Company history

The company was founded in Tokyo in August 1925 as Chuo Rika Kogyo, a small chemical firm backed by the Hattori watch house, making fire extinguishers. The market was too narrow to grow in, and in September 1928 it renamed itself Nippon Kako and moved into explosives and pyrotechnics — a bid for survival, as Japan slid from its own financial crisis into the world depression, by attaching itself to military demand.

The second pivot, in February 1936, made the company what it is. A works opened at Daishigawara in Kawasaki to make special steels, light alloys and stainless steel, with capital of ¥2 million. Japan’s heavy-industry build-up had created demand for special steels for warships, aircraft and weapons, and what carried over from the explosives business was not a product but a discipline: the control of high temperature and violent reaction, transferred from powder to furnaces. Presses and rolling equipment were added in 1938 and light-alloy capacity in 1939. Eleven years after starting out in fire extinguishers, the firm was a steelmaker — and the Kawasaki works it built then has been running for some ninety years since.

The wartime years bought it three things in eighteen months. In June 1942 it listed on the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges; that September it took the name Nippon Yakin Kogyo — yakin meaning metallurgy — and sold the explosives division to Showa Kayaku in the same month, cutting its founding trade loose to concentrate on steel. Then came the raw material. It had been smelting nickel-bearing pig iron from the low-grade siliceous ore of Oheyama in Kyoto since 1939, at first in a rotary kiln borrowed from a cement maker, and succeeded in making N-K steel from it in 1941. In December 1943 it merged Oheyama Nickel Kogyo outright, taking in ore mining and ferronickel smelting — an ore-to-product chain almost unheard of in the Japanese stainless industry, and the source of its advantage ever since.

War damage was comparatively light and production restarted early, but with no ore the business went nowhere. The turn came in August 1952, when the Oheyama works resumed making nickel-bearing pig iron from imported ore — the same process, fed from abroad. Around the parent, a group took shape over a decade with each function in its own company: a machinery maker in 1948, a precision wire company in 1953, and a trading house in 1954.

From 1959 the company built a new plant on 397,000 square metres of reclaimed land beside the Kawasaki works, and equipped it for volume. Sendzimir cold mills followed in sequence — for plate in 1959, for sheet in 1960, a second sheet mill in 1964 — aimed at the appliance, automotive and building demand of the growth years. Continuous casting in 1965 replaced ingot casting and lifted yield; a planetary hot mill came in 1966 and a 60-ton electric furnace in 1968. By then annual sales were above ¥30 billion, a quarter of it exported.

The decisive piece of equipment arrived in September 1977: a 60-ton argon-oxygen decarburization vessel at Kawasaki, then the leading refining technology for stainless. AOD made stable volume production of low-carbon stainless and high-purity nickel-base alloys possible, and with it the corrosion-resistant applications that would define the company — semiconductor production equipment, nuclear plant, LNG. Two years earlier the ferronickel smelting division had been split out into a separate company, an attempt to give the upstream its own balance sheet.

In October 1983 the company merged the ferronickel smelter back in as the Oheyama works, eight years after separating it. Folding the upstream into the parent’s own accounts made investment decisions faster, and restored the single chain from ore to sheet. The modernisation of Kawasaki’s cold-rolling line was completed in June 1989, at the top of the bubble.

Through the 1990s the plant renewed its own generation. A compact hot mill of the company’s own design started in April 1996, cutting space and energy while raising quality, and completing the cycle of replacement that had begun with AOD twenty years earlier. Certification followed the same logic: ISO 9002 for cold-rolled products in 1996 and ISO 14001 in 1999, because overseas buyers of high-specification material had begun to treat third-party audit as a condition of trade rather than a courtesy.

What the company gave up in these years is as telling as what it built. In September 1999 it closed the Kanazawa plant and left stainless castings after forty-three years — a business where volume economics never worked and which turned into a drag whenever the market softened. In August 2001 it shut Namegawa Island, a leisure park in Chiba that a steelmaker had somehow acquired during the high-growth years. The integrated chain from ore to rolled sheet was kept intact; almost everything that sat outside it was let go.

In April 2003 the two works were turned into separate companies, YAKIN Kawasaki and YAKIN Oheyama, each with its own president and its own profit and loss. Neither could be sold or closed, so the only remaining lever was to make somebody answerable for their costs and their capital. The refining line kept advancing regardless — an argon-vacuum vessel started at Kawasaki in December 2007, extending AOD toward the purities that nickel-base alloys for semiconductor equipment demand. Then, in April 2010, after a year that closed with a net loss of ¥12.6 billion, the parent absorbed both companies again. Seven years of separation ended in the quietest procedure available, and Kawasaki and Oheyama went back to being works of one company, as they had been since 1943.

The early 2010s exposed what the company still was. Sales of ¥134.8 billion in the year to March 2012 yielded ordinary profit of only ¥1.3 billion; the following year brought an ordinary loss of ¥6.4 billion and a net loss of ¥7.3 billion, as currency, raw material prices and weak domestic demand hit together. Dependence on commodity-grade stainless was the vulnerability, and for several years afterwards revenue moved sideways between ¥120 and ¥140 billion on thin profits.

The shift showed up from the year to March 2019, when raising the share of nickel-base and other high-function alloys, together with better pricing, doubled ordinary profit to ¥8.2 billion under Kubota Takashi, president from June 2018. Rising global nickel and stainless prices then did the rest: the year to March 2023 brought record results — ¥199.3 billion of sales and ¥27.7 billion of ordinary profit — with integration paying off exactly as designed, since a producer of its own raw material passes through a price rise more easily than one that buys it. In January 2022 a high-efficiency electric furnace started at Kawasaki, the first real replacement since 1968 and the core of the company’s decarbonisation, and a new cold mill followed in December 2024, the first since 1989. Under Urata Naruki, president from June 2023, profits have receded from the peak for two years running — but the company now earns through a soft market instead of falling into loss, which is the difference between 2025 and 2013.