History

Daiichi Sankyo’s roots reach back to the year of 1899, when one of its predecessor companies, Sankyo, was founded in Tokyo. This was the time when the industrial production of pharmaceuticals began. Daiichi Sankyo is thus one of the pioneers of industrial research-based pharmaceutical development. Sankyo first concentrated on establishing a strong presence in its home market. From 1905 to 1915, three production plants were opened in Hakozaki, Shinagawa and Osaka. By that time, Daiichi Sankyo’s second predecessor company, Daiichi, was founded as well, and it, too, first focused primarily on the Japanese market. During the First and Second World Wars, imports of pharmaceuticals to Japan were very limited, so supplying medicines to the domestic market formed the core of both companies’ business activities. In 1949, Sankyo and Daiichi were both listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

Global growth

Internationalisation of both companies began in the 1960s. Sankyo, for instance, opened subsidiaries in New York in 1961 and in Basel, Switzerland, in 1963. Nevertheless, the Japanese domestic market remained the focus of both Daiichi’s and Sankyo’s business activities. New drug developments were often licensed out to European or American pharmaceutical companies for their marketing outside Japan. This is why the great contributions to global healthcare made by researchers at Daiichi and Sankyo, such as the development of the first statin, are often little known. Since the 1980s, both Daiichi and Sankyo further increased their direct access to other markets. For example, offices in Germany and Korea were opened, and the presence in the US was enlarged. This allowed the companies to conduct the overseas clinical tests that are required for the approval of newly developed drugs.