TOTO - Company History

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Financial history 1953–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1917
Origin 日本陶器
Founding location 福岡県北九州市
Core business at founding Manufacture and sale of sanitary ware for Western-style buildings
Listed 1949
President Tamura Shinya President since 2025 (age 59, as of 2026)
Current priority Business restructuring · Capacity investment Shrinking production in mainland China and expanding ceramics for semiconductor equipment
Founding
In May 1917 Okura Kazuchika (大倉和親) founded Toyo Toki at Kokura in Fukuoka Prefecture. Its forerunner was a ceramics research laboratory set up in January 1912, with his father Okura Magobei (大倉孫兵衛), inside Nippon Toki Gomei Kaisha in Nagoya, where he put his own money into the search for a way to make the toilets of Western-style architecture in Japan; the first products were sold in August 1914. Where the sister company Nippon Toki had made the American tableware market its main battleground, Okura wrote into the company name his aim of reaching the “Oriental” market of mainland China and South-East Asia. There was, however, no domestic market for Western-style toilets at the time, and losses in the slump that followed the First World War forced a capital reduction in 1923. The business began to turn only with the reconstruction demand that followed the Great Kanto Earthquake of September that year, and the volume production was carried by Japan’s first Dresser-type tunnel kiln, installed in May 1920.
The Decision
Holding first place in a single product, the company kept widening the range it sold instead. Its national share of sanitary ware rose from 62 per cent in 1963 to 66 per cent in 1967, and yet in March 1970 it changed its name to Toto Kiki and abolished the tableware division it had restarted in 1947 and spent twenty-three years building. In June 1980 it launched the Washlet warm-water washing toilet seat, moving into a business in which it built, in-house and at volume, a toilet with electronic control inside it. In February 1981 it turned itself into a full-line maker of housing equipment, setting baths, taps, vanity units and water heaters alongside one another on the axis of water. It placed a sales company in the United States in November 1989 and began local production of sanitary ware in Atlanta in 1991. In 1994 it put separate manufacturing companies for separate products into Beijing, Nanjing and Dalian, assembling a mainland Chinese production network in two years.
Today
Half the profit is earned not by toilets but by ceramic parts for semiconductor production equipment. Consolidated sales for the year to March 2026 were $4.7B (¥737bn) and operating profit $339.5M (¥54bn). Of the reporting segments, Global Housing Equipment had sales of $4.2B (¥670bn) and profit of $176.4M (¥28bn), while Ceramics had $426.2M (¥67bn) and $182.7M (¥29bn) — less than a tenth of sales, and yet ahead of housing equipment on profit. The technology behind the electrostatic chuck descends from the knowledge of joining ceramics to electronic control that was banked in the Washlet of 1980. Within housing equipment, Japan accounted for $3.0B (¥480bn), the Americas $478M (¥76bn) and Asia and Oceania $347.1M (¥55bn), while mainland China turned sales of $340.2M (¥54bn) into an operating loss of $43.6M (¥7bn). In April 2025 sanitary-ware production was stopped at Toto Beijing and Toto East China and concentrated in Liaoning and Fujian, cutting capacity by about forty per cent.
Competition
The contest is fought not over housing starts but over replacement demand in the homes already standing. As new housing starts fell over the long run, TOTO created its own demand for replacement through expanded showrooms and co-operation with renovation contractors, lifting the remodelling share of Japanese housing-equipment sales to close to seventy per cent in the year to March 2022. At home its rival in the bathroom and kitchen is LIXIL, which came into being through the merger of Tostem and INAX, and where TOTO builds its products from the firing of the ceramic onward, LIXIL assembled its sashes and its plumbing fixtures by acquisition. Overseas the opponent changes. The Americas grew to sales of $478M (¥76bn) and profit of $30.3M (¥5bn) in the year to March 2026, while mainland China posted an operating loss of $43.6M (¥7bn) under price competition from local makers and a weak property market. The difference between a home market where demand can be created and a Chinese market settled on price is what divided the results by region.

