Nadahama, Amagasaki Steel and the Kakogawa works (1965)

A purchase that spent its own agility

In a 1964 lecture, managing director Minato Shizuo answered that “setting the future aside, up to now we have had no need of it, so we feel no delay” — and in the same session said the time was about right to merge with Amagasaki Steel. He would not concede that lacking a hot strip mill was a weakness, yet he was already arranging to bring his pig-iron supplier in-house. For a company that held 40% of the country’s special wire rod and earned its living from welding consumables and machinery, having no blast furnace was a weakness and, at the same time, an agility — capital that did not have to sit idle.

Kakogawa was the purchase that spent that agility. Enormous sums went in from the 1968 reclamation through the second furnace in 1973, with a further several hundred billion yen budgeted for the third phase, and completion coincided with the oil shock — executive director Inoue Kozaburo spoke of the third phase amid a crisis without precedent in the postwar era. Even so, owning a mill in Harima that could make sheet is what left room, in the 2010s, to fold up the furnace at Kobe. Whether an investment was right can only be judged not by what happens just after start-up, but by what it leaves behind.