Toppan - Company History

Importing the Ehret relief process, founded on securities printing

In January 1900 Toppan Printing was established as a limited partnership (凸版印刷合資会社) at Nichomachi in Shitaya-ku, Tokyo City (東京市下谷区二長町)[1]. The founding was led by men who had come out of the Cabinet Printing Bureau (内閣印刷局)[2], and the purpose written into the company was to apply fine relief-printing techniques based on engraving to the manufacture of share certificates, corporate bonds and other securities that could not be forged or altered. Its defining feature was the import of the Ehret relief process (エルヘート凸版法), then the most advanced platemaking technology in Europe[3]. By using the halftone dot to print photographs and paintings, the process brought into commercial printing a fineness that letterpress and lithography could not reach, and it won the company the confidence of government offices and financial institutions early on in counterfeit-proof printing of securities and banknotes. A private works dedicated to securities alone was hard to sustain at the time, so the company also carried general printing — cigarette wrapping paper, posters and labels.

As demand for securities widened, orders grew beyond share certificates and corporate bonds to industrial-promotion bonds (勧業債券) and various government-issued bonds, and both equipment and technique advanced with them[4]. Toppan was also the first private company in Japan to print banknotes that circulated domestically. On the strength of that broader base, in June 1908 it was reorganised as a joint-stock company with capital of ¥400,000[5], fixing its character as a business built around fine platemaking. The store of counterfeit-proof printing that the Cabinet Printing Bureau engineers brought with them at the founding lifted the company early in securities, a field with high barriers to entry, and built a footing that took in government offices and private finance alike. Relief printing based on engraving had no ready substitute elsewhere in the private sector of the day, and the company held a position of its own in the printing that underwrites credit — share certificates and banknotes.

Maro Hideharu (麿秀晴), who became president in 2022, sums up the company’s origins by placing it as a technology-led venture that set out more than 120 years ago by bringing in the most advanced platemaking technology in Europe. The habit fixed in those first years — take in the newest technology from abroad and seize a market quickly, rather than raise it slowly in-house — carried through to the later move into electronics. The accumulated skill in fine platemaking would become the footing for the semiconductor photomask business and the display-related businesses more than seventy years later. Behind a printing company’s ability to step into precision fabrication lies the know-how in halftone control and plate-surface accuracy built up in the closing years of Meiji.

A plant network built by merger, recovery from the air raids, and diversification into chemical printing

After its founding the company widened its production network through repeated mergers and new plants. In October 1908 it absorbed Naigai Printing (内外印刷) to form the Honjo plant[6]; in February 1918 it bought Offset Printing (オフセット印刷); and in April 1926 it merged Tokyo Shiki (東京紙器) to create the Koishikawa plant, adding the manufacture of paper containers to its business[7]. It went on adding sites — the Osaka branch plant in January 1927 (later the Oyodo plant)[8], the Itabashi plant in May 1938[9] and the Fuji plant in May 1943 — and in July 1944 merged Seihan Printing (精版印刷) to form the Osaka branch office plant, raising capital to ¥22.5 million at the same time[10]. Taking in a leading Kansai printer amid the wartime reorganisation of the industry, the company came early to hold two bases of different character — counterfeit-proof printing in Tokyo, publication printing in Kansai — and that became the ground for its post-war diversification.

In 1945 two waves of air raids destroyed the head office and its plant along with the Honjo, Oyodo and Koishikawa works[11], but in July of that year the company opened a new Kyushu plant in Kumamoto Prefecture and kept production going. Recovery followed step by step after the war: Oyodo was rebuilt in August 1946 and the head-office plant in April 1948, the Sendai plant opened in 1949, and Honjo was restored in June 1951. In March 1953 the Fuji plant was closed for reasons of location, leaving an eight-plant structure. Fund-raising began afresh as well, and in May 1949 the shares were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange[12]. In a short span the company repeated destruction and rebuilding, and recovered almost all of the network of sites it had spread before the war.

After the war the company opened one new field of printing after another, combining imported technology with its own research. It began printing and converting vinyl in 1949, installed a three-colour press of its own design in 1951, and in 1952 started operating polyethylene printing, aniline printing and tube-forming printing[13]. In securities printing it combined the anti-counterfeit M.C.F. machine with refinements in platemaking to speed up delicate, sharp work. Paper-container manufacture also became active after the war, with effort concentrated on outer cartons for the cigarettes of the Japan Monopoly Corporation and on paper boxes for cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and foodstuffs. The expansion of plant and the opening of new fields as an integrated printing company bore fruit: operating revenue of $5.8M (¥2bn) was recorded in the term ended May 1955, and capital reached $833,333 (¥300m) in December 1954.

The divisional structure, overseas tie-ups, and the leap into precision printing

With the high-growth years the company put a nationwide structure in place, in organisation and in sites alike. In December 1961 it adopted a divisional structure, and the head-office, Itabashi, Shitaya, Koishikawa, Kansai and West Japan divisions were created[14]. Sites were rearranged too: the Asaka plant opened in August 1962 and the head-office plant moved into it, the Itami plant opened in August 1964 and Oyodo moved into it, and in May 1968 the old head-office building, the Toppan Building, was completed. In December 1971 the company merged Aichi Tokushu Printing (愛知特殊印刷) and Kobunsha Printing (興文舎印刷), completing its structure in Nagoya and Sapporo as well. By October 1968 capital stood at $16.7M (¥6bn) and the company had grown to six business establishments, nine plants and twelve sales offices across the country[15] — the shape of an integrated printer handling publication, commercial and packaging work had set.

Expansion abroad also began in the 1960s. A joint venture was set up in Hong Kong in May 1963 and a representative office opened in New York in June 1964[16], and the company entered technical tie-ups with Milprint of the United States, Letraset of Britain and Transworld Display of the United States. Then, in May 1965, it established Toppan Moore Business Forms Co., Ltd. as a joint venture with Moore of Canada (renamed Toppan Moore in 1971)[17]. This was entry from contract printing into the growth market of business forms used for corporate data processing; it took in the demand for forms during the spread of computers and long served as the core of the Toppan group’s information businesses. Joining an overseas partner to enter a growth market was the same type of judgement as the import of the Ehret relief process in 1900 — the genes of a technology-import venture carried on into the post-war years.

In December 1973 the company built the Asaka precision plant and began producing photomasks and shadow masks[18]. A photomask is the master used to transfer circuit patterns in semiconductor manufacture; a shadow mask is the metal plate that preserves colour purity in a colour CRT. Laying images at halftone accuracy onto glass and metal rather than paper was a move into precision fabrication beyond the bounds of the printing business, and the starting point of the later electronics business. Fine platemaking technology met the demands of the semiconductor and display industries, and the range of application for printing technology widened a step further. The technology-venture cast of mind running from the founding came to the front again here, leading directly to the liquid-crystal colour filters and semiconductor photomasks of later years.

Electronics and flexible packaging become businesses, and the three pillars form

The Fukusaki plant in 1975 (specialty printing, tubes, cups, plastics)[19], the Niigata plant in 1984 (printed wiring boards)[20], the Takino plant in 1988 (liquid paper containers) and the Satte plant in 1990 (functional materials)[21]: from the late 1970s into the 1990s Toppan raised production sites one after another in flexible packaging and electronics alike. It was a period in which the field of business widened from printing on paper to transfer and converting onto plastics, metals and semiconductors. The range of application of fine fabrication built around platemaking spread past paper media to a variety of substrates. This manner of expanding — changing the substrate while reusing the same core technology — prepared the next source of earnings before the paper printing that was the main business began to stall, and it would tell during the long plateau of later years.

In July 1997 IC card production began at the Ranzan plant, taking the company into a new field with an eye on the cashless era. The investment stacked up through the 1990s became the base of a three-pillar segment structure — information and networks, living environment, and electronics — and formed a portfolio of earnings that did not depend on paper printing alone. The Printing Museum, opened in October 2000[22], was also an attempt to make the accumulation of technology visible as a cultural asset. Within the frame of a printing company, this was a period in which a multi-layered business structure of the company’s own making — paper and non-paper, information and physical fabrication — was raised. Of the three pillars, information covered forms and cards, living environment covered paper containers and flexible packaging, and electronics covered photomasks and liquid-crystal materials, each moving with a different industrial cycle: a design that spread the single risk of shrinking paper media.

The ¥1.67tn peak, and the loss that followed Lehman

Sales in the year ended March 2006 were $13.3B (¥1.55tn) and operating profit $783.5M (¥91bn). The segment make-up in the following year, ended March 2007, was information and networks $7.3B (¥860bn) with profit $485.7M (¥57bn), living environment $3.1B (¥366bn) with profit $165.6M (¥20bn), and electronics $2.8B (¥331bn) with profit $121.4M (¥14bn) — the balance of the three pillars set out in figures. Production of liquid-crystal colour filters began at the Mie plant in January 2004, and electronics grew as demand for Japanese liquid-crystal panels expanded. In October 2007 the company made Tosho Printing (図書印刷) a consolidated subsidiary, taking a leading position in the reorganisation of the publication printing field as well. Even with information making up more than half of sales, the electronics margin ran above the information margin — a structure of earnings unlike a printing company’s, already visible in 2008.

In the year ended March 2008 sales reached $16.2B (¥1.67tn), the highest in the company’s history. It would take sixteen years to pass that level. In June 2008 Kaneko Shingo (金子眞吾) succeeded the former president Adachi Naoki as president, and the year ended March 2009, immediately after he took office, was struck head-on by the Lehman shock. Sales were $17.3B (¥1.62tn), operating profit $312.2M (¥29bn) — down $459.7M (¥43bn) on the previous year — and the company recorded its first move into the red, a net loss of $82.3M (¥8bn). Extraordinary losses of $171.1M (¥16bn) included impairments of assets, figures that marked the beginning of a structural contraction. It was a set of results hit head-on by the double headwind of shrinking paper media and the financial crisis, and the entrance to the long stagnation that followed. The information and networks segment, which had earned $7.3B (¥860bn) the year before, became the main cause of more than a decade of flat years from 2008.

A plateau of more than ten years, and overseas flexible-packaging M&A stacked up

After Lehman, Toppan’s sales moved sideways over a long stretch in a range of ¥1.4tn to ¥1.5tn. Operating profit held a certain level — $445.6M (¥49bn) in the year ended March 2016 and $473.7M (¥52bn) in the year ended March 2018 — but sales stood more than $918.8M (¥100bn) below the peak. In April 2009 the manufacturing operations were split off into separate companies, creating Toppan Communication Products, Toppan Package Products and Toppan Electronics Products, among other reorganisation by field of business. It was a period of sorting the units of the business and searching for the next area of growth while taking the headwind of shrinking paper media. Splitting off the manufacturing functions while keeping the three-pillar segment structure was meant to separate profit responsibility business by business, and the organisational design of this period was also the stage that preceded the move to a holding company in later years.

Overseas M&A continued through this period as well. The purchase of SNP Corporation of Singapore in 2008, the Gunma Centre plant in 2014 (the mother plant for flexible packaging materials at home and abroad), the Georgia plant of Toppan USA, Inc. in 2016 (transparent barrier film) and the purchase of INTERPRINT of Germany in 2019 stacked up as overseas expansion in flexible packaging and decorative materials. These did not go so far as to lift the total volume of sales, however; they stopped at offsetting the industry-wide headwind of shrinking paper media. It was a plateau period in which overseas investment stayed at the stage of long-term seeding, and a real presence in the North American flexible-packaging market would have to wait for InterFlex in 2021 and the purchase of Sonoco in 2025. The two-stage order of investment — securing overseas supply sites point by point over more than ten years, then widening them into an area by acquisition — was designed during this period.

The Maro Hideharu regime and five growth businesses named

In June 2022 Maro Hideharu became president. He stated plainly that the company would grow its businesses over the next hundred years without being bound by the frame of printing in the narrow sense, and set out five growth businesses built around DX (digital transformation) and SX (sustainability transformation): information communication, living and industry, electronics, DX and global flexible packaging. A new leadership breaking through the long stagnation had shown the direction of strategy clearly. What marked it was the re-sorting of the earlier three-pillar frame — information, living environment and electronics — by growth area: rather than separating paper printing from non-printing, the design turned management resources towards fields with high rates of market growth.

