Mitsubishi’s trade dates to 1870, when Iwasaki Yataro founded the shipping venture Tsukumo Shokai; by 1881 it was exporting coal through the line that became NYK, and trading grew into the sales division of the holding company Mitsubishi Goshi. In April 1918 that division was incorporated as Mitsubishi Shoji — the old Mitsubishi Corporation — with ¥15 million of capital and five departments (general affairs, coal, metals, sundries and shipping), weighted toward foreign trade rather than the home market. By the 1930s it stood beside Mitsui and Co. as one of Japan’s two great trading houses.
Defeat in the Pacific War ended it. Under an Occupation memorandum of July 1947 the old Mitsubishi Shoji was ordered dissolved; it went into liquidation that November, and the trade rights (shoken) and goodwill built over decades scattered. A successor “second company,” Kowa Jitsugyo, was set up in April 1950 to work off the inherited assets and liabilities, and reclaimed the Mitsubishi Shoji name in August 1952. Around it, the many trading firms that had splintered at the dissolution were gathered into three houses — Fuji Shoji, Tokyo Boeki and Tozai Koeki. These four would be the seedbed of the 1954 reunification.
1968“Trading and development” — business investment begins in earnest
1968Takes a 45% stake in Brunei LNG, alongside Shell
1968Sets up Mitsubishi Development Pty in Australia (coking coal)
1974Establishes Tri Petch Isuzu Sales in Thailand
1981Signs the Saudi petrochemical joint venture
In July 1954 four successor firms — the reconstituted Mitsubishi Shoji together with Fuji Shoji, Tokyo Boeki and Tozai Koeki — combined (legally, one company absorbing three) to re-create Mitsubishi Corporation. Former chairman Yohei Mimura called it “literally a start from zero”: the goodwill could not be inherited, only the will to rebuild trade and credit from nothing. From the outset, and unlike rivals still weighted toward the prewar textile trade, Mitsubishi built its book around steel, non-ferrous metals and machinery — less a strategy of its own than a mirror of the Mitsubishi group’s heavy-industry base. That non-textile tilt became the platform for moving into resources and energy in the decades that followed.
In 1968 president Chujiro Fujino set out “trading and development” and turned the model from brokerage toward business investment. That November the board committed to Brunei LNG, forming the development company with Shell at 45%, Mitsubishi at 45% and the Brunei government at 10% — Mitsubishi’s own outlay reaching about $116.9M (¥42bn). What let a Japanese trading house hold rights equal to a global oil major was not technology but its long-standing sales channels to Japan’s gas and power utilities: distribution, not engineering, bought the equity. Brunei threw off a large and stable dividend for decades, and that recurring income became the seed capital for the next resource investment — a virtuous cycle later repeated in Australian coking coal and Chilean copper, and generalised through overseas ventures from Isuzu in Thailand to Saudi petrochemicals.
1985The K-Plan: selection, focus and the trading “winter”
1988Escondida copper project (Chile) begins
1992Joins the Sakhalin oil and LNG project
1995Sheds the “GNP company” mindset; Makihara’s reforms
2000Capital and business tie-up with Lawson
2011Acquires AAS (Anglo American Sur) — Chilean copper
In 1985 president Shinroku Morohashi diagnosed the company bluntly: earnings from ordinary trade no longer covered its costs, and the group was being carried by dividends from past overseas investments. His K-Plan — sharper selection of business fields and higher-value-added trading — was his structural answer to the “winter of the trading houses” that followed the second oil shock. That a management named its own core weakness — dependence on yesterday’s investment income — made the document one the company retold for years.
The warning went unheeded when prices rose. Through the 2000s, Chinese-led demand lifted iron ore, coal and copper, and the whole sector scrambled for resource equity. Mitsubishi added to its Australian coking-coal rights and, in 2011, paid about $5.3B (¥420bn) for a stake in the Chilean copper company AAS — the Brunei model reproduced at larger scale. It hedged with non-resource deals — a 2000 capital tie-up with Lawson, the 2014 purchase of the Norwegian salmon farmer Cermaq — yet pressed forward on both fronts at once, stacking business investment in resources and non-resources alike.
2016AAS impairment tips the group to its first net loss
2020Buys Eneco, a Dutch renewables firm
2020Berkshire Hathaway discloses a ~5% stake
2022Moves to the TSE Prime Market
2024Portfolio rotation begins in earnest (sells Japan KFC)
2025“Corporate Strategy 2027”; a ¥1tn share buyback
In the year to March 2016 Mitsubishi wrote down about $2.5B (¥271bn) on AAS and fell to a consolidated net loss of $1.4B (¥149bn) — its first ever. Sliding copper prices were the trigger, but the deeper fault was exactly the one the K-Plan had named in 1985: an earnings base leaning on past investment, recurring in a new form after the shift from trading to business investment. Resource stakes that print thousands of billions of yen in a rising market invert into a multi-hundred-billion-yen impairment when it turns; swapping the underlying asset from textiles to copper had not dissolved the cycle.
