Company history

In February 1908 Kawamura Kijuro set three ink rollers down in Honjo, Tokyo, and began making and selling printing ink as Kawamura Ink Manufacturing, renamed Kawamura Kijuro Shoten in 1912. The work was job processing: grind imported pigment and resin together, deliver the result to printers. By the Taisho years the shop had drawn up a plan to supply its own pigments and dyes, reached into higher grades, and was making separate inks for offset, collotype and intaglio. The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed both shop and plant; rebuilding began at once and a new works was finished in 1924.

In 1925 the company succeeded in producing organic pigments in Japan, on its own. What decides an ink’s colour and its cost is the pigment, and while that came from outside, both the performance and the price of the product were held in another firm’s technology — subject to exchange rates, to a foreign maker’s supply, and impossible to tune for consistency of shade. Self-supply moved the company from grinding other people’s materials to synthesising colour itself, and DIC still marks that year, in its own integrated reports, as the milestone next after the founding. Every later diversification descends from two technologies: pigment, and the resin that disperses it.

Incorporated in 1937, the business was deliberately split in two — tar intermediates, dyes and pigments into Nippon Dyestuff & Chemical Manufacturing, printing ink into Dainippon Ink Manufacturing — so that a single group could run colour chemistry all the way back to its raw materials. Sales pushed onto the Asian mainland, and by about 1941 some 60% of an annual 800 tons of ink was exported there; then wartime controls on publishing collapsed ink demand, and in 1944 the dyestuff company’s munitions division was folded into the new Kureha Chemical while the rest was absorbed back into the ink company. The Honjo works burned in March 1945. Production restarted at Shimura that August, the postwar publishing boom pulled demand back fast, and on 29 May 1950 the company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange with capital of $83,333 (¥30m), 500 employees and about 14% of national ink output — first in the country. The next move was already decided: of a $83,333 (¥30m) rights issue approved that August, $55,556 (¥20m) was earmarked not for more ink capacity but for a joint venture in resin.

In February 1952 the company set up Japan Reichhold Chemical Industries with Reichhold Chemicals of the United States and, ahead of its rivals, began producing synthetic resins. Resin was the other main raw material of ink and, at the same time, a material that reached into paints, adhesives, foundry work and textile finishing: an investment made to secure a raw material was also the entrance to new markets. The logic was that of 1925 — supply your own inputs — with one difference, that the technology was brought in from a partner. In October 1962 the venture was absorbed and the parent renamed itself Dainippon Ink and Chemicals. By 1968 it had capital of ¥6 billion and 5,800 employees, first in Japan and third in the world in printing ink; by fiscal 1977 the resin division’s sales, 24% of the total, had passed the ink division’s 20%. The word standing first in the company’s name was no longer its largest business.

The rule governing that expansion was stated plainly by the second president, Kawamura Katsumi, in a lecture of October 1974: stay inside chemicals, and inside chemicals expand only into businesses organically related to one another — the opposite, he said, of scattering into unrelated trades and weakening yourself. Because 70% of its raw materials came from petrochemicals and its products were secondary applications, the plant was comparatively light and the capital required small. Leave basic chemicals to the great integrated chemical houses; take their materials and turn them into products with knowledge and service. He called this position downstream — an industry standing at the water’s edge of final demand.

The position dictated how things were made. Roughly 160,000 product varieties for some 70,000 customers, almost nothing mass-produced: for printing ink alone, press speed, paper smoothness, plate type and colour multiply out. Serving orders that fine meant selling direct rather than through dealers, and in the late 1970s some 1,100 salesmen were backed by about 1,000 technical service staff — a labour-heavy trade that could not survive on thin margins, but one fought on a different field from competitors cutting prices with volume. Out of the same two technologies came epoxy resin (commercialised 1971, taking about a fifth of a market dominated by Shell), nematic liquid-crystal materials developed in 1973 and adopted in calculators, and, after petroleum protein was refused approval at home, the spirulina algae business built outside Bangkok. Sales grew from $13.6M (¥5bn) in 1957 to about $933.9M (¥240bn) in 1977 — forty-nine-fold in twenty years, against a sixteen-fold rise in nominal GNP. But equity stood at only 16.9% of assets, and the interest bill on that leverage ran close to ¥6 billion a year more than Toyo Ink, the rival that had stayed with its core.

Kawamura Shigekuni became the third president in June 1978. Born in Dalian in 1928, a graduate of the University of Tokyo law faculty, he had gone into the Long-Term Credit Bank of Japan and studied at New York University’s business school as a Fulbright scholar before being adopted into the Kawamura family in 1957 and joining the company in 1959. He defined his own task by succession: the first president had built the foundations of an ink company, the second had grown it into a diversified chemical company, and the third’s job was to make it a global one. The goal he set was sales of $6.9B (¥1tn) in fiscal 1987, the eightieth anniversary — a figure no chemical company in Japan had then reached. He had each division calculate what it could do and judged the total attainable, and he attached weight to that procedure itself: a number built from below, not imposed from above, was what would turn a target into energy.

