Kubota Iron Works 久保田鉄工所 (1890–1953) · Kubota Tekko 久保田鉄工 (1953–90)
Revenue · FYE Mar 2025
$20.2B (¥3.02tn)
Net profit · FYE Mar 2025
$1.2B (¥187bn)
Kubota: long-term performance & turning pointsSales (revenue) and profit-margin ratio
Sales (¥ bn)Net margin (%)
1890A foundryman takes on cast iron pipe, then widens into machinery
1890Kubota Gonshiro founds Kubota Iron Works in Osaka
1893Manufacture of cast iron pipe for waterworks begins
1900The marubuki tatekomi vertical casting process is devised
1901The Funayama-cho works is built for pipe and machinery
1908A rotary casting process for cast iron pipe is patented
1914A machine shop at Funade-cho begins marine machinery
1917Kansai Iron Works acquired as the Amagasaki plant; entry into machine tools
1919Jitsuyo Jidosha Seizo founded; a brief entry into motor vehicles
1922Manufacture of small engines for farm and industrial use begins
1924Patent for an automatic moulding machine, after the core-making machine of 1923
1927Sumidagawa Seitetsujo acquired; diesel and marine engines taken up
Kubota began in 1890 as a one-man foundry in Osaka and made its name on a job the country had written off — casting water pipe in Japan instead of importing it. The seven years it took to reach a process fit for volume set the company's working habit: learn a hard technique in-house, patent it, then build the machines that use it, until a single pipe shop was carrying four product groups and had outgrown the man who owned it.
The founding years, aimed squarely at cast iron pipe for waterworks
In February 1890 Kubota Gonshiro (久保田権四郎) founded Kubota Iron Works (久保田鉄工所) at Mikuratoato-cho, Minami-ku, Osaka, and began making and selling castings of every kind. It started as a town workshop under sole proprietorship, and Gonshiro was both its founder and its first president. Three years later, in July 1893, it took up the manufacture of cast iron pipe for waterworks. What it made in these founding years was castings of various sorts, chiefly cast iron pipe for water and gas. Casting pipe was not easy, however, and a further seven years passed from that start before a technique fit for volume production was established.
The barrier to volume was broken by a refinement of the casting method: in 1900 he devised the marubuki tatekomi vertical casting process (丸吹立込鋳造法) and put it into practice. The following year, 1901, the Funayama-cho works was built and began making and selling cast iron pipe and machinery of various kinds. In 1908 he went on to devise a rotary casting process for cast iron pipe and obtained a patent on it, settling into a pattern of assembling casting techniques in-house and fencing them in with patents. Holding both the plants and the techniques, cast iron pipe settled in as the pillar of Kubota Iron Works.
The Taisho years, widening from castings into machinery
As the casting business grew, Gonshiro turned to the machining of what it cast, and in 1914 he added a machine shop at the Funade-cho works and began building marine machinery such as steam engines. In 1916 the range widened to machine tools, economisers, stokers, sluice valves and general machinery, and in 1918 to moulds. Rather than merely selling castings, the company set itself up to build the machines that used them, and through the Taisho years the work of grafting a second pillar, machinery, onto the single pillar of cast iron pipe went forward.
As demand for cast iron pipe and castings rose, the company bought the means of production outright: in 1917 it acquired Kansai Iron Works (関西鉄工所), made it the Amagasaki plant, and moved the cast iron pipe division of the Funade-cho works there. Alongside it built the Okajima plant (恩加島) for fittings, and the Ichioka plant for drainage pipe, fittings and general castings. In February 1922 it took up the manufacture of small engines for farm and industrial use, and in the same year began casting heat-, acid- and alkali-resistant castings, gunmetal and light alloys. The engine business that would later grow into farm machinery began in that year. In November 1919 it also set up Jitsuyo Jidosha Seizo and tried its hand at building three- and four-wheeled vehicles, but that venture found no market and was withdrawn.
