Company history

The company began in 1886 when Kobayashi Chubei opened Kobayashi Seidaido in Nagoya, selling sundries, cosmetics and imported liquor. Meiji-era Nagoya was a commercial hub on the Tokaido with room for new merchants in the retail trades, and the founder started not as a pharmacist but as a small retailer with a mixed shelf. Medicines came later, as the family widened its range — but the underlying business, everyday goods for ordinary households, was already fixed at that stage and has never changed since.

In August 1919 the family merged its partnerships into Kobayashi Daiyakubo K.K., moving the head office to Osaka beside Doshomachi, the centre of modern Japanese pharmaceutical distribution — a shift of both region and corporate form, from personal partnerships to a joint-stock company, and from peddling to wholesaling. In November 1940, under wartime controls, the manufacturing arm was split off as the original Kobayashi Pharmaceutical. The two halves came back together in April 1956, when the wholesaler absorbed the manufacturer, took the name Kobayashi Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd. in May, and moved to central Osaka in November. Retailer, wholesaler, manufacturer: the integrated maker-seller of medicines and household goods dates from that point.

In March 1967 the company launched Ammeltz nationwide, an anti-inflammatory analgesic you rub on — in a household-medicine market where oral drugs and adhesive patches dominated, a form nobody else had pushed. In June 1969 came Bluelet, a scenting cleaner for flush toilets, entering a corner of domestic hygiene that no household-goods maker had properly taken. Sawaday, a room deodoriser, followed in 1975. Each product’s name stated its purpose, and each one addressed a specific small inconvenience rather than contesting a large category on strength — the method later condensed into the slogan “making what you wish existed,” and carried on by the third and subsequent generations of the Kobayashi family.

Attempts to grow outside that method fared less well. A 1972 tie-up with C.R. Bard of the United States created a medical-device business; a Kobayashi Medical division followed in 1992, and a 1996 joint venture with Medtronic Sofamor Danek aimed at orthopaedics. None contributed much beside the household business, and the medical side was wound back over time — the Medtronic venture dissolved in 2002.

Overseas expansion began in earnest in September 1998, with a manufacturing and sales company in Shanghai and Kobayashi Healthcare in the United States established in the same year, followed by a European arm in the UK in 2001. Setting up three poles at once was a statement about a domestic market approaching its ceiling. Turning them into a meaningful share of revenue would take more than twenty years.

Kobayashi listed on the Osaka exchange’s second section in April 1999 — 113 years after founding, late by industry standards — and reached the first sections of both Tokyo and Osaka in 2000. What the market valued was the repeatability: a company that could manufacture niches on a schedule. By the year to March 2012 it was earning ¥20.0 billion of recurring profit on ¥131.1 billion of sales.

Growth came partly by purchase — the Kiribai heat-pad business in 2001, tea from Hitachi Zosen in 2002, Combe’s Japanese trademarks in 2005, a US device and heat-pad pair in 2006 — while the wholesale arm was traded away to Medipal in 2008, narrowing the company to household goods, OTC medicines and health foods. From the year to December 2016 the fiscal year moved from March to December to align with the overseas subsidiaries, and the international business finally scaled: ¥45.1 billion in 2024, close to 30% of the group, on a model of localising the same kind of small-inconvenience products across China, the US and Europe.

Kobayashi Akihiro, eldest son of chairman Kobayashi Kazumasa, became the sixth president from the family in 2013 and kept the formula running. The year to December 2023 produced record figures — ¥173.4 billion of sales and ¥20.3 billion of net profit. It was the last such year.

In March 2024 health damage emerged from an ingredient in the company’s beni-koji (red yeast rice) cholesterol supplements, and a voluntary recall followed. Cases including deaths turned it into a public scandal, and the focus moved to the responsibility of the founding family. On 23 July 2024 chairman Kobayashi Kazumasa and president Kobayashi Akihiro resigned; on 8 August, executive director Yamane Satoshi became president — the first non-family president since 1886. In March 2025 Toyoda Kaichi, who had led the international business, succeeded him, and Ota Yoshihito, known for the restructuring of Japan Airlines, came in from outside as chairman. Kobayashi Akihiro stayed on the board with responsibility for compensating victims.

The costs run through the accounts. The year to December 2024 carried $89.8M (¥14bn) of extraordinary losses, halving net profit to ¥10.0 billion; the year to December 2025 was flat at ¥165.7 billion of sales but bore ¥19.7 billion more in compensation and quality-investment charges, cutting net profit to ¥3.6 billion. Two consecutive years of decline from the 2023 record, and the high-margin structure has not returned.

President Toyoda Kaichi said on taking office that crisis management on the factory floor had been absent, and began reworking personnel policy to place quality-minded people in manufacturing. In February 2026 he presented a medium-term plan, the “Vision for the 35th year,” pairing a rebuild of quality control with renewed growth from overseas. Four tasks run in parallel: moving beyond dependence on the founding family, completing compensation, resuming suspended television advertising, and restructuring quality assurance. Whether the niche-manufacturing model built since Ammeltz in 1967 can be reconstructed on top of that is the open question.