥49.1 billion. The expansion available to a company that has narrowed itself is not to choose a different market but to rewrite the measure of the market it chose.
Two products are not enough to get in front of a doctor
What was lacking in the 2004 transfer was not the number of drugs but a reason for a sales representative to visit a doctor. After the narrowing that began in 1981, Hisamitsu’s prescription business had converged on Mohrus and Mohrus Tape; as of 2000 those two products accounted for ¥41.4 billion and 27.6% of the market for topical analgesic anti-inflammatories. Holding a quarter of the market, it could still offer orthopaedic surgeons and dermatologists nothing but patches, so the number of meetings themselves did not grow. There were two routes to a wider range — wait for approval of a new drug, or take over another company’s business whole — and Hisamitsu moved to the latter.
That said, the shelves that widened at a stroke were not filled with drugs Hisamitsu had made. The diclofenac products that transferred in April 2005 spanned oral tablets, gels, tapes and poultices, so that a company that had held only adhesive medicines now had the oral and topical forms of the same compound. The added items lay outside the transdermal therapeutic system — drugs the single-point focus held since 1981 cannot explain. A business SSP let go in order to concentrate on medicines and cosmetics is stacked, at Hisamitsu, outside the focus. It was a transaction in which the single phrase “selection and concentration” worked in opposite directions for the seller and the buyer.
Twenty-two years had passed between placing a sales subsidiary in the United States in April 1987 and this acquisition. In that time the over-the-counter Salonpas Pain Relief Patch did win US FDA approval in 2008, but no organisation grew up that could develop, gain approval for and sell a prescription drug in America. What carried the price tag presented on 14 July 2009 — $16.50 a share, roughly $430 million including the stake already held — was neither a drug nor a factory. It can be seen as the organisation itself, the 610 employees with which Noven Pharmaceuticals, founded in that same year of 1987, was running.
What the price tag shortened, however, reached only as far as the organisation. The effect Hisamitsu cited for the acquisition was a short payback from buying a self-sustaining company already generating profit. What generated that profit were Daytrana and Vivelle-Dot, Noven’s own products. That it was a company earning from the day it was bought also means that those earnings turned independently of Hisamitsu’s technology. Money buys an organisation someone else has finished building, not the products still to be made. What the company that shortened twenty-two years with a price tag took on next appears to have been another decade — the time needed to bring two technologies together into a single drug.
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