Company history

Lion began in October 1891 as a small shop on the Yanagiwara riverbank in Kanda, Tokyo, where Kobayashi Tomijiro sold the raw materials for soap and matches and, before long, made soap himself. The turn came in July 1896, when he began producing a fine-quality tooth powder and called it Lion. Naming goods after animals was the fashion of the day — there were deer brands and elephant brands — and the lion was chosen because its teeth are strong and startlingly white. A single product’s name became the brand, then the company’s name, and it has been carried at the front of the business ever since.

What happened next set the shape of the company for the following eighty years. In 1910, the year the founder died, the soap side was incorporated as the Lion Soap Works; in 1918 the trading house was reorganized as Kobayashi Shoten, the future Lion Dentifrice, and in 1919 the soap works became Lion Sekken, the future Lion Fat & Oil. The founder’s two trades — oral care and household cleaning — were now two separate legal entities, run by the same family under the same brand. Nothing forced them together, so nothing did.

The 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake burned down the Honjo works, and production was carried on at the Osaka branch plant until shipments resumed. In 1940, under wartime control of fats and oils, Lion Sekken was renamed Lion Fat & Oil. Defeat cost the dentifrice company most of its plant and the Southeast Asian markets it had built before the war; it rebuilt from what it called a restart from zero, raised capital twice to reach $208,333 (¥75m) in 1949, renamed itself Lion Dentifrice in February of that year and listed on the reopened Tokyo Stock Exchange in May.

Through the high-growth decades the two Lions expanded in parallel and rarely in concert. On the dentifrice side, Super Lion (1957) opened the market for fluoride toothpaste, a research laboratory followed in 1960, and White Lion was readied in 1961 against the foreign brands then entering Japan. A 1962 tie-up with America’s Bristol-Myers brought men’s grooming products and deodorants, and from 1963 the company pushed into foods and pharmaceuticals.

Capacity was built at speed on both sides — Odawara (1964), Kawasaki (1964), Osaka (1968), Akashi (1969) — with the Odawara dentifrice plant the largest of its kind in the world and fully automated. In December 1967 Lion took its first serious step abroad, forming a manufacturing and sales venture in Thailand with the Saha Group; that joint venture is the origin of the leading position Lion still holds in Thailand today. Half-year sales passed $27.8M (¥10bn) for the first time in the company’s history that same year.

By the 1970s both companies were listed on the Tokyo exchange, each with its own board, its own laboratories and its own sales network, held together only by the Kobayashi family’s shareholdings and the shared name. In a slow-moving market the duplication was affordable. Once Kao and Procter & Gamble made the domestic fight expensive, it stopped being affordable.

On 1 January 1980 Lion Dentifrice and Lion Fat & Oil combined as equals into Lion Corporation, ending sixty years of separation and putting oral care, personal cleansing, laundry detergents and over-the-counter drugs under one roof. The stated aim was to be first in every category; the practical aim was to stop paying twice for research and distribution while fighting Kao. The cultures did not merge as neatly as the balance sheets — the fat-and-oil side was described as a pyramid, the dentifrice side as a trading house — and overseas shareholders opposed the terms, a fight the chairman refused to settle by buying them out at a premium.

The bill for a decade of expansion arrived in 1989, when falsified test data on the hair-growth product Pentadecan became public. President Kobayashi Atsushi chose not to resign but to say publicly what had produced it: an organization swollen by the merger, a growth plan that had run ahead of the company’s ability to deliver, and a sense of urgency that had never reached the shop floor. It took several more years for that diagnosis to show up in the margins.

The 2000s were spent tidying the structure the merger had left. Plants at Kawasaki (2003) and Tokyo (2006) closed; in December 2004 Lion bought Chugai Pharmaceutical’s OTC drug business and CJ Corporation’s household chemicals business in Korea, giving it scale in both. In 2007 it acquired the Japanese analgesic trademarks — Bufferin among them — from Bristol-Myers Squibb and unwound the joint venture, and delisted from the Osaka exchange to trade in Tokyo alone.

Lion spent the 2010s rebuilding its map. Chinese and Southeast Asian ventures were founded, absorbed and unwound in turn; in 2015 the group’s chemicals operations were consolidated into Lion Specialty Chemicals, taking Lion into the front rank of a consolidating industry. Under IFRS from FY2014, the household-products business showed the higher margins that consolidation was supposed to produce, with sales climbing from ¥335.2bn in FY2012 to ¥418.9bn in FY2018.

Then came a windfall and its hangover. Pandemic demand for hand soap and sanitizer pushed FY2020 operating profit to a record $412.1M (¥44bn) on a 12.4% margin. As the demand faded and raw-material and energy costs rose with a weak yen, operating profit fell for three straight years to ¥20.5bn in FY2023 — a 5.1% margin. The spike had been borrowed, not earned.

The response was to stop competing on volume. Begun under Kikukawa Masazumi as a series of individual disposals and carried further by Takemori Masayuki, who took over in March 2023, the policy widened from peripheral brands into the core: SKUs cut by roughly 30%, brands sold, and the remainder priced upward. Alongside it, the long-standing habit of entering foreign markets through joint ventures was abandoned — Vietnam’s Merap Lion was taken outright in 2025, Australia’s PNB Consolidated in January 2026, and a wholly owned Indian subsidiary followed in February. FY2025 sales of ¥422.1bn and operating profit of ¥36.4bn put the company back on its pre-pandemic track; whether concentrating on premium brands can grow a business in a shrinking domestic market is the question the next decade will answer.