Sumitomo Group

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Sumitomo Group (住友グループ Sumitomo Gurūpu?) is one of the largest keiretsus founded by Masatomo Sumitomo.

[edit] History

Masatomo Sumitomo began the company as a store selling medicine and books in 1630.

Masatomo Sumitomo's brother in law, Riemon Soga, who ran a copper smelting and smithing business at the time, soon developed a new smelting technique called Nanban-buki which extracted silver from raw copper. Tomomochi Sumitomo, the eldest son of Riemon Soga disclosed this technique to other copper smelters and made a name for the Sumitomo family as the origin of the Nanban-buki technique. This gave Sumitomo the ability to rise to the top in the copper mining and refinery industry until the late 1800s when the company began to enter other industries such as banking, warehousing, electric cable production and more.

Today, the Sumitomo Group is still run according to the "Founder's Precepts" as written by Masatomo Sumitomo in the seventeenth century.

[edit] Sumitomo companies

[edit] External links


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