Company history

Kubota began in 1890, when a nineteen-year-old Gonshiro Kubota opened a small foundry in Osaka as the Meiji capital urbanized and demand for waterworks swelled. He fixed early on the one product the market needed but could not make at home: the cast-iron water pipe, essential to modern water supply yet imported wholesale because Japan had no way to mass-produce it. Even a well-backed Tokyo venture had tried the domestic craft and gone bankrupt, and the trade was widely written off as impossible in Japan — but Gonshiro took the failures as a spur, and after years of trials on poor equipment worked out his own round-blow, hard-packed casting method by 1900, the first domestic technology able to turn out sound pipe in volume. He built the company’s first owned works at Funade-cho in 1907, kept refining the process — rotary casting patented in 1908, automatic coring and molding machines in 1923–24 — and by the 1910s held roughly 60% of the domestic market as the dominant maker of public-works water pipe.

When water-supply demand ran its course in the Taisho years and the First World War drove up pig-iron prices, the pipe business slumped, and Gonshiro diversified along the grain of what he already knew. A machine shop opened in 1914 gave him a foothold in machinery; he entered machine tools with lathes he could make well, cheaply and in quantity, and supplied naval arsenals. In 1917 he split production by function — pipe to new Amagasaki and Onkajima plants, machinery to Funade-cho. A 1919 push into three- and four-wheel vehicles, Jitsuyo Jidosha, failed and was abandoned, confirming that the company’s strength lay in casting and materials rather than finished vehicles.

The decisive move for what Kubota would become was quieter. In 1922 it began building small farm-and-industrial engines; refined from the 1923 A-type, they went into mass production at the new Sakai plant in 1937. Wartime demand thickened that engine capacity and the know-how to run it — assets that, once peace returned, the company would redeploy into an entirely new industry.

The redeployment came in 1947, when Kubota converted its wartime engine line into cultivators and stepped into agriculture. The timing was ideal: postwar food shortage and the land reform that created a nation of owner-farmers multiplied rural purchasing power and set off explosive demand for the engines used in irrigation and threshing. The casting and materials heritage that ran back to the founding water pipe gave Kubota’s equipment a reliability that won farmers’ trust from the start — the same fit that its 1919 detour into cars had lacked.

What began as a use for idle engine capacity became the company’s spine within two decades. When the 1961 Agricultural Basic Law and the structural-improvement program pushed rice farming to mechanize, Kubota met the wave through the nationwide farm-cooperative network: farm-machinery shipments leapt from under $11.1M (¥4bn) around 1960 to $40.3M (¥15bn) in 1965, and in the second half of that year farm machinery (34.2% of shipments) overtook the founding pipe segment (32.9%) to become the largest business — the twin pillars of pipe and farm machinery now set in place. The product line spread across the whole rice cycle, from the 1957 harvester and the 1960 T15, Japan’s first all-domestic tractor, to the HC75 auto-binding binder of 1966 and self-threshing combines and rice transplanters, with dedicated farm-machinery dealers, a 1963 Fiat tie-up and the first probes at the US market building the ground for what came next.

The surge did not last. From 1971 the government’s rice-acreage-reduction policy, aimed at chronic surplus, cooled farmers’ appetite and capped a market that had only expanded, tipping it into replacement-driven maturity. The plain reading — that domestic growth had hit a ceiling — is what pushed Kubota to look abroad.

Judging Japan’s rice mechanization essentially complete, President Keitaro Hiro warned his board again and again that replacement demand would arrive “within five years at the latest,” and on that conviction he shifted Kubota’s centre of gravity from the saturating home market to overseas. Kubota Tractor Corporation was set up in the United States in 1972, and from 1974 the company entered with Japanese-style small tractors, deliberately avoiding the 100-plus-horsepower machines that the American makers fought over. It aimed instead at the 20-to-40-horsepower compact class and sold it not to commercial agriculture but to home gardens and vineyards — a niche beneath John Deere and the other giants, where it faced no head-on fight. The same brand image carried into France, Germany and Italy through the 1970s, and Kubota listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1976; escape from domestic dependence let it expand through the 1980s and 1990s.

Then the founding business exacted its price. In February 1999 the Japan Fair Trade Commission found a roughly thirty-year illegal cartel in cast-iron pipe and referred Kubota, Kurimoto and Nippon Chutetsukan for criminal prosecution — a market of about $1.0B (¥115bn) in which the three held 63%, 27% and 9%. The blow to the trust the pipe business rested on forced a change at the top and a wholesale rebuild of compliance. Worse followed in 2005, when a cluster of asbestos-related disease emerged among residents near the Kanzaki plant in Amagasaki; Kubota, which had stopped making asbestos products in 2001, set aside $28.4M (¥3bn) in relief for the year to March 2006. Through these two crises the company both repaired its standing and relatively shrank the founding pipe business, re-centring on farm machinery — which by around 2011 supplied over half of sales.

Kubota now scaled by acquisition. In 2012 it bought Norway’s Kverneland — an implement maker founded in 1879, strong in the plows and harrows that mount behind a tractor — for about $226.8M (¥18bn), letting it offer European farmers a single tractor-to-implement solution against AGCO and CNH and buying time it could not build alone. India proved harder: Kubota had entered in 2008 with light, easy-handling compacts for the southern rice belt, but Indian farmers use tractors mainly for haulage, where its small machines lacked pulling power, so in 2022 it acquired Escorts outright to take a brand and a distribution network in one step — while a Global Innovative Tractor project in India was also conceived as the platform base for the next generation of North American compacts, an emerging market turned into a manufacturing base for the developed ones.

The other project was internal. Six business domains had each run their own core systems, a state seen inside the company as “twenty years behind” Komatsu on IT, and under President Yuichi Kitao the multi-year K-RISE overhaul (2019–2026) set out to standardize on a company-wide ERP at a cost of hundreds of billions of yen. By 2023 Kubota was a ¥3-trillion-revenue group earning around ¥300 billion in operating profit, but it had chased pandemic-era volume in North American compact tractors at the expense of capital efficiency — a mistake Kitao admitted plainly and answered by pivoting to a focused, ROIC-driven model. In 2025, after six years, Kitao handed the presidency to Shingo Hanada, an insider from the tractor and machinery line and the fourth president in a row drawn from it, who inherits a contracting North American tractor market weighed by US reciprocal tariffs of roughly $233.9M (¥35bn) a year and a K-RISE cutover due to complete in December 2026.