Sumitomo Group

The Sumitomo Group is a group of autonomous Japanese multinational companies headquartered in Tokyo that traces its origins to a bookshop established around 1590 by Masatomo Sumitomo, a former Buddhist monk, in Kyoto. The enterprise grew through copper refining after Sumitomo's brother-in-law Riemon Soga founded a smelting operation, Izumiya, that developed a technique for extracting silver from copper ore not previously achieved in Japan, and by the late seventeenth century operations had relocated to Osaka, where the business expanded into copper exports, silk imports, copper mining from 1691 and financial services as a major trading house. After the Meiji Restoration it modernized with Western technology and expanded into machinery, coal, forestry, banking and warehousing, becoming a zaibatsu business conglomerate, and following World War II it was restructured into a keiretsu of interconnected independent companies organized around what is now Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation.