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is a Japanese corporation based in
Umeda is a major commercial, business, shopping and entertainment district in Kita-ku, Osaka, Japan, and the city's main northern railway terminus (Ōsaka Station, Umeda Station). The district's name means "plum field". History Umeda was historical ...
,
Kita-ku, Osaka is one of 24 wards of Osaka in Japan. Incidents and accidents 2021 Osaka building fire Notable locations Kita-ku, particularly the Umeda area surrounding Osaka Station, is one of the main commercial centers of Osaka. Kita-ku is also a fin ...
and Aoyama,
Minato, Tokyo is a special ward in Tokyo, Japan. It is also called Minato City in English. It was formed in 1947 as a merger of Akasaka, Azabu and Shiba wards following Tokyo City's transformation into Tokyo Metropolis. The modern Minato ward exhibits t ...
. It is one of the largest Japanese '' sogo shosha'' (general trading companies). Among Japanese trading companies, it is distinguished by not being descended from a historical '' zaibatsu'' group, but by the strength of its textile business and its successful business operations in China. It has seven major operational divisions specializing in textiles, metals/minerals, food, machinery, energy/chemicals, general products/
real estate Real estate is property consisting of land and the buildings on it, along with its natural resources such as crops, minerals or water; immovable property of this nature; an interest vested in this (also) an item of real property, (more genera ...
, and ICT/financial business. Itochu was ranked 72nd on the 2020 list of Fortune Global 500 companies, with an annual trading revenue of US$100 billion. Itochu has been one of the most popular employers for graduates of top Japanese universities for over thirty years due to their high pay levels, stability and the diversity of opportunities available to employees. In 2019 and 2020, Itochu was ranked the most popular employer for college graduates.


History


Pre-war years

Itochu started in 1858, shortly after the
opening of Japan was the final years of the Edo period when the Tokugawa shogunate ended. Between 1853 and 1867, Japan ended its isolationist foreign policy known as and changed from a feudal Tokugawa shogunate to the modern empire of the Meiji government. ...
to foreign trade, when began door-to-door wholesaling of linen in the regions between Osaka and
Kyushu is the third-largest island of Japan's five main islands and the most southerly of the four largest islands ( i.e. excluding Okinawa). In the past, it has been known as , and . The historical regional name referred to Kyushu and its surround ...
. Itoh founded the "Benichu" drapery store in the Honmachi district of Osaka in 1872. This site was renamed "Itoh Honten" in 1884 and became the Itoh Thread and Yarn Store in 1893, which was renamed "C. Itoh & Co." in 1914. Chubei Itoh II took over the company following his father's death in 1903. The company opened an office in Shanghai in the 1890s and started business in Seoul in 1905, but had severe difficulties with these first overseas forays. Itoh travelled to London in 1910 and began direct procurement and financing for the business in the London markets, which considerably improved its margins, as it had previously used more expensive intermediaries in Japan. Itoh's company grew considerably in the wake of World War I, with offices in the United States, India, the Philippines and China, and the firm began to handle machinery, automobiles and metals in addition to its core business of textiles. However, a recession in 1920 left the company deeply in debt, and unlike the major zaibatsu firms of the time, it had no captive bank to finance its business. In 1921, the company split in half, with one half forming what is now known as Marubeni. The company's performance improved in the 1930s, but as World War II began in the latter half of the 1930s, all trading companies' business became increasingly war-oriented. In 1941, Itoh and Marubeni re-combined to form Sanko KK, which merged with two other companies to form Daiken Co., Ltd. in 1944.


