Japan's big trading companies find themselves underemployed

Japan's sogoshosha - its large trading companies - are fighting their way through an identity crisis. Originally established to help connect Japanese products and companies with offshore customers and a global market, the sogoshosha suddenly find that they are no longer in demand. The trading companies were originally intermediaries, says Yasunori Masuda, v.p. of Mitsui's chemical dividion (New York). But now we are less intermediaries and more organizers of joint ventures. Mitsubishi has a position in Saudi Arabia in methanol, ethylene glycol, and polyethylene (PE), currently being expanded. More recently the company teamed up with Pequiven, Venezuela's state-owned petrochemicals firm, on a 2,000-m.t./day methanol plant to be completed by the end of 1993 at Jose. Sone says Mitsubishi plans to market the methanol in the US Mitsubishi is also working on a feasibility study for a chlor-alkali/ethylene dichloride venture with Pequiven. Mitsubishi has jointed with five Japanese trading companies - Itochu, Marubeni, Mitsui, Sumitomo, and Nissho Iwai - to build a 450,000-m.t./year ethylene plant in China