Company history

The company began as a technologist’s workshop that could not sell. Tamamizu Hiroshi, a University of Tokyo applied-chemistry graduate who had been director and chief engineer at Nippon Paint and at Toa Paint, set up on his own in 1917 with about twenty employees, making red lead, red oxide and stiff-mixed zinc paint. The First World War had turned Japan from a paint importer into an exporter, but a workshop that size had no way to reach a national market. Through a mutual friend, an assistant professor at the same university, Iwai Katsujiro — head of the trading house Iwai & Co., today’s Sojitz — took the business over, and on 17 May 1918 Kansai Paint was incorporated in Amagasaki with ¥500,000 of capital and some 150 employees.

The founding form mattered more than the founding date. A managing director sent from Iwai took the presidency; Tamamizu became executive director and chief engineer. Iwai was sole selling agent, so the new maker had, from day one, a trading house’s credit and its distribution across western Japan and into Asia — the one advantage it held over Nippon Paint and Toa Paint, the two firms that with Kansai Paint made up almost all of Japan’s domestic paint industry.

It nearly did not survive. The post-war glut and the 1920 crash left accumulated losses, and the recovery was engineered by the managing director Oda Akinosuke, who shifted the product mix from price-volatile pigments to paints proper and, decisively, replaced dependence on Iwai’s counter with Kansai Paint’s own branches and contracted dealers nationwide. In 1926 the company produced Japan’s first domestic nitrocellulose lacquer, Selva; in 1930, with rivals passing their dividends in the Depression, it paid five per cent and cleared the old losses. Absorbing Iwaki Paint in 1937 made it a full-line maker, a Manchurian subsidiary followed in 1938, and wartime mergers swelled it further — until the 1945 air raids burned the Amagasaki works and every overseas asset was gone.

Rebuilding ran through raw-material shortages and the threat of being split up under the deconcentration law. The company opened a Muroran plant in 1948, listed on the Osaka and Tokyo exchanges in May 1949, and put its head office in Osaka in 1950. Through the high-growth decades it laid down the domestic map it still runs on — Hiratsuka (1960), Nagoya (1961), the Central Research Laboratory (1965), Kanuma (1971) — and organised the business around four end-markets: automotive, architectural, marine and industrial coatings.

The other change was in the corner office. For the first quarter-century the presidency belonged to Iwai: its managing directors, then Iwai Katsujiro himself from 1934, then Iwai Yujiro — capital and management on one side, Tamamizu’s technology on the other, the two-headed structure common to trading-house manufacturing of the era. After the war the chair passed to men who had come up inside the paint business. Sasaki Zenshichi held it for eleven years from 1955 and drove the plant-building and the four-market structure; from then on the presidency turned over every few years among insiders. The company financed by a trading house had become a company run by the people who made and sold the product.

Overseas, the first move was small and conventional: Thai Kansai Paint, a greenfield joint venture set up in November 1968, followed by Taiwan Kansai Paint in 1985. Building from nothing was the only method the company knew — and it was about to abandon it.

In September 1986 Kansai Paint bought into Kansai Nerolac Paints, an Indian maker already listed in Bombay since 1968 and holding roughly sixty per cent of the country’s automotive coatings market. Paint travels badly — freight costs make it a local-production, local-sales business — so consolidating a company that already had the brand, the plants and the dealers was faster and surer than building any of it. The method, not the country, was the discovery: take over the incumbent, leave its management in place, and let it run.

The company then repeated it on a roughly five-year cadence for two decades — Kansai Resin in Thailand (1995), Sime Kansai Paints in Malaysia (1996), P.T. Kansai Paint Indonesia (1999), a regional headquarters, Kansai Paint Asia Pacific, in Malaysia (2006) to bind the country-by-country subsidiaries together, and Kansai Altan Boya in Turkey (2007), which opened the road to the Middle East and Europe. Consolidated revenue stood at ¥256.5 billion in FY11.

At home the direction was the reverse: consolidation. In July 2002 the regional sales companies were merged into Kansai Paint Sales, a response to a shrinking domestic market that also created the career step — running domestic sales — through which the group’s later chief executives would pass.

The method scaled up. In April 2011 the company acquired Kansai Plascon Africa, betting that architectural and refinish demand in African emerging markets would grow for decades, and added an east African arm in Kenya in 2017. In August 2016 it took over U.S. Paint Corporation to enter the American automotive market.

The largest step came in March 2017 with Kansai Helios Group, a coatings maker across western and eastern Europe, which brought a European sales network and R&D — including a strong position in rail-vehicle coatings — in a single transaction. Consolidated revenue crossed $3.6B (¥402bn) in FY17 and $3.9B (¥427bn) in FY18. Kansai Paint now had a footprint on four continents, assembled almost entirely by purchase.

Leadership continued to rotate among paint-business insiders — Kobayashi Masaju, Kawamori Yuzo, then Ishino Hiroshi, who took the CEO title in 2017 and led the Helios deal before handing over in FY18. Mouri Satoshi, who joined in 1981 and had run Kansai Paint Sales, sales planning and the international portfolio, became president in April 2019 — a sales-and-overseas executive taking charge just as the question shifted from what to buy to what to keep.

The subsidiary network built over forty years became, after the pandemic, a portfolio to be sorted. The 17th medium-term plan from April 2022 turned to share buybacks, a refreshed brand and locally rooted operations. The test case was Africa: loss-making since entry under currency weakness and slowing growth, the two regional subsidiaries were agreed for sale to AkzoNobel for $450 million in June 2022 — and in November 2023 South Africa’s competition authority refused the transfer, the contract was terminated, and Kansai Paint was left to fix the business itself.

Geography had shifted underneath the group. In FY24 (year to March 2025) Europe sold $961.7M (¥146bn) and India $950.5M (¥144bn), each on a par with Japan’s $979.5M (¥148bn). But the 18th medium-term plan of November 2024 put profitability first, naming the Helios territory as the object of a restructuring programme, True Color: plant closures in Germany and Slovenia and carve-outs of unprofitable lines, because Europe’s segment profit of $23.1M (¥4bn) on $1.0B (¥156bn) of sales was the thinnest in the group. For the plan’s duration, acquisitions stop and internal reorganisation takes their place.

Capital policy turned the same way. Roughly $569.4M (¥80bn) of shares were bought back and cancelled in FY23, cross-shareholdings continued to be sold, the dividend rose from ¥40 to ¥50 for FY24 under a progressive policy, and the company moved to an audit-and-supervisory-committee board with outside lawyers on it. Kansai Paint also moved its Osaka head office in December 2023. President Mouri names India and Africa as the growth markets and runs the group under the banner ONE KANSAI — a company that spent four decades buying separate businesses now trying to operate them as one.