Company history

Fujita Denzaburo formally established Fujita-gumi in 1881 with capital put up by three brothers, and in 1884 took the state-run Kosaka mine off the Meiji government, borrowing ¥200,000 from the Mori family — the former lords of Choshu — to fund it. Kosaka produced 黒鉱, “black ore”: gold, silver, copper, zinc and lead grown together in a single body. No one else would take it on because no one could separate it, and that was precisely the attraction — whoever cracked the metallurgy would hold a deposit nobody could compete for.

Ten years on there was still no working process and still no profit. The Mori family, as lender, ordered Kosaka closed. Kuhara Fusanosuke, sent up to wind the mine down, argued instead that it had to keep running, and with the personal backing of Inoue Kaoru got the closure order reversed. In 1902 the self-fluxing black-ore smelting process was finally completed; by 1906 Kosaka was the largest-producing mine in Japan. A firm that had survived by out-engineering a problem rather than by retreating from it kept that story as its founding lesson.

Anticipating the decline of Kosaka’s grades, Fujita-gumi bought outward. The Hanaoka mine in Akita, acquired in 1915, hit falling grades almost immediately, then in 1916 the Doyashiki orebody was found and Hanaoka became the second pillar; the same year eleven small mines in Okayama were consolidated into Yanahara, a steady source of sulphide ore. Deliberately mixing non-ferrous with sulphide, and Akita with Okayama, the company spread itself across both ore type and geography — more than thirty mines opened or bought — and was counted among Japan’s four great copper producers. The mining arm was separated as Fujita Mining in 1917, reorganized as Fujita Gumi Co., Ltd. in March 1937, and in May 1942 took capital from two wartime national-policy companies; in 1945 it was renamed Dowa Mining, and in 1949 listed in Tokyo.

The 1971 Nixon shock and the rapid appreciation of the yen arrived at the same moment as the collapse of sulphide-ore economics, and every domestic mine the company held came under pressure at once. A workforce of some 10,000 in the 1970s was cut to around 3,000 by the 1990s, while property and other fixed assets were sold to keep earnings on the page. The last domestic mining ended in 1994 — but by holding mines that long, the company kept its metallurgical staff and know-how from dispersing, which turned out to matter more than the ore.

In parallel it planted what it would later live on. Electronic materials began in 1965; environmental recycling in 1977, in the same December as an emergency committee was convened on the crisis in mining; a semiconductor materials laboratory followed in 1982, the Kosaka smelter was spun out as Kosaka Smelting in 1989, and a ceramic-substrate plant opened at Shiojiri in 1992. The 1971 decision to build a coastal zinc smelter at Akita, fed by purchased concentrate rather than the company’s own ore, belonged to the same movement: the feedstock no longer had to come out of the ground the company owned.

What the seeds did not get was resource or resolve. Through the 1990s, exits from loss-making businesses were deferred and profits were manufactured out of disposals, and the very cushion that a century of land and mineral rights provided is what let the decline run for three decades without a reckoning. A firm with that much to sell could postpone the question of whether its operating businesses actually earned anything.

Reform was announced at the end of 1999, driven by a ten-person team under Yoshikawa Hirokazu, then executive vice-president. Nine in ten of the company were against it; Yoshikawa later described the Dowa Mining of that moment as a textbook mature firm resting on its history. His predecessor, Kanaya Koichiro, named him successor in the teeth of that opposition, which was the only way the plan could survive. By February 2000, 322 employees had taken voluntary retirement; sales fell and results worsened for two straight years before profit turned up in the third — and that evidence, more than any argument, put Yoshikawa in the presidency in April 2002.

Once there, he applied three tests to every business: does the market have a future, can we compete in it, and do our people want to do it. Eighteen businesses failed one of the three and were closed, dissolved or sold — 70% of them profitable at the time. What was kept was pushed into niches where it could hold a leading share, an arrangement Yoshikawa called 雑木林経営, “coppice management”: not one great trunk but many independent trees, each strong in its own patch, their cycles offsetting one another. Fifteen businesses ended up holding top share.

Environmental recycling became the core of that coppice. A controlled final-disposal site was built at Kosaka in 2004 and a new recycling-capable furnace, at about $86M (¥10bn), in 2006; surplus assets were sold in bulk and interest-bearing debt cut. In 2006 the company took the name DOWA Holdings and split into five operating companies under a holding structure. In the year ended March 2007 it posted net profit of $223.3M (¥26bn) — its highest ever.

The recycling business grew by purchase and extension — Yamaha Metanix in 2007, zinc recycling in earnest from 2008 — and although the Lehman shock pushed the group to a loss in the year ended March 2009, the earnings base built in the reform pulled it back quickly. The transformation was not instant, though: the urban-mine furnace ran at roughly 60% against a plan of 71.8% in fiscal 2009, and small consumer electronics would not come in because waste-disposal law stood in the way. The organizational form had been settled years before the economics caught up with it.

Abroad, the company kept a two-mine position in zinc — Tizapa in Mexico from 1994, Los Gatos from 2019 — and in 2023 began environmental and recycling operations in Indonesia, exporting the technology it had spent decades building at home. The historic run-up in metal prices carried it to another record in the year ended March 2022.

The latest turn reverses the oldest habit. A company that had spread itself across ore types and prefectures to blend out the cycle is now concentrating capital on one place: Akita Zinc was taken to full ownership in 2024, three zinc-related companies were absorbed in April 2025 to run smelting as a single operation, and the Medium-term Plan 2027 announced in May 2025 commits on the order of $668.2M (¥100bn) through fiscal 2030 to rebuilding a combined smelting-and-recycling complex there — funded by halving the group’s listed equity holdings by fiscal 2030. The wager is that widening the range of elements recovered and of recyclable feedstock, with smelting and recycling run as one, makes a single site enough.