The loss forced a turn to financial discipline. Takehiko Kakiuchi, president from 2016, pushed the company to build judgment beyond commodity know-how, and in 2020 bought the Dutch renewables company Eneco for about $4.6B (¥489bn), signalling a portfolio spread away from resources under a group-wide decarbonization theme. Then in August 2020 Berkshire Hathaway disclosed a 5.04% stake, praising Mitsubishi’s stable cash flow and resource rights; foreign ownership climbed toward 30%, and a management long resting on stable domestic shareholders swung toward capital efficiency and shareholder dialogue. By the year to March 2023 record cash flow of about $13.5B (¥1.9tn) let it pay down debt and rebuild discipline.
Katsuya Nakanishi, president from 2022, made a “cyclical growth model” — continually rotating the portfolio — the centre of strategy, selling flagship consumer businesses such as Japan KFC even at the peak of a resource boom. In April 2025 his Corporate Strategy 2027 set a $20.0B (¥3tn) investment frame (excluding maintenance capex), a fiscal-2027 ROE of 12% and consolidated net profit of $8.0B (¥1.2tn), paired a $6.7B (¥1tn) buyback with progressive dividends, and kept only the businesses that earn — taking Mitsubishi Foods fully in-house while moving Chiyoda Corporation out of consolidation. Whether “hold and rotate” can succeed the long era of “buy and hold” is the wager the company is now making.
Set aside small differences, unite on the greater cause
The heart of this founding was that it did not merely revive the name “Mitsubishi Shoji” lost to the zaibatsu dissolution, but re-bound as equals the trade that had scattered across more than a hundred companies. In legal form it was one company absorbing three, yet the substance of the agreement was a spirit of parity and the preservation of jobs. Making no winners and no losers, with the elders playing the binding role under the watchword “set aside small differences and unite on the greater cause,” was what kept it from ending as a mere federation of factions. It was a fresh start that overcame the division imposed from outside — the dissolution — through a design for cohesion from within.
Yet what could be re-bound was the vessel; the trade rights themselves could not be inherited. Rather than inheriting goodwill, the company had to rebuild transactions and credit from zero — what Yohei Mimura called “an accumulation of things without precedent” is rooted in this origin. Underwriting the rebuild were the funds of the Mitsubishi Bank and the cohesion of the Mitsubishi group that would later crystallize as the Kinyokai. The start of Mitsubishi Corporation, a reassembly out of dissolution, was at once the revival of a single company and a chapter in the larger story of how postwar Japan’s corporate groups were put back together.
The heart of this decision was that a trading house rewrote, for itself, what it earns from. Broking between producer and buyer for a commission — long the skeleton of the trading business — Chujiro Fujino judged to be a way of earning with a visible ceiling. The several hundred million dollars he committed, through sleepless nights and repeated impulses to abort, turned — carried by the tailwind of the oil crisis — into a dividend large enough to sustain a whole year’s earnings on its own. The pattern of winning rights equal to a global major on the strength of sales channels rather than technology became the template for Japan’s general trading houses entering resource development, and passed on to the later Australian coking coal and Chilean copper.
Neither the rights it held nor the swollen dividend, however, lasted forever. As the gas-producing state gained strength, its share was pared from an equal three-way split to 25%, and a strong yen and cheap oil halved the dividend. Even so Mitsubishi did not withdraw from Brunei, and half a century on it has re-invested capital into upstream production itself. From commission to business investment, from downstream to upstream — a trading house’s involvement in resources has continually changed shape to match the host country’s sovereignty and the tides of energy. That long transformation began with Fujino’s sleepless-night decision to join Brunei LNG.
Buy, fix, sell — another form of business investment
This decision shows another form that a trading house’s business investment can take. If Brunei LNG was an investment that developed a resource and drew a dividend over the long run, Aristech was an investment that bought a loss-making company with debt, stepped into its management to rebuild it, restored its value and then let it go. Away from both commission-earning brokerage and long-held resource equity, it took a business itself into custody for a set period and lifted its price — and the LBO, as a method, sharply mirrored that mode of involvement.
The road, though, was not smooth. Recession set in just after the purchase, and reaching profitability took six years, $500 million in additional loans and a wholesale replacement of the old management. It was a turnaround that bet on a reading of chemicals as a market that moves in cycles of seven to ten years, and that waited without treating the demand slump as structural. Buy, fix, sell. This pattern — a trading house that had made long holding its creed “turning” an operating company to extract value — reads, from a distance, as a foretaste of the later era that would make portfolio rotation its banner.