This strategy stood on a run of groundwork going back to 2021. In April 2021 the head-office functions moved to the Toppan Koishikawa Head Office Building in Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, and in July 2021 the company bought InterFlex Investment Holdings, Inc. of the United States and entered North American flexible packaging in earnest. Then in December 2021 it split off the semiconductor photomask business to establish Toppan Photomasks (now Tekscend Photomask). Making the photomask business an independent company was an unusual structural change for a printing company, and a statement of the intent to grow a growth area under independent management. Toppan’s moves from the start of the 2020s were a continuous levelling of the ground for the shift to a holding-company structure in 2023. Concentrating the head-office move, the North American acquisition and the photomask spin-off all in 2021 was a use of timing meant to put the conditions for the new strategy in place without waiting for the Maro regime to begin the following year.

The holding company, and the change of name from Toppan Printing to TOPPAN Holdings

In October 2023 Toppan Printing moved to a holding-company structure and changed its trade name to TOPPAN Holdings Co., Ltd. Through absorption-type company splits, each business was succeeded to one of three consolidated subsidiaries. The decision to take down the Toppan Printing sign in the company’s 123rd year was a statement of the intent to complete, in organisational terms, the structural shift away from being a printing company. President Maro set out a policy of shedding the shell of printing and accelerating change through five growth businesses in information, living and electronics with DX and SX at the centre, tying the meaning of the name change to a recasting of business strategy. In April of the same year the company also carried out a reorganisation in which the secure business of the former Toppan Printing was succeeded to Toppan Forms, whose trade name was changed to TOPPAN Edge. It was a period in which the move from a printing company to a multi-layered information and materials company advanced in name and in organisation at the same time.

The year ended March 2022 recorded a net profit of $937.8M (¥123bn), the highest in the company’s history. That figure included extraordinary gains of $873.9M (¥115bn) from the sale of cross-held shares and other assets, however, and profit from the main business — operating profit — stopped at $559.5M (¥74bn). The recomposition of capital using extraordinary gains continued after the year ended March 2023, and extraordinary gains reached $1.2B (¥184bn) in the year ended March 2025. The funds obtained from the sales went into North American flexible packaging and semiconductor photomasks: the sale of held assets and the transformation of the business structure advanced together. Turning long-held cross-shareholdings into cash and reallocating it to growth areas is the movement that gives the TOPPAN Holdings structure its frame. What can be read out of the figures of these two or three years is a capital policy that brings forward, on gains from selling shares, the growth investment that profit from the main business would take time to fund.

The sales peak passed after sixteen years, and the handover to Oya

Sales in the year ended March 2024 were $11.1B (¥1.68tn), slightly above the $16.2B (¥1.67tn) peak level of 2008. In the year ended March 2025 they rose further to $11.5B (¥1.72tn), with operating profit reaching $561.3M (¥84bn) and net profit $596.7M (¥89bn). The company had set a record for sales in the second year after becoming a holding company. By segment, Japan was $6.0B (¥898bn) with profit $304.7M (¥46bn), Asia $3.6B (¥540bn) with profit $222.5M (¥33bn), and other regions $1.9B (¥280bn) with profit $347.5M (¥52bn): the overseas share of sales had risen to about 47 per cent, and the structure had changed such that the margin in other regions ran above the domestic one. These were results that broke out of a plateau lasting sixteen years. Earning close to half of sales abroad, with margins abroad above those at home, is the point reached sixty years on from the overseas expansion that began in earnest with the Moore joint venture of 1965.

In April 2025 the company acquired the flexible packaging business and the thermoformed container business of Sonoco Products Company of the United States. This was one of the largest acquisitions ever made in the North American flexible-packaging market, and the outcome of the run of North American investment that followed the Georgia plant in 2016 and InterFlex in 2021. In April 2026 Maro Hideharu stepped back to representative director, chairman and CEO, and Oya Satoshi (大矢諭) became representative director, president and COO. The line of the Maro regime — surviving not as a printing company but through a business portfolio with the frame of printing taken off — passes to the next generation after the move to a holding company. It is the starting point of a new phase of growth as TOPPAN Holdings. The speed of the timing, with the sales peak passed, the largest North American acquisition and a change of president all completed within two years of the name change, reflects the momentum of the next move by a company that took sixteen years after its 2008 peak to leave the plateau.