Winding down Kamioka in stages and pivoting to copper foil and TAB (2001)

How a resource company folded its founding business

Read as the tidying-away of a declining resource business, the core of this transition stays hidden. Mitsui Kinzoku could gain a foothold in electronic materials because the electrolytic process by which it refined copper overlapped almost exactly with the process for making electrodeposited copper foil. What it let go was the upstream — extraction from its own mountain — not the technology of handling metal by electricity. Folding a mine of some 130 years while transferring the metallurgy honed there onto downstream components is what marks this decision out from a simple withdrawal.

That said, the pivot can be called a success only because ultra-thin copper foil went on to take about 90% of the world market. The contraction of Kamioka took twenty-three years, from 1978 to 2001, and results sank into the red repeatedly along the way. Even after the axis had moved to electronic materials, the crash in metal prices produced a $718.5M (¥67bn) loss in the year to March 2009; the constitution of a resource company was not easily shed. When, and how fast, to fold the founding business, and how to carry the technology it earned across to the next pillar — Mitsui Kinzoku’s twenty-three years can be read as one long answer to that question.