Nippon Steel - Company History

Japanese steel begins in 1857, when a Western-style blast furnace was first lit at Kamaishi. Private ironmaking never became self-supporting, so in 1896 the government created the Yawata Works, which started operating in 1901 with capacity for 90,000 tonnes of steel a year. For the next three decades the state kept commissioning inquiries into how to put the industry on its feet, and nearly all of them returned the same prescription: one large merged company. The trigger was fiscal — duty-free imported steel, admitted to speed reconstruction after the 1923 Great Kantō Earthquake, ended up squeezing domestic producers instead.

The 1925 inquiry set out the reasoning that would govern the next century. Steelmaking could pay in Japan, it argued; the trouble was that apart from the state works there were too few financially solid integrated mills, so the rest wore each other down in pointless competition. Its remedy was a half-public, half-private combine built around Yawata. Steel users objected and the plan sat unbuilt for years. It finally moved under the Saitō cabinet: the Nippon Steel Act passed the Diet and was promulgated in 1933, and on 29 January 1934 the Yawata Works merged with five private firms — Wanishi, Kamaishi Mining, Mitsubishi Steel, Fuji Steel and Kyushu Steel — to form Nippon Seitetsu, with Nakai Reisaku as its first president.

The new company employed 45,847 people and held 96% of Japan’s pig iron, 52% of its crude steel. But the merger delivered less than intended: five firms that had been expected to join, including Nippon Kokan, declined despite heavy ministerial persuasion, and the economy recovered just as the combine was being formed, blunting its rationale. War then wrecked it — output peaked at about 7.7 million tonnes in 1943 and fell to 2 million in 1945. The occupation first proposed stripping three-quarters of the country’s steel capacity as reparations, then reversed course in 1947 when the Strike report argued that Japan could not stand on its own without steel. What the reversal spared, antitrust took: Nippon Seitetsu was designated under the deconcentration programme and, in December 1948, ordered to reorganize itself out of existence.

On 1 April 1950 the assets of Nippon Seitetsu were contributed in kind to two new companies — Yawata Iron & Steel and Fuji Iron & Steel — and the parent was dissolved into liquidation. The steel operations were divided between the Yawata works on one side and the Kamaishi, Wanishi, Hirohata and Fuji works on the other. Where the old company had been semi-public and in practice close to a government agency, the successors were ordinary private firms: roughly 22,000 shareholders for Yawata, 18,000 for Fuji. President Miki Takashi told employees at the dissolution that the two were brothers by blood who had not chosen to part, and asked that they compete fairly and sharpen one another. With Nippon Kokan, Kawasaki Steel, Sumitomo Metal Industries and Kobe Steel, they formed the “big six” that carried the postwar industry.

Both spent the 1950s and 1960s building. Yawata replaced worn-out plant, integrated the Tobata district, and opened new works in sequence — Hikari in 1955, Nagoya and Sakai in 1961, Kimitsu in 1965 — finishing Sakai in July 1967 with two of the world’s largest blast furnaces and capacity for 4.8 million tonnes a year. A 19-day strike at Yawata in 1957 that the company refused to settle on the union’s terms established the single-offer wage bargaining that followed. But the market did not keep pace with the plant. When prices collapsed in 1957–58, Inayama Yoshihiro went to the chairman of the Fair Trade Commission to argue for reviving, in substance, the prewar joint sales body; in June 1958 MITI’s market measures produced the open sales system, under which 32 makers published volumes and prices to their own distributors on the basis of ministry production directives — with no horizontal contact between them, and therefore, in the design, no antitrust violation.

The system’s limits showed in 1965. Through the income-doubling boom every maker had expanded at once, and because capacity arrives in lumps while demand grows gradually, the industry fell back into recession and cut output by up to 20%. MITI tried to stagger new blast furnaces by six months to a year; Hyūga Hōsai of Sumitomo Metal refused, saying firms invested at their own risk and he would not change his plan. The confrontation escalated until the ministry signalled that it would cut Sumitomo’s coking-coal import quota, and the company returned to the fold. Inayama drew a different conclusion: that administered coordination rested on a false equality. Yawata employed 100,000 people and was allowed one additional furnace — the same as a maker a fraction of its size. If the rules could not be beaten, the answer was to become large enough that the rules no longer bound. He later said the merger that created Nippon Steel was already germinating there.

Inayama and Nagano Shigeo of Fuji agreed on a merger in principle in 1966 and told the trade minister so in person. The news broke in April 1968, and the Fair Trade Commission opened its review within a fortnight. Opposition was serious: ninety academic economists published a joint objection arguing that competition, not scale, drove the efficient allocation of resources and the pace of innovation, and the Diet took the case up. The commission narrowed its objection to four products — rails, tinplate for cans, foundry pig iron and sheet piling — and in May 1969, days after the two presidents formally announced the merger, recommended abandoning it and opened hearings. Three of the four products came from the Kamaishi works, and Nagano would not agree to divest it. The settlement in October 1969 instead transferred rail rolling equipment to Nippon Kokan and one Yawata blast furnace to Kobe Steel.

On 31 March 1970 the two companies merged as Nippon Steel Corporation, with capital of $637.1M (¥229bn), 82,000 employees, 41.6 million tonnes of crude steel capacity and nine works. It passed U.S. Steel to become the largest steelmaker in the non-communist world, and with sales of $3.6B (¥1.3tn) it was the largest company in Japan. Scale did not translate into unity. Executives described the two cultures as water and oil — the old Yawata carrying a sense of national duty and personal obligation, the old Fuji a focus on cost and profit — and the decision to staff each line by alternating people from both sides, in the name of harmony and equality, produced meetings of thirty people that reached no conclusion and blunted what each side was good at. In May 1970 a data-entry error in the finance department left the month-end short by ¥8bn, and unifying the business plan produced a gap approaching ¥50bn, partly from a one-dollar difference in the assumed coking-coal price. Management judged that reorganizing would frighten staff, and chose consensus instead.