Post-war years

After World War II, the constituent companies of Daiken were spun off from each other in December 1949 as part of GHQ efforts to dismantle the war-era zaibatsu. Itoh re-listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1950. On December 1, 1949, the company was incorporated. Itoh resumed business in the wake of the war by bartering Japanese textiles for foreign grain, and resumed trading in petroleum, aircraft, automobiles and machinery to meet UN forces requirements during the Korean War. After the war, Itoh absorbed many smaller trading operations that could no longer stand on their own. Itoh expanded its overseas mining and petroleum exploration activity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, followed by large-scale overseas industrial projects in the 1980s. Former Imperial Japanese Army staff officer Ryuzo Sejima joined Itoh in 1958 after spending 11 years in a Siberian prison. Four years later, he was promoted to director and became Itoh's head of corporate planning, implementing a military-style internal reporting system. He went on to serve as president and chairman of the company, having developed a powerful group of followers known as the "Sejima Machine." In 1970, Sejima and his younger protege Minoru Murofushi arranged a joint venture between General Motors and Isuzu, one of the first tie-ups between US and Japanese automakers. In 1972 Itoh became the first Japanese trading company allowed to do business in the People's Republic of China. Itoh was headquartered near the site of Chubei Itoh's historical headquarters in Osaka until 1967, when it upgraded its Tokyo branch to the status of a co-headquarters. In the 1970s, the company became part of the "Kawasaki Group" within the
keiretsu A is a set of companies with interlocking business relationships and shareholdings. In the legal sense, it is a type of informal business group that are loosely organized alliances within the social world of Japan's business community. The ''k ...
of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank (now Mizuho Corporate Bank), eventually displacing
Nissho Iwai is a ''sogo shosha'' (general trading company) based in Tokyo, Japan. It is engaged in a wide range of businesses globally, including buying, selling, importing, and exporting goods, manufacturing and selling products, providing services, and p ...
as the keiretsu's dominant trading company. Itoh's affiliation with the keiretsu was significantly looser than other keiretsu-affiliated trading companies, and many firms within the DKB group did not use Itoh's services at all. Itoh absorbed Ataka & Co., the ninth largest general trading company in Japan, in 1977. Ataka had recently suffered major losses from an oil development project in the United States and had undergone restructuring at the direction of its main lender,
Sumitomo Bank was a major Japanese bank based in Osaka and a central component of the Sumitomo Group. It merged with Sakura Bank on April 1, 2001 to form Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation. History Sumitomo Bank was established as a private enterprise in ...
. From the early 1970s Itoh was a major supplier of synthetic yarn ( polyester) to India's Reliance Industries Limited. Over the years, the close collaboration between both companies culminated in the co-promotion of a world-scale Polypropylene Project with a capacity of 250,000
tonnes per annum The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a International System of Units#Non-SI units accepted for use with SI, non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to disting ...
at a total project cost of Rs. 525 Crores, at
Hazira Hazira is a suburb and a transshipment port in the Surat City in the Gujarat state of India. It is the west most end of Surat. Hazira is one of the major ports of India and the most important element of Surat Metropolitan Region. The town is ...
in the State of Gujarat. With a $50 million cost for a 15 percent stake, it was at that point, the largest investment in India by a Japanese firm. Itoh also marketed products—under their own label—as diverse as a line of bicycles (mostly manufactured by Bridgestone), and computer printers. Itochu began to develop a strong information technology business in the 1980s through its subsidiary C. Itoh Techno-Science (CTC), which acted as a Japan distributor for Sun Microsystems,
Cisco Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational digital communications technology conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develops, manufactures, and sells networking hardware, ...
, Oracle and others. On October 1, 1992, C. Itoh & Co. Ltd. changed its English name to Itochu Corporation, a more direct transliteration of its Japanese name. By the early 1990s Itochu had become the largest trading company in Japan, but losses from the Japanese asset price bubble, particularly domestic real estate investments, brought it down to third place by the middle of the decade. In the 1990s Itochu made several investments in the media industry, including a minority stake in Time Warner and investments in cable and satellite delivery systems. Uichirō Niwa became president of Itochu in 1998, implementing cuts to unprofitable businesses and cutting back executive perks enjoyed by his predecessor Murofushi. In 1999, Itochu became one of the first Japanese companies to move away from the traditional seniority-based pay scale, adopting a base pay scale based on responsibilities, impact and value of each position as well as a performance-linked bonus system. Itochu also spun off CTC in 1999, only to see CTC quickly achieve a market capitalization more than twice that of its former parent company. Masahiro Okafuji became president of Itochu in 2010 and announced a strategy to make Itochu the first-ranked ''sogo shosha'' in areas other than raw resources, particularly in food products and machinery. Under Okafuji's leadership, Itochu implemented a general ban on work after 8 PM with an across-the-board "lights out" policy at 10 PM while encouraging that any necessary overtime be taken in the early morning hours, reducing the total amount of overtime across the company. Itochu moved its Osaka headquarters to the North Gate Building adjacent to Osaka Station in 2011. Itochu entered into a cross-shareholding relationship with the Thai conglomerate
Charoen Pokphand The Charoen Pokphand Group Company, Ltd. (CP) (; ) is a Thai conglomerate based in Bangkok. It is Thailand's largest private company and the largest privately held Royal Warrant holder of the Thai Royal Family. The company describes itself as havi ...
(CP) in 2014, and together with CP, agreed to invest over $8 billion in the Chinese state-owned conglomerate
CITIC Limited CITIC Limited () is a conglomerate headquartered in Hong Kong. Its shares are listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, and it is a constituent of the Hang Seng Index. 58% of its issued shares are owned by the Chinese state-owne ...
during 2015, the largest investment ever made by a Japanese general trading company. The transaction was also the largest acquisition in China by a Japanese company, and the largest investment by foreigners in a Chinese state-owned enterprise. In July 2016, short seller Glaucus Research Group published a report critical of Itochu's accounting practices, causing a stock price dip of around 10%. As of 2020 Itochu was one of the three largest global tuna traders along with Tri Marine of Italy and FCF of Taiwan.
Berkshire Hathaway Berkshire Hathaway Inc. () is an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. Its main business and source of capital is insurance, from which it invests the float (the retained premiums ...
acquired over 5% of the stock in the company, along with four other Japanese trading houses, over the 12-month period ending in August 2020.