Casting technology fenced in by patents, and the purchase of Sumidagawa Seitetsujo
The accumulated casting knowledge showed itself at the end of the Taisho era in two patents: an automatic core-making machine in 1923 and an automatic moulding machine in 1924. Both replaced hand work with machinery, and with these two the volume production of cast iron pipe advanced a stage. In 1924, in step with the revision of the Weights and Measures Law, the Funade-cho works also began making weighing machines. The casting techniques and the machines that supported them were now both held in-house.
Additions to plant continued: in February 1927 the company bought Sumidagawa Seitetsujo Ltd. (隅田川精鉄所) and expanded the cast iron pipe business. In that same year, 1927, it also took up automatic stokers, diesel engines and small marine engines. In under forty years from its founding, Kubota Iron Works had reached a size carrying four product groups — cast iron pipe, castings, machinery and engines. A town workshop under sole proprietorship could no longer contain that spread.
1930Incorporation as two companies, and the power tiller that sprouted after the war
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY1953 · unconsolidated
Revenue$23M
Net income—
Net margin—
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FY1959 · unconsolidated
Revenue$66M
Net income—
Net margin—
1930Kubota Iron Works incorporates, split into a castings company and a machinery company
1937The two are merged again; the Sakai plant begins mass production of engines
1938Sumidagawa Seitetsujo merged in as the Sumidagawa plant
1940Mukogawa plant built; centrifugally cast iron pipe from October 1941
1943Kanzaki plant established in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture
1947Power tiller production begins — the start of farm machinery
1949Shares listed on the Tokyo and Osaka Stock Exchanges
1950Odawara Taizo becomes president; a divisional structure by product is adopted
1953The company name is changed to Kubota Tekko
1954Asbestos pipe and vinyl pipe production begins; a vinyl pipe plant is built
1957Kubota Kenzai Kogyo founded; entry into housing materials
1959Founder Kubota Gonshiro dies; spiral steel pipe production begins
The 1930s split the firm in two and then put it back together, and the approach of war filled Osaka and Amagasaki with new plants — among them the Kanzaki works whose asbestos would return sixty years later. What sprouted after the defeat was smaller and more consequential: a power tiller, taken up in 1947, that turned an engine supplier into a maker of the machines farmers themselves used. Sales were $22.7M (¥8bn) in 1953, the first year in the record, and $65.6M (¥24bn) by 1959.
Incorporation, splitting castings and machinery into two companies
In December 1930 Kubota Iron Works took corporate form by splitting into two joint-stock companies. One was Kubota Iron Works Ltd., capitalised at ¥4.5 million, making chiefly cast iron pipe for water and gas and castings of all kinds; the other was Kubota Iron Works Machinery Division Ltd. (久保田鉄工所機械部), capitalised at ¥2.5 million, making internal-combustion engines, land and marine machinery, machinery for iron- and steel-making, sluice valves, weighing machines and machine tools. The two lineages, castings and machinery, were split into two companies as they stood. In the same year, 1930, the company mark was redrawn as well: the circle-and-cast-iron-pipe design adopted in 1925 had its circle replaced by a gearwheel. It was a rewriting of the sign, from the Kubota of castings to the Kubota of castings and machinery.
The two-company structure was folded up after seven years: in March 1937 Kubota Iron Works Machinery Division Ltd. was merged into Kubota Iron Works Ltd. In September of that year the company bought Daido Iron Works (大同鉄工所) and made it a steel-casting plant, and in November it built the Sakai plant and began mass production of engines for farm and industrial use, installing new machinery imported from Europe and the United States. In August 1938 Sumidagawa Seitetsujo was merged in as the Sumidagawa plant, taken into the organisation eleven years after its purchase in 1927.
Production sites went on spreading as war approached: in October 1940 the Mukogawa plant was built to expand the industrial machinery business, and from October of the following year it began casting centrifugally cast iron pipe. In March 1943 the Kanzaki plant was established, and in the same month the company entered the casting of special cast-steel products and high-silicon cast iron. In July 1945 the Fuse plant was added. Of these, the Kanzaki plant in Amagasaki, Hyogo Prefecture, would become the scene, more than sixty years later, of the asbestos damage that shook the company's management.
