Mitsubishi Corporation - Company History

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.

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.

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.

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 (¥490bn), 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.