The merger did pay: about ¥5.8bn of rationalization gains in the first six months, coke consumption down from just under 500kg to just over 400kg per tonne, and enough authority that when Nippon Steel announced a 10% output cut in November 1970 the rest of the industry followed voluntarily. Oita opened in June 1971. But market share fell from 35% before the merger to 28%, and after the 1973 oil crisis the growth in steel demand simply stopped. From 1978 the company ran four successive rationalization plans over a decade, banking blast furnaces and shedding people, while looking outside steel for growth — an engineering division in 1974, new materials in 1984, electronics in 1986. The year to March 1987 brought an operating loss of ¥20bn. White-collar staff had aged from 34.3 to 43.7 years in a decade, and the fourth rationalization plan announced that February cut 19,000 jobs over four years and capacity from 34 to 24 million tonnes, lifting output per employee from 520 to 880 tonnes. President Takeda Yutaka avoided outright forced redundancy and refused to abandon Kamaishi and Muroran entirely. Alongside it, in April 1987, some 11,000 managers were moved onto merit pay — the first serious breach in the company’s seniority wage system.

The businesses built to replace steel never earned. An LSI division was set up in 1993 and a silicon wafer division in 1997, but all five integrated steelmakers lost money in electronics and semiconductors, and Nippon Steel’s ¥19.3bn deficit was the largest of them. Chisoku Akira, who became president in April 1998, sold the semiconductor subsidiary to Taiwan’s United Microelectronics group within months — for a little over ¥1.5bn, against the ¥35.5bn paid to acquire the operation from Minebea in 1993, after booking ¥115.2bn of exit losses the previous year. Semiconductors, he said, were a world far too distant from the rest of the company. The wafer division followed in 2004, closing a roughly twenty-year detour.

1998 was the low point in steel as well. National crude steel output fell 11.5% to 90.98 million tonnes, the weakest since 1971; Nippon Steel’s own output dropped 12.8% to 23.2 million tonnes, the lowest since the company was formed, and its share fell to 25.5% against 35.7% at the merger. The title of world’s largest producer passed to POSCO of South Korea, founded in 1968 — and by 1999 the two held 1% of each other’s shares. Retrenchment continued: twelve blast furnaces in 1987 became eight, a mid-term plan targeted ¥300bn of cost reduction and removed more than 13,000 people over five years at a cumulative special-retirement cost above ¥290bn, and the non-steel units were reorganized into separate companies — NS Solutions listed in 2002, engineering and materials spun off in 2006.

Then the industry consolidated over Nippon Steel’s head. In 2006 Mittal bought Arcelor to create a company three times its size, and hostile takeovers stopped being hypothetical. The response was to hedge in both directions at once: a memorandum of expanded cooperation with ArcelorMittal in July 2007, and three months later a tighter capital alliance at home with Sumitomo Metal Industries and Kobe Steel, including roughly ¥90bn invested in enlarging Sumitomo’s Wakayama blast furnace to secure semi-finished supply. On 3 February 2011 Nippon Steel and Sumitomo Metal announced a full integration — the alliance had turned into a merger.

On 1 October 2012 Nippon Steel absorbed Sumitomo Metal Industries at an exchange ratio of 0.735 and took the name Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal, the world’s second-largest producer of crude steel; the Fair Trade Commission cleared it subject to remedies in non-oriented electrical steel and high-pressure gas pipeline engineering. Domestic consolidation continued from there. In February 2016 the company moved on Nisshin Steel, Japan’s fourth-largest, via a ¥1,620-per-share tender offer of about ¥76bn — deliberately capped at 51% so the brand and listing could survive for a time — with full ownership following in January 2019. The pressure was external: China, half of world output, had domestic demand falling and was exporting the surplus cheaply enough to collapse Asian prices. Sweden’s Ovaco AB was bought for ¥51.7bn in 2018, Sanyo Special Steel came in early 2019, and in April 2019 the group renamed itself Nippon Steel Corporation.

The year to March 2020 produced an operating loss of ¥406.1bn and a net loss of ¥431.5bn. The underlying problem was structural rather than cyclical: domestic steel demand had shrunk from around 90 million tonnes a year in the 1990s to the 50-million range, and prices had already reached a reasonable level, leaving little room for profit growth at home. Nippon Steel Nisshin was absorbed in 2020, Nippon Steel Trading brought in as a subsidiary in 2023, and the former Nisshin works at Kure — acquired only a few years earlier — was closed that September. Even when results recovered to sales of $62.0B (¥6.81tn) and net income of ¥637.3bn in the year to March 2022, the direction of domestic capacity did not change.

On 18 December 2023 the company agreed to buy U.S. Steel at $55 a share, roughly ¥2tn and about a 40% premium. It insisted on full ownership because a majority stake would not justify transplanting technology such as electrical steel sheet without reservation, and it wanted production inside a market with a growing population, tariff protection and demand for high-grade steel. The United Steelworkers opposed the deal, an election year politicized it, and in January 2025 President Biden blocked it — whereupon Nippon Steel sued the U.S. government. The resolution came under the succeeding administration: approval in exchange for a golden share held by the U.S. government and about $11bn of investment by 2028, with roughly $14.1bn paid on 18 June 2025 to make U.S. Steel a wholly owned subsidiary. The market was less persuaded. The shares had traded below book value as a matter of course, at about 0.5 times by May 2025, and on 10 June Singapore’s 3D Investment Partners published a critique of the conglomerate discount and weak capital discipline and urged shareholders to vote against the president’s re-election. He was re-elected on 24 June with 87.11% support — some ten points below the other directors.