Company history

Toyo Rubber Industry was incorporated on 1 August 1945 — two weeks before the surrender — by merging Toyo Rubber Kako, which the textile house Toyo Boseki had set up and nurtured to build a rubber business, with Hirano Gomu Seizosho. The junction was less dramatic than the date suggests: Hirano, founded in December 1943 on the industrial-rubber business of a partnership of the same name, had leased Toyo Boseki’s Nishinari works in 1944 to make battery cases for the military, and in September that year took the land and buildings as an in-kind investment. Toyo Boseki was already inside its capital. The merger tidied an existing relationship into one company, based in Osaka and defined not as a tyre maker but as a maker of rubber goods at large.

Recovery came through the products the equipment could turn out fastest. Footwear production began in 1946 at a new plant in Ayabe, Kyoto; in 1948 the tyre equipment was moved to the Osaka works. The company first went public on the Osaka Stock Exchange in April 1949 and raised capital to ¥90m that September. In September 1950 the first president, Tomihisa Rikimatsu, laid down a thirty-one character corporate creed — better and cheaper today than yesterday, each of us doing our best at our own post, for the customer — which the company still keeps at the top of its value system.

The decisive commitment came in July 1953, when the Itami plant in Hyogo opened for full-scale tyre production. Japan then had about 110,000 passenger cars and 300,000 trucks on the road, under a hundredth of today’s fleet; the plant was a bet on motorization that had not yet happened, and it is the ancestor of the Itami site that is the company’s centre today. Listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange followed in May 1955, ten years after founding and six years ahead of Bridgestone. But tyres remained one line among four. A 1958 technical tie-up with General Tire brought air springs and polyurethane foam; a central research laboratory opened at Ibaraki, Osaka in 1961; and through the 1960s tyres, chemical products, footwear and industrial goods hardened into four parallel pillars. That self-definition as a general rubber maker would hold for the next fifty years.

A mid-sized maker could not meet Bridgestone head-on at home, so Toyo Rubber went for the largest market abroad while the leaders were still looking inward. In July 1966 it established Toyo Tire (U.S.A.) Corp. — at a point when neither Bridgestone nor Yokohama Rubber had yet set up an overseas sales company. Within a decade it had a real position in the American aftermarket, and the structure that today makes North America the source of most of the group’s earnings traces back to that distribution network rather than to any later factory.

The rest of the map filled in quickly. A 1974 stake in an Australian tyre company (today Toyo Tyre Australia) opened Oceania; Toyo Reifen GmbH in Germany followed in September 1975, completing an Americas–Europe–Oceania sales skeleton by the middle of the decade — fast even by the standards of the industry. A 1979 agreement with Nitto Tire covered production, technology, sales and administration alike. In 1987 a joint venture in Taiwan with Cheng Shin (Maxxis) making anti-vibration rubber gave the company its first production foothold in Asia.

At home the movement ran the other way: consolidation. The domestic distributor Ryoto Tire was absorbed in 1996, and in December 1998 tyre production at Itami was folded into the Kuwana plant in Mie and the Itami tyre works closed. The founding site stayed on as headquarters and R&D. Expanding sales outward while concentrating manufacture inward — those two reorganizations ran simultaneously for three decades.

In June 2004 the company set up Toyo Tire North America in Georgia — thirty-eight years after the sales arm, and at a time when few mid-sized makers ran their own plants overseas. The Georgia works was expanded repeatedly and became the main supply base for the large-diameter SUV and pickup tyres that now carry the group’s profit; the pairing of local production with local selling, established here, is the template the company would later copy into Europe. Around it the map thickened: a Shanghai tyre sales company in 2003, an anti-vibration rubber plant in Guangzhou in September 2004, and, at home, a tyre technical centre opened at Itami in 2001 to take over product development and road evaluation from the 1961 laboratory.

Distribution and alliances were rebuilt in parallel. In April 2007 ten domestic tyre distributors were merged into Toyo Tire Japan and two chemical-products distributors into a single company, shifting weight toward direct selling. In May 2008 came a business alliance with Bridgestone — the industry leader — followed that October by a sales company in Moscow.

Production then spread across Asia: a tyre plant in Perak, Malaysia in April 2011; a Chinese maker in Shandong acquired that June and renamed Zhucheng; sales and chemical-products companies in Thailand in 2011 and 2013. The research function moved from Ibaraki to Kawanishi in 2013. And in 2012 the company abandoned the March year-end it had kept since 1945 to align with its overseas subsidiaries; the nine-month transitional period to December 2012 recorded $3.6B (¥291bn) of sales and $170.4M (¥14bn) of ordinary profit. Nobuki Akira became president as this transition closed, in March 2013.

In March 2015 the company disclosed that performance data for its seismic isolation rubber bearings had been falsified in order to obtain ministerial certification the products did not merit. Fifty-five buildings were identified — flats, government offices, hospitals — and in October a second falsification surfaced, in anti-vibration rubber that did not meet JIS standards. President Nobuki resigned in April 2015; Yamamoto Takuji ran the following seven months on investigation, remediation and the replacement work, handing over to Shimizu Takashi in November 2015. The company itself later described 2016 as an existential moment, and the board’s response was to rebuild the corporate philosophy from the ground up — the first such rebuild in seventy years.

The structural answer came under Shimizu Takashi, president from November 2015. In his second year in office the divisional structure blamed for letting business units grow too autonomous for company-wide quality control was replaced by a functional organization — product, technology, production, sales, procurement — and the head office moved from Osaka to Itami, next to the plant and the tyre technical centre. In November 2018 a capital and business alliance with Mitsubishi Corporation brought a stable shareholder, two directors and access to a trading house’s channels and raw-material sourcing, while Bridgestone’s holding (7.86% at the end of 2015) was wound down. In January 2019 the seventy-four-year-old name Toyo Rubber Industry became TOYO TIRE; an R&D centre opened in Georgia the same month, a tyre plant at Indija in Serbia that October, and a European R&D centre at Willich, Germany, in November.

The mid-term plan of 2021–2025 chose margin over volume, naming the large-diameter North American tyre the priority product and folding sustainability targets into each function’s business plan; the shares moved to the Prime Market in 2022. The year to December 2024 set records at every line — sales of $3.7B (¥565bn), operating profit of $620.5M (¥94bn) and net profit of $493.7M (¥75bn) — carried by North America. That December a European sales company was placed at Indija, alongside the plant, closing the loop between making and selling on one site. The concentration remains the problem: the plan beginning in 2026 has to deepen North America while preparing an offensive in Europe and Japan, and to rebuild a supply chain under a trading order turning protectionist.