Merging Oheyama Nickel: owning the raw material (1943)

Not giving up on poor ore made eighty years of difference

The 1943 merger itself looks, on paper, like a modest piece of administration: a mine and a smelter the company had already opened, brought inside the parent along with their corporate shell. The weight of the decision sits in the years before it. Facing low-grade siliceous ore, the company chose not to return to imports but to take a direct-reduction method born in Germany for ironmaking and apply it elsewhere, running on its own a furnace no one else used. That was the wager. The merger amounts to a declaration that the wager would be carried permanently, as plant.

The burden on the side that took it on was not small either. Smelting with rotary kilns alone had no parallel anywhere in the world, so both the technology and the people had to be handed down in-house, and when prices fall it is the upstream that bleeds first. Even so — through the wartime halt in 1945, the switch of raw material in 1952, the separation in 1975 and the re-merger in 1983, the spin-off in 2003 and the reintegration in 2010 — the one thing that never narrowed was the range from ore to product. The mine mouth of 1934, whose ore travelled out on the Kaya railway, is closed; the ore that enters the Oheyama works today arrives in Miyazu Bay from New Caledonia.