Post-war farm machinery, which began with the power tiller
In March 1946, the year after the defeat, the company began making sawmill machinery and machinery for mining, and in 1947 it took up the power tiller. The farm machinery division that would later account for four-tenths of sales began with that tiller. Using as the power source the small farm and industrial engines it had started in 1922, Kubota crossed over to making the machines the farmer himself used. In May 1949 it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Osaka Stock Exchange, and in August 1950 it adopted a divisional structure by product, putting in a mechanism that closed the books on profit and loss product by product.
The post-war product range thickened around cast iron pipe as well: in July 1950 came metal-mould centrifugally cast iron pipe, in 1951 chrome cast iron pipe and cement-lined pipe together with civil-engineering and construction plant of various kinds, and in 1952 cast steel pipe and pumps. In December 1952 the Mukogawa machinery works began making pumps. From a company that made the pipes of a waterworks, the range widened to one that handled the equipment moving the water as well.
A change of name, and the start of asbestos pipe production
In June 1953 the company changed its name to Kubota Tekko Ltd. (久保田鉄工). The following year, 1954, it began making asbestos pipe and vinyl pipe, and in April of that year it built a vinyl pipe plant and entered full production of synthetic-resin pipe. Asbestos-bearing water pipe was a piping material in wide use at the time, and it is from this year, 1954, that the handling of asbestos began — the asbestos later called to account as damage in the neighbourhood of the old Kanzaki plant.
In the second half of the 1950s the range stretched further into housing materials and steel pipe: in April 1956 into mobile cranes and materials-handling machinery, and in November 1957 into housing materials with the establishment of Kubota Kenzai Kogyo Ltd. (久保田建材工業). In December 1959 it began making spiral steel pipe and built the Ohama plant in the same month. The skeleton of four divisions — cast iron pipe, farm machinery, general machinery and castings — was largely in place by this time. Of the four, the one that would step into the leading role over the next decade was farm machinery.
1960Two decades that made farm machinery the mainstay and carried it to North America
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY1960 · unconsolidated
Revenue$92M
Net income—
Net margin—
→
FY1984 · unconsolidated
Revenue$2.4B
Net income$55M
Net margin2.3%
1960The T15, a wholly domestic mid-size tractor, goes on sale
1961Entry into the environment business
1962Volume production established for industrial machinery and cast steel products
1966The HC75 three-row binder with automatic tying is launched
1967Annual sales pass ¥100bn; full entry into housing materials
1969Utsunomiya plant brings rice transplanters and binders to volume production
1972Kubota Tractor Corp. established in the United States
1974Europe Kubota Tractor Sales founded in France
1975Tsukuba plant built as a dedicated works for farm tractors
1976Shares listed on the New York Stock Exchange (delisted July 2013)
1980Kashima plant built for exterior wall materials
1985Sakai Rinkai plant built for engines
The T15 tractor of 1960 moved Kubota from selling power to selling complete machines, and within five years farm machinery had passed cast iron pipe as its largest division. When the acreage-reduction policy stalled that market at home from 1971, the company did not add a business — it changed the country it sold in, carrying a 25–30 horsepower paddy-field tractor to North America in 1972 and finding, beneath the American giants, the market it had not been able to plan for.
From an extension of the power tiller to a system of complete machines
In 1960 Kubota Tekko put out the T15, a 15-horsepower tractor of wholly domestic make. Until then its farm machinery had been an extension of the farm engine and the power tiller, and had not left the business of selling power. The T15 was a shift that placed a complete machine, the ride-on tractor, at the centre of the range. The wind was behind it: the Agricultural Basic Law of 1961 and the structural improvement programme that followed pushed land improvement and the introduction of high-performance farm machinery forward as one. The power tiller, meanwhile, reached two million units in use nationwide in 1963 — one machine for every three of just under six million farm households — and the end of its diffusion was coming into view.
