Company history

The company began as an internal department. Japan Iron & Steel set up a shipping section in January 1934 to move its own cargo; wartime control handed the ships to the national shipping operations board in 1945. When the deconcentration order of December 1948 broke up the steelmaker and the split-up plan was approved a year later, the shipping section was carved out as a successor company alongside Yawata Steel, Fuji Steel and Harima Refractories. On 1 April 1950 Nittetsu Kisen opened in the Marunouchi Building in Tokyo with ¥40 million of assets contributed in kind and a further ¥171 million transferred, a fleet of 24 ships and 52,426 deadweight tonnes, and Watanabe Kazuyoshi as its first president.

Its birth coincided with the return of Japanese shipping to private hands, and most of what it owned were wartime standard vessels. The first years went into swapping that tonnage for something seaworthy and then building: capital quadrupled in thirty-four months, from ¥120 million at the end of 1950 to ¥480 million in October 1952, and in January 1951 the shares were listed in Tokyo, Osaka and Kobe. The new ocean-going ships carried the names of the parent’s works — Fuji, Yawata, Kashii — and by March 1955 the fleet stood at 14 ships and 85,942 dwt, of which 8 ocean-going vessels made up 82 per cent.

The names said steel; the cargo did not. Coastal ships carried steel products and coal for Yawata and Fuji, but the ocean fleet could not be filled by the parent alone. Part of it ran a North America–South Africa round-the-world service in partnership with Kawasaki Kisen; the rest worked as tramps, lifting North American grain, Cuban sugar and ore fixed at Goa, the Philippines and Hong Kong. From its first year the company was two businesses at once — a captive carrier for a steelmaker, and a tramp operator living off the freight market.

The company it would merge with had fallen much further. Toho Kaiun descended from Dairen Kisen, founded in 1915 as the shipping arm of the South Manchuria Railway; at its height it ran some 80 ships and over 300,000 tonnes, with warehouses, wharves and its own dockyard, ranking third in Japan behind NYK and Osaka Shosen. Defeat erased the overseas assets and left 18 ships and 64,000 dwt. Refounded in 1947 with ¥12 million of capital, it followed national policy out of its old China coastal trades and into ocean liner services — and was punished for it when world freight rates collapsed in the summer of 1952 and eight Japanese lines fought over the New York route. It closed both liner services and quit the Kokusai Line consortium in 1954.

That retreat produced the connection that shaped the next half-century. Kikuchi Shojiro, then a deputy sales chief at Nippon Yusen, suggested to a visiting Toho executive that Toho hand over its three modern liners and lighten itself; Toho agreed on condition it was a swap, not a sale. NYK gave up three converted wartime tramps, took the three new ships, and with them opened a Middle East service at a time when planned shipbuilding allocated a company one or two hulls a year. Toho got its tramps just in time for the Suez boom. The two firms came out of the trade as, in the phrase of the day, brother companies.

In February 1962 Nittetsu Kisen absorbed Toho Kaiun and renamed itself Shinwa Kaiun — a name from neither side. One company had secure shippers and only eight ocean-going ships; the other had 19 ships and 134,548 dwt and was bleeding on liner routes. Cargo owner and shipowner became one firm. Then policy took over: the 1963 shipping reconstruction laws pushed 95 companies, 658 ocean-going ships and 9.36 million dwt — about 90 per cent of Japan’s ocean fleet — into six groups built around merged core operators, and in May 1964 Shinwa Kaiun was confirmed as an affiliated company of the Nippon Yusen group. A firm born of steel capital now had its cargo on one side of the ledger and its capital and keiretsu on the other, a duality it would carry for forty-six years.

The economics of running Japanese ships were coming apart. By 1970 Liberia already led the world tonnage table ahead of Japan, almost entirely on flag-of-convenience registrations taken out to escape ship taxes and home-country regulation, while tankers and specialised carriers — the dry bulk trades Shinwa lived on — grew fastest. After the 1985 Plaza Accord the rising yen made Japanese seafarers expensive against dollar freight, and the fleet flagged out to Panama and Liberia with foreign crews. Where a ship was registered, whose nationals sailed it and what currency paid for it were now three separate decisions, and absorbing that split cost a mid-sized owner proportionally more than a major.

Shinwa answered by reorganising its group and pushing outward: cargo-handling was spun into a separate firm in 1988, ship maintenance into Shinwa Marine in 1989, and representative offices opened in Singapore (1992), Sydney and Beijing (1993) and Hong Kong (1995) — putting people into China just as its steel industry began to scale, which later underwrote the iron-ore trades. Meanwhile the industry above it kept shrinking: the six core groups of 1964 became three majors as Navix Line formed in 1989 and Mitsui O.S.K. Lines in 1999. Shinwa stayed outside the mergers as a specialist in steel raw materials, a company the market filed under “NYK-camp quasi-major”.

While the market rose, being mid-sized cost nothing. China’s steel expansion lifted parent-company sales 41 per cent in two years, from ¥93.6 billion in the year to March 2006 to ¥132.0 billion in the year to March 2008, and doubled operating profit to ¥22.6 billion; in March 2008 Nippon Steel raised its stake, making Shinwa an “other affiliated company” and giving the steelmaker a second transport channel beside its own Nittetsu Shipping. Then September 2008 ended it. Operating profit fell to ¥13.2 billion the next year and ¥4.8 billion on a consolidated basis in the year to March 2010, with the newbuildings ordered in the boom due to deliver into an oversupplied market. Two carriers serving the same shipper on overlapping routes, each with its own fleet, crews and back office, now looked like duplication — and together they would hold about half of Nippon Steel’s raw-material transport.

On 1 October 2010 Shinwa Kaiun absorbed Nittetsu Shipping and became NS United Kaiun — the N for Nittetsu, the S for Shinwa, as the new president explained at the announcement. The form was a merger of equals: 1.6 Shinwa shares for each Nittetsu Shipping share, Shinwa surviving and keeping the listing. The substance leaned the other way. The president came from Nittetsu Shipping, the initials put it first, and Nippon Steel’s holding rose from 15.04 to 34 per cent, turning the company into its equity-method affiliate while NYK — first on the register since 1964 — dropped to second. Within half a year every group company traded its “Shinwa” name for “NS United”.

Scale did not immediately mean profit. The first year’s parent sales of ¥127.2 billion merely matched the two predecessors combined, and the year to March 2013 produced a net loss of ¥15.5 billion on the strong yen and revisions to long-term charter commitments. What changed the shape of the business was the decision to follow the cargo rather than the country. Under the Vale iron-ore programme the company built NSU CARAJAS, a 400,000-dwt Valemax delivered in December 2019 — Japan’s first ship of that class — against a 25-year contract to move some 40 million tonnes on the Brazil–China route. With Japanese steel output flat since the 1990s, cross-trades that never touch Japan were the only way to grow.

The portfolio then narrowed deliberately. Tankers were exited in the year to March 2020 and the fleet concentrated on dry bulk, and when post-Covid restocking sent capesize rates to record levels the results followed: sales of ¥250.8 billion and net profit of ¥27.6 billion in the year to March 2023, the best since the merger, with return on equity above 10 per cent for four straight years. In 2024 the company committed roughly $2.0B (¥300bn) of investment to 2030 — replacement tonnage, and environmental ships led by 209,000-dwt methanol dual-fuel capesizes ordered ahead of its peers, aimed at the reduced iron and liquefied CO₂ cargoes that a decarbonising steel industry will need to move.