Buying Nippon Seido and starting copper wire (1897)

What was bought was not a company but a destination for copper

Sumitomo already held the raw material in the Besshi mine, and had already paid for the consequences of smelting it — the enormous investment of moving the Niihama smelter out to Shisakajima to deal with its fumes. The only thing missing was the process that turned mined and refined copper into products at home. What it obtained by taking over Nippon Seido in 1897 — a firm founded in 1895 and already in trouble — can be read not as a company with rolling equipment and skilled workers, but as a destination for Besshi copper.

It would be going too far, though, to say that Sumitomo in 1897 could see a cable company ahead. What began that year was bare copper wire as one item within rolled-copper goods; higher-grade products such as cable went on being imported for years afterwards. Wire would not be separated out as its own works until 1911, fourteen years later. The value of placing fabrication next to material may have been visible to no one at the moment it was placed. The decision to pull the process one step closer through an acquisition simply left room for the next business to grow.