Farm machinery at the time was a growing market and a brutal one at once. By 1964 competition in the industry was fierce in the extreme; over those two or three years many makers had poor results and fell to paying no dividend, and some went out of business or failed outright. Kubota Tekko's divisional mix in the term to October 1963 was farm machinery 40.4 per cent, pipe 31.8 per cent, general machinery 14.7 per cent and castings 13.1 per cent — farm machinery the largest division. Sales for the term to April 1964 were $95.8M (¥35bn), expected to be 7 per cent up on the previous term. Hiro Keitaro (広慶太郎), senior managing director, took the view that pipe and castings would grow in weight in future while farm machinery and general machinery fell back.
The product range spread across the whole cycle of rice growing: in autumn 1966 the HC75 three-row binder with automatic tying, and in 1968 the SP soil-block rice transplanter using the baramaki scattered-seed nursery method (ばらまき育苗). In May 1969 the Utsunomiya plant was built, moving transplanters and binders to volume production. A structure for looking after machines after the sale was laid down as well, with technical training required of the engineers at some 2,000 dealers nationwide. A company that had supplied only the power source had turned into one that carried the machines for everything from tilling to harvest, and their repair besides. Farm machinery overtook the founding business in this period too: in the second half of 1965 it accounted for 34.2 per cent of company-wide shipments, passing the pipe division's 32.9 per cent for the first time. Shipments went on rising, and in fiscal 1969 exceeded $194.4M (¥70bn).
Reaching ¥100bn, and the headwind of acreage reduction
In fiscal 1967 annual sales passed ¥100 billion for the first time — $131.9M (¥48bn) in the term to April 1967 together with $152.5M (¥55bn) in the term to October. The divisional mix was pipe 37 per cent, farm machinery 28 per cent, and castings and general machinery 17–18 per cent each; the two divisions of pipe and farm machinery alone made up 65 per cent. Hiro Keitaro said it was no exaggeration that the company's results were decided by the movement of those two. Cast iron pipe held 65 per cent of an annual demand of 530,000–550,000 tonnes, and the fact that piped water reached 70 per cent of the country against 90 per cent in Europe and America was the room this division had to grow. Company-wide sales for the term to April 1968 were $175.6M (¥63bn), capital $81.4M (¥29bn), and employees numbered 13,698; a regular on the National Tax Agency's published list of the fifty largest declared incomes, the company stood 31st in 1967 with $29.3M (¥11bn).
Farm machinery, which had grown without a break, met a headwind entering the 1970s: the production controls that began in earnest in fiscal 1971 against a background of surplus rice stocks shrank demand for farm machines. The slump was such that the phrase “getting out of farm machinery” went round the industry, and one maker went bankrupt. Rice output, on an index of 100 for 1965, peaked at 116 in 1969 and then fell; 1971 was down 5 per cent on the year before and 7.1 per cent on the year before that. Gross agricultural output in 1971 was down about 5 per cent year on year, and agricultural production income about 7.5 per cent.
Hiro Keitaro said he was not thinking of getting out of farm machinery but of how it might be a growth industry. What he saw supporting it was the purchasing power of farm households. Farm production was falling while farm household income rose: income per household in fiscal 1971 was $4,203 (¥2m), of which $1,294 (¥466,000) was farm income against $2,908 (¥1m) earned outside farming. Part-time farm households reached about 90 per cent, and wages from seasonal work away from home supported the buying of machines. In addition the farming workforce fell from 8.78 million, 17.4 per cent of total employment, in fiscal 1965 to around 16 per cent in fiscal 1971, so that the need for labour-saving machinery grew stronger rather than weaker.
Exports to North America, and management by pruning branches
In September 1972 Kubota Tractor Corp. was established in the United States. What was mainly produced in America were large machines of 60–100 horsepower; what the company brought in were the small and medium machines of 25–30 horsepower built for Japan's paddy fields. It was an entry that avoided the market for large machines and stepped outside head-on competition. In March 1974 it set up Europe Kubota Tractor Sales (ヨーロッパクボタトラクタ販売) in France and widened into western Europe. At home, production could not keep up with orders: as of 1974 tractor output of 7,000 units a month was not enough, and the rate had urgently to be lifted to 10,000.