Timeline

1912–1964Making sanitary ware in Japan, and the postwar rebuild

  1. 1917Toyo Toki founded at Kokura with capital of ¥1 million
  2. 1920Japan's first continuous firing kiln installed
  3. 1923Capital reduction; the Great Kanto Earthquake lifts demand
  4. 1937Chigasaki plant completed for sanitary ware
  5. 1943Tableware production halted under wartime controls
  6. 1946In-house production of tap fittings begins
  7. 1949Listed in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka
  8. 1956Japan's first FRP bath developed
  9. 1958Plastics production starts at the Chigasaki plant
  10. 1962Shiga plant completed for sanitary ware
  11. 1964Unit bathroom developed for the Hotel New Otani; sales pass ¥10bn

1965–2000Becoming a full-line housing-equipment maker, and the Washlet

  1. 1967Kokura No. 2 plant completed for tap fittings
  2. 1968Divisional structure adopted; entry into housing equipment
  3. 1969Trademarks unified under TOTO
  4. 1970Renamed Toto Kiki; tableware division abolished
  5. 1971Oita plant completed for tap fittings
  6. 1972Yukuhashi plant completed; vanity units in production
  7. 1978Sales pass ¥100bn
  8. 1980The Washlet bidet toilet seat is launched in June
  9. 1981Defensive management ended; a full-line plumbing strategy adopted
  10. 1989Financial year end moved from 30 November to 31 March; TOTO Kiki U.S.A. founded
  11. 1991Sanitary-ware plant opened in Atlanta; Kokura No. 3 built for the Washlet
  12. 1994Sanitary ware, bath and tap plants established in mainland China
  13. 1995Sales and holding company set up in China; Washlet plant in Malaysia

2001–2019Becoming a global brand, and expanding overseas

  1. 2001Sales and manufacturing merged into TOTO U.S.A., Inc.
  2. 2002TOTO Vietnam Co., Ltd. established for sanitary ware
  3. 2006Sanitary-ware manufacturing company established in Mexico
  4. 2007Renamed TOTO LTD.; Washlet maker taken to full ownership
  5. 2008Asia-Oceania headquarters set up in Singapore; Harimoto Kunio becomes president
  6. 2009Net loss attributable to owners of the parent of ¥26.2bn
  7. 2011Subsidiary established in India
  8. 2013Kitamura Madoka becomes president; TOTO Aqua Techno split off
  9. 2015TOTO Museum opens for the centenary
  10. 2017One hundred years since the founding
  11. 2019Kiyota Noriaki becomes president

Founding Story

1912–1964Making sanitary ware in Japan, and the postwar rebuild

TOTO began as a research bench inside another company's factory, set up to work out how to make a Western-style flush toilet in a country that had almost no buildings to put one in. It took the firm some twenty years — through a capital reduction, an earthquake and a war — to turn that piece of engineering into a business, and the demand that finally carried it came not from its own selling but from disasters and the state's decisions about sewers and cities.

A sanitary-ware works saved by an earthquake

In January 1912, Okura Kazuchika (大倉和親) of Morimura-gumi, together with his father Okura Magobei (大倉孫兵衛), set up a ceramics research laboratory inside Nippon Toki Gomei Kaisha (now Nippon Toki) in Nagoya, putting his own money into the search for a way to make the toilets of Western-style architecture in Japan[1]. The research ended in a workable industrial process, and the first products were sold in August 1914 — the beginning of domestically made sanitary ware in Japan[2]. Where the sister company Nippon Toki (now Noritake Co., Limited) had chosen the American tableware market as its main battleground[3], Okura wrote his own target into the company name: the “Oriental” market of mainland China and South-East Asia[4]. In May 1917 he founded Toyo Toki with capital of ¥1 million at Kokura, close to the port of Moji and the Chikuho coalfield. Okura Kazuchika became its first president; the main products were sanitary ware and tableware, and the company was in effect the laboratory's technology turned into a firm[5].

