Company history

Cosmo’s oldest root is not an entrepreneur but a policy. In September 1939, under wartime petroleum control, eight small refiners in Niigata prefecture were combined into Daikyo Oil, capitalised at ¥1.25 million, with its head office in Tokyo. The state wanted refining capacity consolidated; the company that resulted had no founder in the usual sense. Construction of a refinery at Yokkaichi began soon after and was completed in July 1943, fixing the shape that would serve the company for decades — headquarters in Tokyo, the main works on Ise Bay, and a supply position aimed at the metropolitan market that would grow fastest after the war.

In May 1949 Daikyo Oil listed in Tokyo and Osaka, and that August it was registered as a general petroleum-products wholesaler. The licence mattered more than the listing: it made the company an integrated player entitled to run the chain from refining crude through to selling product, and it marked the passage out of the controlled wartime economy into a market one. A provincial amalgamation had become a national supplier.

The decisive move of the postwar decades came in December 1967, when Daikyo Oil, Maruzen Oil and Nippon Mining signed a concession agreement with the government of what is now Abu Dhabi; the three founded Abu Dhabi Oil the following month. Japanese-developed upstream barrels, held directly rather than bought from the majors, were rare — and Cosmo has held that position ever since. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and the swing back to a strong yen and cheap crude after the 1985 Plaza Accord, then pushed the whole industry toward consolidation. Daikyo prepared for it deliberately: a 48.7% stake in Asia Oil in 1980, a new refining subsidiary in 1984 to which Yokkaichi was transferred, and in 1984 an intermediate merger of the refining arms with Maruzen.

In April 1986 Daikyo Oil, Maruzen Oil and the interim refining company merged and took the name Cosmo Oil — one of the largest restructurings in postwar Japanese refining, joining Daikyo’s metropolitan network to Maruzen’s Kansai one. Cosmo did this more than a decade before Nippon Oil and Mitsubishi combined in 1999, and more than twenty years before JX and JXTG; being too small to wait made it first. Absorbing Asia Oil in 1989 completed the design, and by then Cosmo combined a nationwide brand, mid-tier refining scale and, unusually, an upstream concession of its own.

The following two decades were mostly about shrinking gracefully. Japanese gasoline demand flattened as car ownership stopped growing and efficiency improved, and service-station economics deteriorated with it. Cosmo answered by collapsing its sales subsidiaries into one: eleven regional distributors merged in a single step in July 2000, further mergers followed in 2003 and 2004, and in 2007 the station real estate was hived off into a separate property company. The aim throughout was to hold the network while stripping out fixed cost.

Seeds for something else were planted early. Cosmo bought the wind developer Eco Power in March 2010 and Sojitz Energy in January 2013, renaming it as an integrated-energy company ahead of electricity deregulation; the Abu Dhabi concession was renewed and extended with new blocks in February 2011. Then 2014 delivered the shock that decided the next structure: crude fell from around $115 a barrel in June to the $50s by December, inventory write-downs hit the entire industry, and Cosmo swung to an operating loss. With JX and TonenGeneral, and Idemitsu and Showa Shell, already exploring mergers, Cosmo chose the other road — stay independent, convert to a pure holding company, and deepen its capital tie to Abu Dhabi.

In September 2015 Cosmo Oil was delisted, and in October Cosmo Energy Holdings listed in its place — refining, marketing, petrochemicals, power and exploration set side by side as subsidiaries under a parent whose job was to allocate capital between them. The continuity was unbroken, but the sixty-six-year listing history of the old Daikyo Oil formally ended. IPIC, the Abu Dhabi state investment vehicle, became the largest shareholder with more than 20%. Morikawa Keizo, a Daikyo Oil career man, led the transition for eight months before handing over in June 2016 to Kiriyama Hiroshi — also a Daikyo entrant, and the executive who would define the group’s strategy for six years.

Kiriyama’s framing was “Oil & New”: squeeze structural cost out of refining and marketing while building positions in businesses that will outlast oil. Yokkaichi Kasumi Power was set up with the Development Bank of Japan in February 2016 as electricity retailing opened; Maruzen Petrochemical, a relationship dating to the 1986 merger, was consolidated as a subsidiary the following month; Eco Power was taken to full ownership in 2019, making wind an in-house business rather than an investment; and a new exploration subsidiary in 2021 extended the Abu Dhabi position that had begun in 1968.

Kiriyama handed the presidency to Yamada Shigeru in June 2022 and stayed on as chairman. The group moved to the Prime Market that April and set out a seventh medium-term plan for 2023–25 organised around human capital, digital and green transformation — a shift from designing the portfolio to building the capability to execute it. The most concrete piece was SAFFAIRE SKY ENERGY, formed in November 2022 with JGC Holdings and Revo International to build a roughly 30,000 kl-a-year plant at the Sakai refinery making sustainable aviation fuel from used cooking oil; ground was broken in 2023 and the unit came onstream in the year to March 2025.

The other story of these years was over the share register. From 2022 funds associated with Murakami Yoshiaki, chiefly City Index Eleventh, built a holding that approached 20% and kept buying. Cosmo responded with returns and governance measures and, in 2023, with an emergency takeover-defence measure put to a vote from which the acquirer was excluded — a majority-of-minority count that passed with 59.54% but would have drawn only about 46% among all shareholders. In the end the defence was never triggered. The funds sold out in December 2023, and in April 2024 Cosmo signed a capital and business alliance with Iwatani, Japan’s largest hydrogen supplier, which took roughly 20% — securing a decarbonisation partner and a stable shareholder in the same stroke.

By the year to March 2025 both halves of the strategy were showing results: top-grade safety certification at Sakai allowing longer runs between shutdowns, full production from the Hail field in Abu Dhabi from December 2024, and the SAF plant complete. Recurring profit came to $995.4M (¥151bn), or ¥181.6bn excluding inventory effects, and the dividend floor was raised alongside opportunistic buybacks. Eighty-five years after the state pushed eight Niigata refiners together, the same company is testing how far an independent refiner can carry itself into an economy that intends to burn less oil.