The plan had an acknowledged hole. Growth over the previous five years had run at about 8% against the 15% a year the target required. To close the gap he named two instruments — new products and overseas strategy — and planned to lift R&D spending, then about 3% of sales, to 6% within a decade, with over 1,000 researchers, a fifth of all employees. In the event it was not development that produced the speed. In March 1979 he acquired the American printing-materials maker Polychrome by tender offer and explained the reason as a saving of time and risk: developing the same photosensitive technology alone would take years and money with no guarantee of success, whereas buying a company delivered the technology and the other side’s market at once. In December 1986 came the graphic arts division of Sun Chemical, at US$550 million — about $504.4M (¥85bn), against equity of roughly $593.4M (¥100bn) — which made DIC the largest printing-ink maker in the world. In September 1987 it bought Reichhold Chemicals itself, taking over the partner that had taught it resins thirty-five years earlier.

Kawamura talked about acquisitions as a problem of people. Before bidding for Sun Chemical he had stayed in touch with Red Parker, the former president who had made it the top ink company in America and then fallen out with his chairman, and had asked in advance whether he would run the business if the deal succeeded. The counter-example was Cole & Marden, the sixth-largest US ink maker, bought a decade earlier for well under its net assets and found to be a one-man company gutted after its founder’s death; managers, accountants and engineers had to be sent in, and the repair took seven years. The trillion itself arrived ten years late — consolidated sales of ¥1.0217 trillion in the year to March 1998 — and 55.3% of it came from overseas, delivered by the acquired subsidiaries rather than by the domestic growth the plan had assumed. What remained in hand was the world’s largest ink business and the debt that had bought it. In June 1998 Okumura Kozo, an accounting man and only the second president from outside the founding family, took over with parent-company sales falling for the first time in three years, and set about re-ranking every product line for reinforcement or exit — the structure, he said, had to be in place by 2000 to survive.

Expansion by purchase continued — the Coates printing-ink group was bought from TotalFina in December 1999 — but in the same years the company began letting go. KPG, the printing-materials venture formed with Eastman Kodak in 1997, passed wholly to Kodak in April 2005 through redemption of DIC’s stake, and in September 2005 the Reichhold group was sold by MBO. The firm it had learned resins from in 1952 and absorbed in 1987 was released eighteen years later, ending a relationship of half a century.

In April 2008, at the centenary, the company took the name DIC Corporation — the initials of Dainippon Ink and Chemicals, used as its emblem since the 1960s. Striking “Ink” out of the name was the mirror image of adding “Chemicals” in 1962. The following year it merged its domestic printing-ink business with The Inctec, a Dai Nippon Printing subsidiary, to form DIC Graphics: grow abroad by acquisition, defend at home by consolidation — the same business, opposite tactics, according to whether the market was expanding or shrinking. Then in July 2012 it bought the Benda-Lutz group and entered effect pigments in earnest, the first step of a turn back toward colour.

With printing ink mature, weight shifted back to pigment. Benda-Lutz brought effect pigments in 2012, Kingfisher Colours of the UK brought cosmetic pigments in 2015, and the G58 green pigment for LCD colour filters, developed in 2010, took a leading position on brightness. In June 2021 DIC acquired BASF’s Colors & Effects business, the largest acquisition in its history and the one that secured world leadership in organic pigments; in 2023 it added PCAS Canada, a maker of semiconductor photoresist polymers, giving it a North American resin site. Self-supply of pigment, begun in 1925 to control the cost of ink, had returned to the centre of the company as a product in its own right — in cosmetics and in display panels.

The weight of what had been bought was then tested from the side of capital cost. The year to December 2023 carried special losses of $288.2M (¥41bn) and a net loss of $283.3M (¥40bn); sales held at ¥1.0387 trillion but operating profit fell from ¥39.6 billion to ¥17.9 billion. Results recovered afterwards — ¥1.0522 trillion of sales and ¥52.2 billion of operating profit in 2025 — while group headcount fell from 22,743 at the end of 2022 to 20,884 at the end of 2025. The scale of the revenue was held; the assets and the people behind it were pared back.

Ikeda Takashi became president in January 2024, and the disposals accelerated. In December that year DIC ended production of the liquid-crystal materials it had developed in 1973, having designated TFT liquid crystal a “structural reform” business under its long-term plan DIC Vision 2030; Chinese production stakes followed in 2025. The same January it sold its entire holding in Seiko PMC, descendant of a 1968 papermaking-chemicals venture. The review reached beyond the businesses: a committee of outside directors took the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art as its first subject in April 2024, decided in December to shrink and relocate it and to cut its 384 works to about 100, and the museum closed in March 2025, its major pieces going to a New York auction that November. At the general meeting of March 2025 the board faced a shareholder proposal from OASIS funds and opposed it; the chairman was re-elected against an ISS recommendation, and Kawamura Yoshihisa of the founding family left the board. The family’s name departed the museum and the boardroom in the same year.