To meet the rising orders, in August 1975 the company built the Tsukuba plant as a dedicated volume works for farm tractors. In November 1976 it listed its shares on the New York Stock Exchange. Market shares as of October 1974 were 65 per cent in cast iron pipe and, in farm machinery, 52–53 per cent in tractors and about 20 per cent in power tillers — an average of 40–42 per cent across machine types, and first place in the industry. Sales were $628M (¥184bn) in the term to April 1974, around $750.9M (¥220bn) in the term to October, and $836.1M (¥250bn) expected in the term to April 1975. How it widened abroad was divided by country: local subsidiaries in Taiwan, Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia and Iran; technical tie-ups in South Vietnam and Burma; a sales tie-up in the Philippines. Into advanced countries it carried finished goods; in developing countries it set up local companies to absorb labour and moved step by step from parts supply to local production.
While the business widened, president Hiro Keitaro had his doubts about diversification itself. In the high-growth years demand had followed whatever one did, he thought, but once low growth set in the same things would become a burden. Branches that have stretched too far and leaves that have grown too thick have to be cut. Leave them alone and it is not only the branches and the leaves that fall, but the thick trunk with them. On that view he held that the most important work of the man at the top was to judge the growth prospects of each division and not to err in the timing of the cut. The company raised six divisions while cutting away a good deal of what it did not need. Building the Kashima plant for exterior wall materials in April 1980 and the Sakai Rinkai plant for engines in January 1985 was investment narrowed to the divisions it meant to grow.
1990Diversification by parachute, the asbestos disclosure, and the tilt to farm machinery abroad
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY1992 · consolidated
Revenue$7.2B
Net income$33M
Net margin0.5%
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FY2025 · consolidated
Revenue$20.2B
Net income$1.2B
Net margin6.2%
1990The company name is changed to Kubota Corporation
1994Subsidiaries are dissolved
1999A water-pipe cartel of some thirty years comes to light; voluntary redundancies solicited
2003Non-core businesses are separated and cut back
2005Kubota-CI formed with CI Kasei for synthetic-resin pipe
2005Asbestos at the old Kanzaki plant becomes a public issue
2007On-site inspections follow one after another; Siam Kubota Tractor founded
2009Masumoto Yasuo becomes president, the first engineer in forty-two years
2012Kverneland ASA of Norway acquired
2016Great Plains Manufacturing acquired
2019The overhaul of the core IT systems begins
2022Escorts of India acquired; the Global Technology Research Centre opens
The change of name to Kubota Corporation in 1990 came with a bet: parachute into businesses the company knew nothing about, computers above all, rather than widen around two mature pillars. The computer venture was written off, and the decades that followed forced two older reckonings into the open — a thirty-year cast iron pipe cartel and the asbestos deaths at the old Kanzaki plant — while the growth Kubota did find came from buying its way into large farm machinery abroad, from $690.6M (¥100bn)-scale ambitions to sales of $20.2B (¥3.02tn) in 2025.
The turn to “parachute” diversification
In April 1990 the company changed its name to Kubota Corporation. With it, president Mino Shigekazu (三野重和) raised the banner of “parachute-type” diversification: rather than widening into the areas around the existing businesses, it would drop directly into fields it had no experience of, with the plan of raising the computer business into a third pillar. Where Hiro Keitaro had narrowed the divisions he meant to grow and cut the branches, Mino took the road of descending into unknown territory. Behind it lay the impasse of the founding businesses: farm machinery and cast iron water pipe, the two pillars, were both mature and hard to grow much further, and a passive constitution of “not touching anything dangerous” had soaked into the company.
