Taiwan Sugar Manufacturing Company (Taiwan Seito Kaisha)

Taiwan Sugar Manufacturing Company (台湾製糖株式会社, Taiwan Seito Kabushiki Kaisha) was founded in Tokyo on December 10, 1900 with capital of one million yen. Japan then imported most of its sugar, and Taiwan Governor-General Kodama Gentarō and Civil Administrator Gotō Shinpei, who made modern sugar the centrepiece of colonial industrial development as part of Japan's comprehensive policy to modernize and expand Taiwan's sugar industry, persuaded Mitsui to invest and offered subsidies and protection. Besides Mitsui the shareholders included the Mōri family (former lords of Chōshū), the Imperial Household and the Kaohsiung sugar merchant Chen Zhonghe. The founders were Suzuki Tōzaburō (鈴木藤三郎), a sugar technologist who became the first president, and Yamamoto Teijiro (山本悌二郎), who helped run the firm from the start and later became president and a politician.

The company's inaugural factory at Kio-a-thau (橋仔頭, modern Ciaotou, Kaohsiung), begun in 1901, started production on January 15, 1902 and was the first modern mechanized sugar factory in Taiwan. Armed resistance was still active in the south, and the mill was fortified and armed. Following Nitobe Inazō's 1901 report on sugar improvement, the Government-General supported modern mills from 1902 through the Sugar Industry Encouragement Regulations and demarcated "raw material zones" within which cane could be sold only to the designated mill at prices set by the company — a grievance behind the farmers' movement of the 1920s.

The company subsequently expanded operations across southern Taiwan through capital increases and mergers; its capital reached 25.5 million yen by 1912, its head office moved to Akō (Pingtung), and it became one of the "Big Four" sugar companies (alongside Meiji Sugar, Dai-Nippon Sugar, and Salt-Water Harbor Sugar). By 1941 it controlled virtually all the mills south of the Zengwen River. It ran its own plantations, light railways and alcohol plants, and its staff housing, company shrines and hospitals created distinctive mill settlements.

In wartime sugar became a controlled commodity, and the mills' alcohol plants increased output of anhydrous alcohol and butanol as substitute fuels; from 1944 many mills were damaged by U.S. air raids. After Japan's defeat in 1945, all Japanese sugar companies in Taiwan were taken over and in 1946 consolidated into the state-owned Taiwan Sugar Corporation (台灣糖業公司). The Japanese corporation survived as Taitō Co. and was finally merged into Mitsui Sugar in 2005. The Ciaotou mill ceased production in 1999 and is now the Taiwan Sugar Museum, preserving the colonial-era office, air-raid shelters and factory.