Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company, Inc. (MGC) was established in 1951 through a merger between Japan Gas Chemical Co., Inc. and Mitsubishi Edogawa Chemical Co., Ltd. Today the MGC Group includes over 120 affiliates at home and abroad. Starting in 2000, MGC introduced an “internal company” system to broadly develop its businesses—spanning basic chemicals to functional materials and products—based on its four companies: Natural Gas Chemicals, Aromatic Chemicals, Specialty Chemicals, and Information & Advanced Materials. In addition to exploration of natural gas and petroleum and development of geothermal energy, MGC is also at the global forefront of the promotion of the next-generation clean energy, DME. MGC is active worldwide in a variety of sectors, including automobiles, electronics, life sciences, the environment and energy. Since its establishment, MGC has continually aimed to create its own technologies, and as a result, it has developed over 90% of the products it handles.
A wide array of MGC technologies appear in a broad range of business sectors, with the MGC Group playing a variety of roles, including its activities as a global methanol supplier, a laminate maker for plastic packaging for semiconductors, a key Asian engineering plastic maker, a maker of chemicals for use in the global electronics industry, a developer and maker of the AGELESS oxygen absorber that revolutionized the food distribution sector, and the world’s first petrochemical maker to succeed in industrially producing highly-pure metaxylene. The “Gas Chemical” in MGC’s name comes from its predecessor, Japan Gas Chemical Co., Inc., which aimed to be a chemicals company that used domestic natural gas rather than depend on imported raw materials.