The moves came quickly. Beginning with an investment in Ardent (アーデント) of the United States in 1986, the company entered the computer business around three-dimensional graphics workstations. It rebuilt the organisation at the same time, splitting the existing businesses into fourteen subsidiaries within a year and pressing the defensive divisions to develop through a personnel evaluation system that set quotas for the share of new products. The design was to raise computers, a market of great size, into a core business measured in units of $690.6M (¥100bn) of sales. Mino spoke of aiming at the same figure in the environment business.
The descent ended differently business by business. The computer business was tossed about by mergers and dissolutions among its partners, posting a loss of about ¥17 billion on the liquidation of Stardent and losing its way. The environment business, on the other hand, went on being grown. It was a judgement in which a sure-footed refusal to eat into the inheritance — keeping investment within the earnings of the existing businesses — sat alongside a bet on the unknown. As late as 1993 Mino was still preaching the effort to stand one's ground rather than easy retrenchment.
The cast iron pipe cartel, and the disclosure of asbestos damage
In February 1999 the Fair Trade Commission found an illegal cartel in the cast iron pipe industry that had run for about thirty years, and filed criminal accusations against three companies: Kubota, Kurimoto (栗本鐵工所) and Nippon Chutetsukan (日本鋳鉄管). The trade in cast iron pipe, the company's founding business, had been called to account as a breach of the Antimonopoly Act. Kubota's cast iron pipe was a field in which it had long held a 65 per cent market share, and the very way that position had been built was what the penalty addressed.
On 29 June 2005 Kubota announced that 78 employees at the old Kanzaki plant had died of causes attributable to asbestos and that 15 were under treatment. It disclosed at the same time that there were patients among the residents living near the plant whose illnesses were suspected of being linked to asbestos, and stated that it would pay condolence money of $18,157 (¥2m) each to three residents who had developed mesothelioma. The first death from asbestos disease inside the company had occurred in February 1979, and from then on such cases had been handled through workers' compensation claims and the company's own supplementary compensation. At the old Kanzaki plant, 47.8 per cent of those who had worked on the manufacture of asbestos pipe developed asbestos-related disease. Word that there were patients in the neighbourhood reached the company in April 2005, by way of a local assembly member. Manufacture of the asbestos-bearing products themselves had been stopped in 2001, ahead of the disclosure.
The condolence payments were set against criteria: that the claim came through a support group, a medical certificate of mesothelioma, no occupational history of handling asbestos, and residence in the vicinity at some point between 1954 and 1995. In April the following year, 2006, after discussions with patients, families and support groups, these were replaced by rules for relief payments of a minimum of $214,998 (¥25m) and a maximum of $395,597 (¥46m). The company charged $30M (¥3bn) to extraordinary losses in the year to March 2006 and $24.9M (¥3bn) in the year to March 2007 as asbestos health-damage relief payments and related costs. The first judgment holding a company responsible for damage to residents in the vicinity came in August 2012; Kubota's payments ran seven years ahead of it. By the end of December 2025 the relief payments covered 414 people.
Correcting the silos, and the tilt to farm machinery abroad
In January 2009 Masumoto Yasuo (益本康男) became president, the first from the engineering side in forty-two years. Seeing the shape of the organisation behind both problems — the asbestos damage and bid-rigging on public works — he openly named “the harm of the siloed organisation, and our reflection on it”, and set out a reform that would gather the core systems, split until then business by business, into a “Kubota standard”. His appointment coincided with a turn in results: hit directly by the world recession, the year to March 2009 brought the first fall in operating profit in five years, down 23 per cent on the previous year. In the United States construction machinery and engines were hit, and the construction machinery plant in Germany came to a stop.
Once the recession was past, a run of acquisitions filled out the overseas farm machinery line-up. In March 2012 Kubota bought Kverneland ASA of Norway, a maker of implements for upland farming, and made it a subsidiary; Kverneland, founded in 1879 and listed on the Oslo Stock Exchange, was an old house, and Kubota took 78.95 per cent of its shares for $226.8M (¥18bn) in total. In December 2013 it set up a production base in France for large tractors for upland farming. In July 2016 it bought Great Plains Manufacturing of the United States and added it as a subsidiary. The aim was the gap in large farm machinery that had been open for so long: in the late 1980s it had also bought a Spanish farm machinery maker and developed tractors of up to 170 horsepower, but the acquired company failed as the economy worsened and sales stopped at about 200 units.