Production did not settle for several years, however, and in the slump that followed the First World War the losses continued until, in 1923, the company was forced into a capital reduction. The Great Kanto Earthquake of September that year changed the position. Reconstruction lifted demand for sanitary ware and the company's results turned upward[6]. The country's first Dresser-type tunnel kiln — a continuous firing kiln, brought in after capital was raised to ¥1.5 million in May 1920 — carried the volume production[7], and as successive improvements in quality earned the products a reputation as the finest available, the years from about 1935 to 1937 became the prewar peak[8]. When Tokyo was awarded the Olympic Games in 1936 and sewerage works in the big cities became busy[9], the company built the Chigasaki plant in Kanagawa Prefecture in October 1937[10]. Making the plumbing industry a domestic one was possible only with external shocks — the earthquake, and the building-out of urban infrastructure — as its catalyst.

From wartime mobilisation to the high-growth wave

In 1943, under the Pacific War, the company stopped making tableware altogether, and the following year it was designated a plant under Army and Navy supervision, producing insulators and insulator tubing for weapons[11]. The Kokura and Chigasaki plants both escaped war damage, and as early as November 1946 the company began making its own tap fittings[12]; in May 1949 it listed on the Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Fukuoka stock exchanges[13]. Drawing funds from the capital market of the reconstruction years gave it the wherewithal for capital investment in earnest.

From the later 1950s onward, the housing estates built by the Japan Housing Corporation, the extension of sewerage, and the rush of hotel and high-rise construction ahead of the Tokyo Olympics expanded demand for sanitary ware sharply. The company built a new sanitary-ware plant at Chigasaki, opened up the market for taps sold to households, and built the Shiga plant in 1962[14]. Alongside this it developed Japan's first FRP (glass-fibre reinforced plastic) bath in 1956[15], and commercialised the prefabricated unit bathroom for the Hotel New Otani, completed in 1964[16]. This was the period in which a maker of a single ceramic product laid the ground for handling the plumbing of a whole house.

How long Okura Kazuchika's wager took to root

Making sanitary ware in Japan, the founding purpose, was untrodden ground in the Japan of the day. The Dresser-type tunnel kiln was the latest European technology, and the fact that losses continued even after it was installed shows that the market itself did not exist. From the founding in 1917 to the capital reduction of 1923 is six years[17]; from there to the prewar peak around 1935 is another twelve; in total it took about twenty years to make the market. The largest creators of demand were the earthquake, the postwar reconstruction, and the building-out of urban infrastructure in the form of sewers and housing estates — the initiative in creating demand lay not with the company but with the state's urban policy.

In the year to 1964 sales passed $27.8M (¥10bn)[18], and the company put up a new head-office building in Kokura and the Toyo Toki Building in Tokyo. The rush of hotel and high-rise construction for the Tokyo Olympics that year pushed sanitary-ware demand up, and the new Shiga plant of 1962 had been an investment made in answer to the same wave[19]. At this point, however, the company still called itself a maker of ceramics. Meanwhile it had begun handling baths, water heaters, bidet toilet seats and unit bathrooms; the product range had already outgrown the pottery. The gap between what the company called itself and what it actually did built up as pressure for the renaming and the redefinition of its business domain in the era that followed.

1965–2000Becoming a full-line housing-equipment maker, and the Washlet

In a single move in March 1970 the company changed its name, abolished the tableware division it had spent twenty-three years building, and declared itself a maker of housing equipment rather than of pottery. What followed — the Washlet in 1980, then plants in the United States, China and Malaysia in the early 1990s — took a firm that had lived on Japanese construction demand and gave it both a product category and a set of markets that nobody else in the industry had.

The 1970 renaming and a redefined business domain

In 1968 the company set up a divisional structure and began making enamelled steel baths and vanity units in earnest[20]. The following year, 1969, it unified its trademarks under TOTO[21], and in March 1970 it changed its name to Toto Kiki Co., Ltd. and abolished the tableware division at the same time[22]. This was a shift from ceramics maker to full-line housing-equipment maker declared simultaneously on four fronts: products, organisation, company name and business portfolio. Tableware had been one of the main products since the founding, restarted in 1947 and abolished in 1970[23] — which makes this the decision to cut away a business that had taken twenty-three years to build.

