Nippon Steel Corporation (日本製鉄株式会社) is a Japanese steel manufacturing company, headquartered in Marunouchi, Chiyoda, Tokyo.[4] The company has four business segments, which are steelmaking, engineering, chemicals, and systems solutions.[5] It is the largest producer of crude steel in Japan and the fourth largest in the world.[6]
The company is on the Forbes Global 2000 list, ranked 1971 in 2023.[7] The company is the third incarnation of the Nippon Steel name, each time with a slightly different spelling or pronunciation. The original company, known as Japan Iron & Steel Co., Ltd. (日本製鐵株式会社), was split into two separate companies in 1950. These two companies later merged in 1970 to form Nippon Steel Corporation (新日本製鐵株式会社) and this name lasted until 2012, when it merged with Sumitomo Metal Industries and rebranded to its post-merger name.[8] The company’s English name reverted to its 1970 name in 2019, while its Japanese name returned to the original 1934 name.
History
Early years
Nippon Steel traces its roots to Japan Iron & Steel Co., Ltd., established in 1934 through the merger of the Yahata Steel Works and several other steel producers with blast furnaces. In 1950, the company's steel production business was split into two companies: Yawata Iron & Steel (八幡製鉄, Yahata Seitetsu), and Fuji Iron & Steel (富士製鉄, Fuji Seitetsu).[10]
These two companies merged again in 1970 to form Nippon Steel Corporation (新日本製鐵, Shin Nippon Seitetsu). Beginning in early 1981, however, the company cut production and saw a sharp decline in profit that fiscal year. Forced to close furnaces, the company exhibited a typical Japanese economic aversion to layoffs, opting instead to offer standard early retirement enticements but also less conventional schemes such as a mushroom cultivation venture that used the surplus heat created by steel furnaces to temperature control a fecund fungi complex.[11]
Troubled times
Major plant locations
- Muroran, Hokkaido
- Kamaishi, Iwate Prefecture
- Kimitsu, Chiba Prefecture: Kimitsu Steel Works
- Tokyo
- Tōkai, Aichi Prefecture (Nagoya)
- Sakai, Osaka Prefecture
- Himeji, Hyōgo Prefecture (Hirohata)
- Hikari, Yamaguchi Prefecture – steel piping
- Kitakyushu, Fukuoka Prefecture (Yahata)
- Oita, Oita Prefecture
Added after Sumitomo merger
Controversies
Espionage from a Korean steelmaker
In May 2012, Nippon Steel filed a lawsuit against POSCO, a Korean steelmaker established in the 1960s with technical assistance from Nippon Steel, for illegally acquiring the technology for grain-oriented electrical steel sheets developed by Nippon Steel. It was alleged that POSCO hired ex-employees of Nippon Steel to obtain the technology. An ex-POSCO official stated that the company's Tokyo research centre was effectively an espionage base, whose primary purpose was to collect information about Japanese steel companies on orders from the Korean head office.[31][32]
The lawsuit was settled in 2015 through an agreement under which the Korean steelmaker paid 30 billion yen (US$300 million at the time) to Nippon Steel.[33] After the settlement, the two companies renewed their strategic partnership agreement, but by 2024, Nippon Steel had sold all its shares in POSCO.[34]
Environmental record
In 2005, the Nippon Steel corporation made a plan to step up its capacity for recycling waste plastics into coke by 30%. Coke is a main resource in steel production. To manage the load they have invested ¥4 billion (about $38.2 million) to install equipment at Oita Mill and set up a second furnace at Kyushu facility.[56]
In 2006, Nippon Steel and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Ltd. (MHI) jointly created a high tensile strength steel. The first application this steel was used for was the hulls of container ships. This steel allows the ships to be just as strong without the thick steel that it was requiring for them to grow in size. The smaller thickness allows the ships to attain a greater fuel-efficiency, cutting down on the environmental load of the ships.[57]
Nippon Steel announced a pilot project to process waste food into ethanol in 2006. They have tasked Kitakyushu City with collecting and sorting the food waste and Nishihara Co., a waste management company, with developing new technologies to implement the sorted collecting system. To minimize costs they will use waste heat from an existing incineration facility that had not been effectively utilized, and the residue left after ethanol recovery will be burned in this incinerator.[58]
See also
- Kashima Antlers
- Nippon Steel Yawata S.C., former company football club, based near the Yahata plant and originally owned by it before the Fuji Steel merger
- NS Solutions
External links
References
- Top Message retrieved 2024-01-09^
- Annual Report 2019 retrieved 4 June 2020^
- Annual Report 2017 retrieved 12 December 2018^