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Tōre Kabushiki-gaisha is a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan that specializes in industrial products centered on technologies in organic synthetic chemistry, polymer chemistry, and biochemistry.
Its founding business areas were and textiles, as well as and chemicals. The company has also diversified into areas such as Pharmacology, biotechnology and R&D, medical products, reverse osmosis big membranes, electronics, IT-products, housing and engineering, as well as advanced composite materials.
The company is listed on the first section of Tokyo Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Topix and Nikkei 225 stock market indices.
When Nylon was invented in 1935 by Wallace Carothers of DuPont, Toray immediately got hold of a sample product through the New York City branch of Mitsui Bussan, and started research by dissolving this sample in sulfuric acid. Because of the patent protection, the company had to make its own effort to synthesize polyamide and make fibre out of it. In 1941, just three years after Du Pont's announcement of nylon, Toray completed the basic research on nylon and started building a small plant to produce Nylon 6. The operation started in 1943 and the product was sold, mainly to make fishing nets.
In 1946, following the end of World War II, Du Pont requested an investigation by GHQ (the General Headquarters of Allied Powers) of Toray's infringement of Du Pont's nylon patents but GHQ found no evidence of infringement, certifying that Toray's nylon technology was its own.
Toray is currently the world's largest producer of carbon fiber, and Japan's largest producer of synthetic fiber. Its carbon fiber is extensively used in exterior components of the Boeing 787 airliner.
In September 2013, Toray Industries announced a plan to buy Zoltek for half a billion dollars. The company became a wholly owned subsidiary of Toray and continued operating as a separate business unit.marketwatch Toray completes acquisition of Zoltek.
In 2014, as a major aerospace composites supplier, Toray opened a polyacrylonitrile (PAN), the carbon fiber precursor, production line in Lacq, south-western France.
In November 2017, Toray admitted to committing 149 quality data falsifications between 2008 and 2016, including on tests run on tire-strengthening cords. As clients to Toray, the companies Boeing and Uniqlo may have been affected.
In 2013, Toray acquired an approximately 13% stake in Spectral Diagnostics, a Canadian pharmaceutical company focused on sepsis.
In 2018, Toray announced it would acquire TenCate Advanced Composites to advance carbon fiber production capabilities.
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