In the spring of 2020 it launched the M8, of up to 210 horsepower, supplied on an OEM basis by a Canadian farm machinery maker. It was the largest tractor in the company's history. President Kitao Yuichi (北尾裕一) said: At this size we run up against John Deere's cash cow. From here it is a head-on fight in earnest. In a market it had entered in 1972 with a strategy of avoiding head-on confrontation and moving into the gaps, this was the first time it chose to take them on from the front. It had entered India by setting up a sales company in 2008, but three years on annual sales were still only about 500 units. In April 2022 it made Escorts of India a subsidiary for up to about $1.1B (¥141bn), taking hold of the largest market in the world by unit volume. Sales for the year to December 2025 were $20.2B (¥3.02tn) and operating profit $1.8B (¥265bn).
The turning points, read in full: what was at stake, what was chosen and what the revenue did around it. The Japanese edition is the edition of record and carries the sourced dossier behind each decision — background, options weighed, outcome — linked under every decision.
Revenue (¥ bn) · net margin % · around FY1960
Key decision · 1960
The T15 tractor, and remaking farm machinery from tillers into complete machines (1960)
Admitting saturation, and adding units anyway
In 1963 there were two million power tillers in use and just under six million farm households — one machine for every three. Read as saturation of demand, farm machinery could only be a division heading for decline. What Kubota Tekko chose was to use that installed base and the network of 2,000 dealers as a foundation on which to pile a different range of products: the ride-on tractor, the binder and the rice transplanter. Being able to read that the Agricultural Basic Law and the structural improvement programme would push up the introduction of ride-on tractors and combine harvesters is what appears to have made the step possible.
The development record, though, was also a chain of failures. The HA, which cut the crop and laid it down, was not taken up by the market because of the labour of gathering and tying; the HB, which gathered and bound, ended unable to cut lodged rice. Reaching the rice transplanter took an accumulation of trial machines going back to the Meiji era, and the year after the volume production structure was ready in 1969, demand for farm machinery shrank under acreage reduction. Where the shift to complete machines was repaid most was not only the domestic paddy field that called for 10,000 units a month, but American demand that wanted machines of 25–30 horsepower. The answer to a decision to change the product can come from outside the market it was aimed at.
Kubota Tractor Corp., and entering North America and Europe with a paddy-field tractor (1972)
It changed the market, not the business
President Hiro Keitaro had his doubts about diversified management itself. In the high-growth years demand followed whatever one did, he said, but under low growth the same things would become a burden; branches that had stretched too far and leaves that had grown too thick had to be cut, and the most important work of the man at the top, he added, was to judge growth prospects and not to err in the timing of the cut. What a president who thought that way chose, facing acreage reduction and the oil crisis, was not to add a new business but to put the small tractor built for the paddy field to a different use in a different country.
That road, though, was not visible from the start. For ten years from 1964 exports stuck at around 5 per cent of sales, the destinations were confined to South-East Asia, and many of the customers who wanted the machines could not pay for them. What moved it, it seems, was that the 25–30 horsepower band sat outside the mainstream of large machines in the United States, so that Kubota could enter without competing head-on. Competing with Deere in the large upland machines themselves took another forty years. The process by which a weakness, exporting, turned into the main pillar was made of a plain accumulation — changing the market without changing the product.
“Parachute” diversification: breaking the dependence on the founding businesses (1990)
What a grand old firm's gamble left behind
At the core of this decision was a sense of crisis about a grand old firm, blessed with two stable pillars, shrinking into itself because of that very stability. To break a constitution of “not touching anything dangerous” it changed even its name and put capital into markets it had no experience of; the word “parachute” can be seen as carrying an intent not to settle in the country around the existing businesses. But because the field it chose was computers, where technical change is fastest of all, that intent also ended in paying the most painful tuition.
