Merging with Toyo Carbon, founded the same year, to become Japan’s leading carbon products maker (1992)

What was bought, and what came with it

Two companies born in the same year becoming one after seventy years invites reading as a story of expansion. Yet the only purpose the company itself gave was cost reduction in the electrode business, and in the December 1992 year it added ¥7.3 billion of revenue while falling to a loss of ¥200 million. The core of this merger appears to have been the recovery, through a reshuffling of production sites, of the electrode price competitiveness lost to the strong yen. The speed with which the Yamanashi plant was closed the following June, in 1993, indicates as much.

A merger undertaken as a cost measure took a long time to produce an answer in electrodes, however. The Shiga plant stopped making them thirty-three years later, and the December 2024 year recorded a net loss of ¥56.4 billion. It was rather friction materials — never named among the objectives — that survived as a business, by way of consolidation into the Shonan works and the establishment of Tokai Materials. What comes along with a deal sometimes outlasts what the deal was struck for; this merger can be read as one example.