Offices

ITOCHU's Osaka headquarters is located at the North Gate Building, 1–3,
Umeda is a major commercial, business, shopping and entertainment district in Kita-ku, Osaka, Japan, and the city's main northern railway terminus (Ōsaka Station, Umeda Station). The district's name means "plum field". History Umeda was historical ...
3-Chome,
Kita-ku, Osaka is one of 24 wards of Osaka in Japan. Incidents and accidents 2021 Osaka building fire Notable locations Kita-ku, particularly the Umeda area surrounding Osaka Station, is one of the main commercial centers of Osaka. Kita-ku is also a fin ...
, Japan. Its Tokyo headquarters is located at 5-1 Kita-Aoyama 2-Chome,
Minato, Tokyo is a special ward in Tokyo, Japan. It is also called Minato City in English. It was formed in 1947 as a merger of Akasaka, Azabu and Shiba wards following Tokyo City's transformation into Tokyo Metropolis. The modern Minato ward exhibits t ...
, Japan. ITOCHU also has seven branch offices in Japan, sixteen offices and local subsidiaries in China, 24 in Asia, eight in the CIS, four in Australia, fifteen in the Middle East, eight in Africa, twelve in Europe, ten in North America and nine in Latin America.


Business overview

Itochu's business is organized into six "companies." * Textiles: Itochu trades in raw materials and finished apparel, and also has a brand business. It owns a portfolio of investments and rights in well-known fashion brands including Converse, Hunting World, LeSportsac, Mila Schön and Paul Smith. In 2018, Itochu acquired the Japanese Master License and exclusive distribution rights for the Laura Ashley brand. * Machinery: Includes plant projects, marine, aerospace, automotive, construction/industrial machinery and healthcare. In the automotive sector, Itochu is a partner in the Yanase imported car dealership and partnered with Mazda and EnerDel to produce a solar-charged
Mazda2 The Mazda2 is a subcompact/supermini (B-segment) car manufactured and marketed by Mazda since 2002, currently in its third generation. An entry-level model of the brand in markets outside Japan, the Mazda2 is positioned below the Mazda3. The Maz ...
. In the infrastructure sector, Itochu partnered with Toshiba and
Hitachi () is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group (''Hitachi Gurūpu'') and had formed part of the Nissan ''zaibatsu'' and later DKB Group and Fuyo G ...
to supply infrastructure for the first expressway in Vietnam, the North–South Expressway between Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City. Itochu is also a partner in supplying
rolling stock The term rolling stock in the rail transport industry refers to railway vehicles, including both powered and unpowered vehicles: for example, locomotives, freight and passenger cars (or coaches), and non-revenue cars. Passenger vehicles can b ...
for the MTR in Hong Kong and for
New Generation Rollingstock The New Generation Rollingstock (NGR) is a class of individually-propelled carriages ("electric multiple units") manufactured by Bombardier Transportation in Savli, India for the Queensland Rail City network that entered service between Decembe ...
passenger rail in Queensland, Australia. It is a minority investor in the Sarulla
geothermal power Geothermal power is electrical power generated from geothermal energy. Technologies in use include dry steam power stations, flash steam power stations and binary cycle power stations. Geothermal electricity generation is currently used in 26 ...
project in Indonesia and has partnered with
Mitsubishi Heavy Industries is a Japanese multinational engineering, electrical equipment and electronics corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. MHI is one of the core companies of the Mitsubishi Group and its automobile division is the predecessor of Mitsubishi Motors ...
and Engie to develop the $15.8 billion Sinop Nuclear Power Plant in Sinop, Turkey. *Metals and minerals: Engages in mining and ore trading, steel and non-ferrous metal trading, coal and nuclear fuel trading and solar power. *Energy and chemicals: Trades in oil and gas and a wide range of chemical products such as methanol, PTA and fertilizers. *Food: Handles production, processing and distribution of various foodstuffs. Two major group businesses are