Even so, in Mino's words about the parachute a gamble and an insistence on sure footing lived side by side. The brake of keeping investment within the earnings of the existing businesses, and not eating into the inheritance, is also the logic of a man protecting a grand old firm. Computers were folded up; the environment and water-treatment technologies remained — which parachutes find their feet cannot be known until one jumps. Kubota's transformation swayed between a sense of crisis that a limit would come unless diversification continued, and a restraint that would bet only within its strength.
Disclosing asbestos disease at the old Kanzaki plant, and paying the neighbours (2005)
Paying without waiting for certification
The words “we will not make excuses” appeared in print in July 2005. But for the twenty-six years from February 1979, when the first death from asbestos disease inside the company occurred, Kubota handled the matter within the frame of workers' compensation claims, and the agreements on supplementary compensation carried clauses waiving the right to claim and requiring confidentiality. It opened outward only after patients appeared among the residents nearby. President Hatakake Daisuke (幡掛大輔) himself acknowledged that without the damage to residents there might have been no disclosure in this form, which makes it hard to read the announcement as a spontaneous decision.
What happened after it opened, though, is worth judging separately for its speed. The $18,157 (¥2m) condolence payments to three residents with mesothelioma were replaced within a year by relief rules of a minimum of $214,998 (¥25m) and a maximum of $395,597 (¥46m). The judgment recognising causation came in August 2012; the payments ran seven years ahead of it. Given that Hatakake himself had spoken of the length of the latency period before onset, paying without waiting for certification can be seen to have carried the meaning of reaching people who could not wait. The company's internal record of 261 cases in total is still being updated year by year.
Up to ¥140.6bn for Escorts, the Indian farm machinery maker (2021)
The price of the time it would have taken alone
Three years after entering, about 500 units a year; twelve years on, in 2020, about 15,300 units and a share of just under 2 per cent. Against Mahindra's 45-horsepower machine from about $7,773 (¥830,000), Kubota's equivalent started from about $10,021 (¥1m). The gap lay not in quality or in the dealer network but in the design itself — narrowing the functions to hold the price down. What Kubota chose was not to remake its own small, high-quality line but to buy a company that could build a basic tractor, and take the price bracket along with it. The roughly $1.3B (¥141bn), the largest sum in its history, can be seen as the price of the time it would have taken to do the job itself.
This judgement, though, did not rest on a welcome memory of India. A joint venture with the Tata Group in the iron pipe business in 2007 ended in failure, and the executive who led the acquisition recalled that a good many voices inside the company argued for proceeding carefully in India. After the purchase, too, it took until September 2024 to bring three separate local companies together into one. Whether the target of a 7 per cent share in 2025 was reached cannot be confirmed as of this writing, and the success or failure of the plan to make India an export hub for emerging markets will likewise be answered by the unit numbers to come.
This English edition follows the Japanese one chapter by chapter. The Japanese edition remains the edition of record: it carries the source-by-source citations, the financial tables and the shareholder and executive records. 日本語版（詳細）— Kubota full history in Japanese →
Kubota — 久保田鉄工八十年の歩み (Eighty Years of Kubota Iron Works, Kubota Iron Works, 1970).
企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968), the Kubota entry.
Diamond — ダイヤモンド (Diamond, Inc.), 5 Dec 1960, on the farm machinery industry entering its growth phase.
Yomiuri Shimbun — 読売新聞: 6 Oct 1969, on comprehensive agricultural policy; 7 Jan 1970, on the average 11.2 per cent acreage cut.
Nihon Keizai Shimbun — 日本経済新聞 (Nikkei Inc.), 6 Nov 1982. Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun — 日経産業新聞: 9 Dec 2004, on the assault on the US tractor market; 16 Nov 2016, on large upland farm machinery for America.
Nikkei Business — 日経ビジネス (Nikkei BP), 19 Oct 1994, on new businesses raised inside large companies.