Proterial Brand Guidelines: Hitachi Metals, the Tobata Foundry of 1910 & NEOMAX Magnets

A foundry, a merger and a Hitachi spin-off.

Proterial is the name that Hitachi Metals has used since January 2023, the company’s own history says. Its story starts much earlier, in June 1910, with the Tobata Foundry Co. in Tobata, now part of Kitakyushu in Fukuoka prefecture. Japanese Wikipedia names its founder as Yoshisuke Aikawa and notes that the same company is also a root of Nissan; Proterial describes the Tobata works as Japan’s first modern plant for malleable cast iron, which we give as its claim.

The foundry grew by buying other works. By the company’s account it purchased Teikoku Foundry, a maker of rolls later called the Wakamatsu Works, and Kizugawa Manufacturing, later the Kuwana Works, in 1926; opened a Tokyo plant for automotive malleables in 1929; and in 1934 merged Yasugi Steel Manufacturing in Shimane, a business it dates to a partnership formed in 1899. In November 1935 the Tobata company was renamed Kokusan Industries, and in May 1937 it was taken over by Hitachi, Ltd.

From 1937 until 1956 the works were therefore part of Hitachi through the war years. English Wikipedia records that Hitachi made parts for the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy, including aircraft engines, until the end of the Second World War, and that the war left many of its factories destroyed. Japanese Wikipedia adds that in 1944 a chromium-tungsten steel developed for the thrust bearing of the Ne-20, Japan’s first domestic jet engine, was commended by the navy’s technical arsenal. The sources used for this guide do not say whether forced or conscripted labour was used at the company’s works in the war years.

In April 1956 Hitachi set up Hitachi Metals Industries, and that October transferred its metals business and five plants to it: Tobata, Fukagawa, Kuwana, Wakamatsu and Yasugi. The company listed in Tokyo and Osaka in 1961, opened its Kumagaya Works in Saitama the same year, and took the shorter name Hitachi Metals in 1967.

Magnets, steel and soft magnetics.

Proterial today makes specialty steel, rolls, magnetic materials, soft magnetic materials, electric wire and cable, and automotive components, its corporate profile says, with plants in Osaka, Tottori, Shimane, Saitama and Ibaraki. Its tool and blade steels are sold under the YASUGI SPECIALTY STEEL name, after the Shimane works; Japanese Wikipedia lists ranges such as SLD-MAGIC cold-work die steel and the DAC hot-work series.

Its magnet business came largely through acquisition. The sintered neodymium-iron-boron magnet was developed by Masato Sagawa shortly after he joined Sumitomo Special Metals in the early 1980s, according to English Wikipedia, which notes that John Croat of General Motors found the same compound independently at around the same time; Sagawa presented the discovery in Pittsburgh in November 1983. Hitachi Metals made NEOMAX Co. a consolidated subsidiary in April 2004 and merged it in April 2007, the company history says. Proterial now sells sintered magnets as NEOMAX, and says it was a pioneer in developing and mass-producing them, including grades that use less of the heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium. In 2016 it set up Hitachi Metals San Huan Magnetic Materials in Nantong, China, to make the same kind of magnet.

Soft magnetics are the other strand. In August 2003 Hitachi Metals bought the amorphous metals division of Honeywell, the source of the Metglas name, the company says, and it also sells FINEMET, a nanocrystalline material. Its 2013 merger with Hitachi Cable added the wire and cable business, and in 2014 it took control of Waupaca Foundry in the United States.

The record also includes a quality scandal. On 27 April 2020 Hitachi Metals announced that inspection data for some specialty steel and magnet products had been altered before being sent to customers, a practice that had run for more than ten years, Japanese Wikipedia reports; the company said it had found no case causing a safety or performance problem. In October 2021 it said the affected customers numbered 1,952.

Design and documentation.

Rare-earth and magnet companies sell materials most people never see, so their pictures do a lot of the explaining. The usual opening image is the mine: an open pit cut in benches into red or ochre desert ground, haul trucks small against the terraces, and a wide sky above. It tells a viewer that the story starts with rock and with a particular place, which matters in a business where origin is part of the product.

The next scenes are inside the plant. Separation is slow chemistry, and companies often show it as long rows of mixer-settler tanks, pipework and walkways, or a rotating kiln seen from its end. The finished goods then appear as oxide powders in small dishes or heaps, often in soft pastel shades of pink, green, grey and cream, a quiet way to show that one ore becomes many separate elements.

Magnets bring the story to the customer. Silver blocks, rings and arcs stacked on a bench, or set into a cutaway of an electric motor or a wind-turbine generator, link the material to the products people know. Investor presentations add the periodic table, usually with the lanthanides picked out in a highlight colour, along with maps that trace the route from mine to separation plant to magnet factory.

The same visual vocabulary appears at trade gatherings, from the events of the Rare Earth Industry Association to the Magnetics conference, where stands and slides lean on the same few motifs: the pit, the plant, the powder and the magnet. For a designer, the category shows how a technical, slow-moving industry can be made legible through a short, repeated sequence of images rather than through slogans.

A new name for a 1910 business.

The change of name followed a change of owner. On 28 April 2021, Financier Worldwide reported, a consortium led by Bain Capital, with the Japanese funds Japan Industrial Partners and Japan Industrial Solutions, agreed to buy all of Hitachi Metals, including Hitachi’s majority stake. Japanese Wikipedia records that the buyers’ vehicle completed a tender offer in 2022 and that the shares were delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange that year; English Wikipedia notes that Hitachi sold all its shares in 2021, by its account. In January 2023 Hitachi Metals became Proterial, Ltd., with its head office in Tokyo. The company says its present legal entity was formally established in April 2021, while it still gives June 1910 as its founding date.

The new owners have reshaped the business. Japanese Wikipedia records that the piping-equipment business was split off and sold to Okaya & Co. in 2024, and that the automotive castings business was split off and sold to a US fund in 2026.

The name is explained on the company’s own site. “Proterial” joins “pro-” and “material,” it says, with “pro” standing for three values it lists as professionalism, progressiveness and proactiveness. Its mission is “Make the best quality available to everyone,” translated from the Japanese phrase 質の量産, roughly “the mass production of quality.” The site groups its stories under the heading “PRO + MATERIAL STORY.”

For a design guide, Proterial shows how a company with more than a century of history can drop a famous parent’s name and rebuild around a coined word. Compare Hitachi, its former parent, and Vacuumschmelze, another maker of rare-earth magnets and soft magnetic alloys. For this guide we use a forge blue, an ingot black and a cool steel grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Proterial’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.