Company history

In May 1936 the wire-and-cable business of Tokyo Electric — today’s Toshiba — was separated out and incorporated in Kawasaki as Showa Electric Wire & Cable 昭和電線電纜, with capital of ¥1 million. Bare copper wire went into production in August 1937; power and communication cables followed in 1938, giving the new company an integrated cable line within two years. Through the Pacific War it turned mainly to military cable and, unusually, came through the air raids intact: Kigyō no rekishi: Meiji hyakunen (1968) records a moment just after the surrender when it was making roughly half of all cable produced in Japan.

The rebuild was fast. In April 1949 it opened a sales office in Osaka and branches in Sendai, Fukuoka and Nagoya to cover the country, and in May of the same year it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange; the special procurement boom of the Korean War then pushed output up again. But the shape of the company was already fixed by what the spin-off had not included. Furukawa Electric, Sumitomo Electric and Fujikura each stood on their own mines and copper mills, an integrated supply of the one raw material that dominates a cable maker’s costs; Showa had only the cable plants. It began, and would remain for seven decades, the industry’s fourth pole — never short of demand, never able to set its own prices.

Japan’s growth years were built on cable, and Showa built plants to match. The Sagamihara works opened in December 1961 for communication cable and later took on power cable as transmission voltages rose, becoming the main site for both. A Tokyo head office followed in 1967, and in May 1968 the first phase of the Mie plant began full production of magnet wire — a line handed over from Toshiba’s own Mie works, formalizing the division of labour inside the Toshiba group. The same year Kawasaki installed Japan’s first dip-forming copper rod line; sales for the year to April 1968 reached $60.8M (¥22bn). Sendai was added in 1972, and the company financed the expansion unusually early for its industry, issuing its first convertible bond in 1973, foreign-currency converts in 1979 and warrant bonds in 1988.

By 1990, when the Ebina works opened — later the base for optical-fibre and superconductivity research — the whole cable industry was pushing into optics and electronics with enough fervour that the press called it the “Showa restoration.” The 1992 plan was of a piece with that: move optical-fibre output from a saturated Sagamihara to Sendai and convert Sagamihara into a pure R&D site, set up an optical-LAN venture with six partners, build a new components plant in Aomori, and extend production into the United States, Europe and Southeast Asia. Murata Kaoru took over as president that year.

None of it changed the arithmetic. Through the post-bubble decade the industry faced shrinking demand and swinging copper prices, and Showa held revenue above ¥200 billion on margins that stayed thin. In July 2002 it transferred its power wire and cable business to Exsym — the symbolic restructuring of the period, and an early instance of the move it would keep making: give away the part you cannot earn on.

In April 2006 the company split itself up, moved to a pure holding structure and renamed itself Showa Holdings 昭和電線ホールディングス, with cable systems, device technology and business-solutions subsidiaries underneath. Tomii Toshio, the twelfth president, drove the reorganization, and the first year looked like vindication: consolidated sales of ¥209.1 billion in the year to March 2007. Then Lehman. Revenue fell to ¥184.9 billion for the year to March 2009 with an ordinary loss of ¥4.6 billion and a net loss of ¥8.5 billion, and the following year brought a second consecutive loss on sales of ¥141.4 billion. The equity ratio collapsed.

In May 2011, under Aihara Masanori, the company signed a business alliance with China’s Futong Group and issued shares to Futong’s Hong Kong arm — roughly $75.2M (¥6bn) of new capital that made a Chinese company its largest shareholder, seventy-five years after Toshiba had set it up. The money shored up the balance sheet; it did not fix the business, and the year to March 2013 produced another net loss of ¥6.4 billion. The remaining years went to tidying up what the holding structure had scattered: Exsym absorbed in 2015, the device and solutions companies folded in during 2017.

Nakajima Fumiaki became the fourteenth president in May 2016 and paired restructuring with growth fields — automotive, rail, roads, disaster resilience, medical — hitting the plan’s profit target two years early. Operating margins nonetheless stayed at a few per cent. The fourth pole’s real problem was not the plan but the premise underneath it, and that was left to his successor.

Hasegawa Takayo took the presidency in June 2018: a researcher who had joined in 1984 out of a master’s in applied chemistry at Niigata University and come up through superconductivity development — the industry’s first female chief executive, and its first from the laboratory. She inherited an equity ratio of 26.6%, a debt-to-equity ratio of 1.5 times, and a culture she named as the deeper problem: as long as a business was in the black, it was left alone. In 2019 she made ROIC the primary metric for every segment, so that a business earning a profit but not covering its cost of capital became a candidate for exit. The sharpest application was the founding trade itself — commodity cable sales were merged with those of arch-rival Furukawa Electric into a joint venture, SFCC. Up to twenty-five subsidiaries were consolidated, copper wire production moved from Sendai to Ibaraki, AI demand forecasting went into production planning, and what was freed up went to high-function cable for renewables, electric vehicles and data centres. ROIC rose from 5.6% to 12.3%.

The numbers turned hard. Sales of ¥168.1 billion with operating profit of ¥6.2 billion and net profit of ¥3.7 billion for the year to March 2018 became ¥213.9 billion, ¥12.8 billion and ¥8.8 billion by March 2024 — revenue up 27%, operating profit roughly doubled, net profit up about 2.4 times — with the equity ratio back near 47%. A share worth $7 (¥791) when Hasegawa took over rose more than tenfold, and market capitalization went from around ¥21 billion to roughly ¥200 billion. In April 2023 the company dropped both halves of its identity, replacing Showa Holdings with SWCC, unwinding the seventeen-year holding structure at the same time and putting governance, a segment system and ROIC forward as the three pillars of the change.

The second act is growth rather than repair. In March 2025 SWCC acquired TOTOKU, a maker of optical fibre and specialty wire, for about $96.2M (¥14bn), thickening capacity for data-centre cable; in April, Hasegawa moved to representative chairman and Komata Tetsuo — a 1989 entrant from optical communication devices, corporate planning and strategy — became the sixteenth president and CEO. The medium-term operating profit target was raised from ¥17 billion to ¥24 billion and the dividend to ¥180. A March 2026 briefing set out the next plan, Transformation for Growth SWCC 2030, upgrading “ROIC management 1.0” to a 2.0 that weighs cash flow and growth together: operating profit above ¥40 billion on organic growth alone, a margin above 12%, ROIC above 15%, and a ¥2 billion investment to multiply e-Ribbon optical fibre capacity sevenfold. Ninety years after being cut out of Toshiba to make cable, the company runs legacy power and communications alongside renewables and data centres — and no longer calls itself a cable maker.