Behind it lay a qualitative change in the housing market late in the high-growth years. Demand had appeared for replacing a whole set of plumbing fixtures at the time of building, and a firm that sold only sanitary ware was missing the opportunity. The run of new plants — Oita in 1971 for tap fittings, Yukuhashi in 1972 for vanity units — was that strategy being carried out[24], and in the year to 1978 sales reached $497.5M (¥100bn)[25]. Reaching that level in the slowed economy after the first oil crisis owed something to the response to falling sales and profits: a turn towards renewed design and colour, and towards higher value added. Strengthening the constitution during a stalled market was the run-up to the more aggressive period of the 1980s.

The Washlet: inventing a category of its own

In June 1980 the company launched the Washlet bidet toilet seat[26]. The warm-water washing seat had originated as an American medical and welfare device, and the proposal to sell it integrated with the toilet of an ordinary household had no precedent in the Japan of the time; it took a while to spread. In the second half of the 1980s, however, it caught the wave of electronics and multiple functions in housing equipment and grew into a hit. In November 1991 the Kokura No. 3 plant was completed for the Washlet alone[27], and in April 1992 the Nakatsu No. 2 plant also began producing new ceramics[28].

The significance of the Washlet cannot be measured in units sold. That a sanitary-ware maker had developed and mass-produced in-house an appliance-like product with electronics inside it was in itself an extension of what kind of company it was. The know-how in combining ceramic technology with electronic control would later lead to the business in electrostatic chucks for semiconductor production equipment. This is the origin of a technical line that began inside a lavatory and reached as far as the component parts of a semiconductor fab's machinery.

Building overseas plants in the early 1990s

In November 1989 the company established the American sales company TOTO Kiki U.S.A.[29], and in September 1991 began local production of sanitary ware in Atlanta[30]. In 1994 it set up manufacturing companies in mainland China in quick succession — Beijing Toto (sanitary ware) in May, Nanjing Toto (enamelled steel baths) in June, and Toto Kiki (Dalian) (tap fittings) in July[31] — adding Toto Kiki (Beijing) in March 1995[32] and, in November of the same year, the sales and holding company Toto Kiki (China)[33]. Choosing the best location for each product and distributing them accordingly, the skeleton of the Chinese network was assembled in only two years. In September 1995 a Washlet manufacturing company was also started up in Malaysia[34].

Postwar expansion had been consistently domestic, with exports in a supplementary position. When the collapse of the bubble slowed growth in the Japanese housing market, the company built local production and local sales in parallel in two large markets, the United States and China. In America it could ride an existing sanitary-ware market; China was a new market into which the Japanese culture of the bathroom had to be carried. The decision to bet on two markets of quite different character at once settled the shape of the overseas business from the 2000s onward.

2001–2019Becoming a global brand, and expanding overseas

In 2007 the company finally took as its legal name the trademark it had used since 1969, and put a single brand behind an operation that by then ran from Atlanta to Vietnam. The decade that followed tested it twice: the Lehman shock arrived three months into a new president's term and produced the largest loss in its postwar history, and the long decline in Japanese housing starts forced it to learn to create replacement demand rather than wait for construction.

The 2007 renaming and unification under TOTO

In January 2001 the American sales and manufacturing companies were merged into TOTO U.S.A., Inc.; sanitary-ware manufacturing companies followed in Vietnam in March 2002 and Mexico in March 2006. In May 2007 the company changed its trade name from Toto Kiki to TOTO LTD. The TOTO mark, in use as a trademark since 1969, had taken thirty-eight years to become the formal name of the company. In December of the same year it increased the capital of its German holding company, and in January 2008 established a regional headquarters for Asia and Oceania in Singapore; consolidated sales for the year to March 2008 reached $4.8B (¥501bn).

