Taking Mitsubishi Corporation as largest shareholder, and renaming the company TOYO TIRE (2018)

What happened on the day the name changed

What Toyo Rubber Industry handed over in this alliance was 20% of the voting rights and the right to nominate one director. The character of the decision shows in the fact that a company which had only just finished clearing up a data-falsification scandal chose a large allotment to a single party over dispersed funding from the market. The $456.5M (¥50bn) went into expansion in the United States and Malaysia and the building of a new site — all of it plant that takes years to recover. It appears the order of events was that the investment it wanted to run came first, even with the share price falling on fear of dilution, and that the one party able to fund it in a single stroke was a joint-venture partner of half a century.

That the decision to change the name stood on the same day shows this alliance was not a matter of money alone. The name “Toyo Rubber Industry” carried, exactly as it was, the provenance of a company created in 1945 by Toyo Boseki to move into the rubber industry. Taking that name down, dropping the “rubber” to which the memory of falsification now clung, raising “TIRE” in its place, and welcoming a trading house as largest shareholder — more than seventy years of self-definition were rewritten together inside two months. Whether the record profits that followed came from that rewriting, or simply from a strength in large-diameter North American tyres that predated it, cannot yet be measured apart.