NYK was formed in 1885 through a merger between the shipping assets of Mitsubishi and the Kyodo Unyu Kaisha (KUK) or Union Transport Company. The Mitsubishi firm had been subsidized by the new Meiji government since 1875, while KUK was an amalgam of trading firms, local shipping enterprises, and government investment that had been motivated by Mitsubishi's increasing neglect of shipping in favor of outside investments, mostly in mining. NYK was initially a joint-stock company, with more than three-quarters of the steamships in Japan. It spent its first decade consolidating its finances and fleet under government subsidization and regulation. At first most of its routes were domestic. These became less profitable by the early 1890s because of competition from railways and another shipping firm with regional strength in western Japan, the Osaka Shosen Kaisha (OSK).