The heart of this decision was that a trading house with some of the largest sales in Japan tried to let go of the idea that the sheer size of those sales was proof of strength. A general trading house’s “sales” are turnover — no more than a thin commission piled up over an enormous volume of transactions. Minoru Makihara called the habit of boasting of this figure, which swells in good times and shrinks in bad, as if it were the nation’s GNP, a “dinosaur.” Cutting the unrealized losses of financial engineering early, and re-selecting business investments on the prospect of profit, was the patient work of halting the inertia of volume and steering back toward quality.
The choice of a president with an almost outsider’s career, picked not for sales results but for “the makings of someone who could change the company,” was part of that shift too. It was an unusual elevation by the trading-house convention that those who pile up volume rise to the top, and Shinroku Morohashi declared publicly that he would judge the wisdom of the wager himself within “three years.” That the reforms did not move as fast as hoped shows how deep-rooted the culture of volume was; but placing at the centre of management, so early, the question of measuring a trading house by profit and capital efficiency rather than sales is suggestive as groundwork for the long shift to the later resource- and business-investment model.
Rotation management, rehearsed on the consumer front line
The significance of this decision was that a trading house moved to secure the “downstream” with capital. For a Mitsubishi that had earned from resources and infrastructure, a store network in daily contact with consumers was unfamiliar terrain. The new waves of the day — e-commerce and finance — abruptly closed that distance. Its insistence on 20% and on seconding directors expressed a will to be involved in Lawson as a principal in its management, not merely as a trading partner. A Daiei pressed to restructure and the card of a sound group bank were what made the move possible.
Twenty percent, though, was not the goal but the entrance. Mitsubishi raised Lawson to a consolidated subsidiary in 2017, and in 2024, teaming with KDDI, moved it out of consolidation. Take a grip, grow it, recompose the stake — the quarter-century relationship with Lawson looks like an early test, on the consumer front line, of the later management that raises capital efficiency by rotating the assets it holds. The 2000 move downstream was the first step of that long experiment.
Brunei LNG and the Chilean copper mine were the light and the shadow of one and the same business investment. The idea — commit capital to a resource and hold the rights — was identical; what differed was the turn of the market and the price at the moment of investing. Where Brunei bore a stable dividend on the tailwind of the oil crisis, the Chilean copper was bought at the peak of a resource boom, and its weight was learned in a falling market. The strength of holding rights for the long term turns, when the price reverses, into the weakness of an impairment. This one episode showed plainly the cyclical peril that resource business investment carries within it.
Mitsubishi, however, did not withdraw from Chile. Rather than exiting after the write-down, it held on through cost cuts and moved to raise output as the copper market recovered. The company as a whole, meanwhile, took this loss as a turning point to strengthen non-resource fields and press ahead with rotating its portfolio. How to hold the rights one has grasped, and when to recompose them — the question of business investment that began in Brunei has passed, by way of the wound in Chile, into today’s trading-house management, which competes over holding and rotation alike.
The heart of this decision lay less in the merits of any single deal than in the fact that a general trading house relativized, by its own hand, the “hold on forever” management it had long taken for granted. Renewing record profit on high resource prices, Mitsubishi stepped — precisely when it had room to — into deciding to let go of flagship consumer businesses such as Japan KFC and Lawson. There is no denying that a low price-to-book ratio, the market’s gaze on capital efficiency, and the rising presence of foreign investors epitomized by Berkshire Hathaway pushed it forward. In re-selecting the businesses it held while conditions were strong lies the substance behind the phrase “cyclical growth model.”
Rotation, though, is no cure-all. That trading houses have walked alongside their businesses through long holding and grown their value over time was itself a strength of the general trading house. How reliably, and into which growth fields, it can direct the capital and revaluation gains raised by selling rests on execution still to come. What to hold and what to let go — this decision, looking beyond an earnings structure dependent on resources, stands as an attempt to re-examine the general trading house’s very model of investment.
Each heading links to the full Japanese analysis — background, decision and outcome, with sources.
This is a condensed English edition. The full, source-by-source history — with the detailed narrative, financial tables, shareholders and executives — is maintained in Japanese: 日本語版（詳細）— Mitsubishi Corporation full history in Japanese →
Mitsubishi Corporation — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports) and 決算説明会 (earnings briefings, incl. FY2025 Q2, 4 Nov 2025; FY2025 Q3, 6 Feb 2026).
Mitsubishi Corporation — Corporate Strategy 2027 press release (経営戦略2027), Apr 2025; press release on the sale of its Japan KFC stake, Apr 2024.