The renaming was not simply tidying up a label; it was the work of fixing in the organisation an awareness of itself as a global brand. The difficulty of getting the Japanese name Toto Kiki read abroad, and the confusion of carrying different brands at home and overseas, were resolved at a stroke. With the Asia-Oceania headquarters in place, the overseas business also gained a structure in which it could set strategy on its own. In parallel, in March 2007 the company bought out both partners' shares in TOTO Washlet Techno — the Washlet manufacturing company founded jointly with Aichi Electric and Koito Industries in 2001 — making it a wholly owned subsidiary and bringing production of the flagship product inside the group.

The Lehman shock and a ¥26.2bn net loss

In June 2008 Harimoto Kunio (張本邦雄) succeeded Kise Teruo (木瀬照雄) as representative director, president and executive officer. Three months later the Lehman shock struck: consolidated sales for the year to March 2009 fell from $4.8B (¥501bn) to $5.0B (¥465bn), operating profit dropped 71 per cent from $219.7M (¥23bn) to $69.5M (¥7bn), and after $236.3M (¥22bn) of extraordinary losses the company reported a net loss attributable to owners of the parent of $280.1M (¥26bn) — among the largest deficits of its postwar history. A financial crisis had landed directly on a company that had just accelerated its overseas expansion, and the collapse of the American housing market shook the premises of the North American business.

For the company, the loss was an occasion to rethink the pacing of the overseas expansion. New overseas manufacturing and sales bases continued — Thailand in November 2009, India in January 2011 — but in April 2013 a company split created TOTO Aqua Techno to manufacture tap fittings and related products, and in July of the same year the company acquired all the shares of TOTO Manufacturing (Thailand) from Siam Cement, making it a wholly owned subsidiary. New establishments and moves to full ownership ran side by side: a two-handed strategy of tightening control in the countries already entered while widening the base into emerging Asia.

Kitamura Madoka and the shift to a remodelling economy

In June 2013 Kitamura Madoka (喜多村円) took over from Harimoto as president. The company then faced a structural problem particular to Japan: the long decline in new housing starts. Its answer was the “remodelling economy” — a strategy of actively creating demand for replacing the plumbing of existing homes. Expanded showrooms, co-operation with renovation contractors, and the continuing contest of real remodelling projects run with DAIKEN and YKK AP built up mechanisms for stimulating demand rather than waiting for it. The effect showed in the numbers: sales of $5.2B (¥553bn) in the year to March 2014 became $5.4B (¥592bn) by the year to March 2018, and operating profit rose from $445M (¥47bn) to $476.4M (¥53bn).

In August 2015, as part of the centenary programme, the TOTO Museum opened on the site of the Kokura No. 1 plant, and in May 2017 the company marked a hundred years since its founding. In June 2019 Kitamura handed the presidency to Kiyota Noriaki (清田徳明); sales took a knock from the pandemic in 2020 but recovered to $4.9B (¥645bn) with operating profit of $396.6M (¥52bn) in the year to March 2022. The domestic remodelling share reached close to seventy per cent of Japanese housing-equipment sales in that year. The mainland Chinese business, on the other hand, had begun to face a turn in the property market and intensifying competition from the second half of the 2010s, and while the company was earning at home from the remodelling economy, its main overseas market moved from a peak of $703.4M (¥92bn) in the year to March 2022 to $447M (¥67bn) in the year to March 2025 — a fall of more than twenty per cent.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  2. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  3. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  4. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  5. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  6. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  7. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  8. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  9. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  10. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  11. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  12. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  13. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  14. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  15. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  16. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  17. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  18. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  19. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  20. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  21. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  22. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  23. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  24. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  25. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc., 1995↩
  26. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  27. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  28. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  29. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  30. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  31. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  32. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  33. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  34. TOTO, securities report for the 159th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩

References & sources

  1. TOTO LTD. (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history section, and the company's own chronology.
  2. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Toyo Toki entry.
  3. Nikkei Business: 25 Jan 1971, on Toto Kiki and the management formula behind its lead.
  4. Yomiuri Shimbun: 29 Mar 1980, on the shadow over new building and the turn towards extensions and remodelling.
  5. A Conspectus of Japanese Company Histories, Toyo Keizai Inc. (1995).

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