FamilyMart is a Japanese convenience store franchise chain. It is Japan's second largest convenience store chain, behind 7-Eleven. There are now 24,574 stores worldwide in Japan, Taiwan, China, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Its ...
, acquired from
Seiyu Voice acting in Japan is an industry where actors provide voice-overs as characters or narrators in media including anime, video games, audio dramas, commercials, and dubbing for non-Japanese films and television programs. In Japan, and a ...
in 1998, and
Dole Food Company Dole plc (previously named Dole Food Company, Standard Fruit Company) is an Irish agricultural multinational corporation headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company is among the world's largest producers of fruit and vegetables, operating wit ...
, which sold its worldwide packaged foods and Asia fresh produce businesses to Itochu for $1.7 billion in cash. Itochu is also a strategic partner of
COFCO COFCO (; full name: China Oil and Foodstuffs Corporation) is a Chinese state-owned food processing holding company. COFCO Group is China's largest food processor, manufacturer and trader. It is also one of Asia's leading agribusiness groups alongs ...
in China and owns an export grain terminal in
Longview, Washington Longview is a city in Cowlitz County, Washington, United States. It is the principal city of the Longview, Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area, which encompasses all of Cowlitz County. Longview's population was 37,818 at the time of the ...
. * ICT, general products and realty: The sixth company handles a variety of business lines including real estate development, logistics, insurance, forest products and information technology. Group companies include Itochu Techno-Solutions (CTC), Excite Japan and Century 21 Japan.


Notable people

*
Mac Akasaka , real name Makoto Tonami (戸並誠 ''Tonami Makoto''), is a Japanese businessman, political activist and perennial candidate. He was born in Nagoya, grew up in a struggling family, and attended Kyoto University. He spent 25 years as an executiv ...
, rare earths trader, perennial candidate in Japanese elections * Ichirō Fujisaki, former Japanese ambassador to the United States, currently member of the Board of Directors of Itochu *
Hiroyuki Nagahama is a Japanese politician of the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), a member of the House of Councillors in the Diet (national legislature). A native of Tokyo and graduate of Waseda University, he was elected to the House of Representatives for th ...
, member of the House of Representatives and Environment Minister in 2012, worked for Itochu early in his professional career * Uichirō Niwa, president from 1998 to 2004, later Japanese ambassador to China * Ryūzō Sejima, chairman from 1978 to 1981, Kwantung Army staff officer during World War II *
Toshiyuki Takano is a Japanese Ambassador to Germany, previously to South Korea (2002–2005) and Singapore (2001). In February 2005 he sparked a controversy in South Korea when he stated that the Liancourt Rocks in the Sea of Japan The Sea of Japan is the m ...
, retired diplomat, currently executive advisor to Itochu * Tsuneharu Takeda, former Imperial prince and later ambassador to Bulgaria, worked at Itochu from 1967 to 2005 and served as head of its subsidiaries in Australia and New Zealand.


References


External links

* * Company history *
English
*
Japanese
*
Chinese
{{Authority control Companies based in Osaka Prefecture Companies listed on the Osaka Exchange Companies listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Conglomerate companies of Japan Conglomerate companies established in 1949 Japanese companies established in 1949 Trading companies established in the 19th century Trading companies of Japan 1950s initial public offerings