Company history

Terumo began in September 1921 not as an entrepreneur’s venture but as an answer to a supply shock. The First World War had cut off imports of clinical thermometers from Germany, on which Japanese hospitals depended, and a group of physicians led by the bacteriologist Kitasato Shibasaburo — who had trained under Robert Koch — put their names behind a domestic maker. Sekisen Ken-onki K.K., the “Red-Line Thermometer Company,” was incorporated in the Shitaya district of Tokyo with ¥500,000 in capital and shipped its first thermometers in February 1922. Its authority came less from any technology than from the scientists who vouched for it; its market came from the wartime failure of a single foreign supplier.

That origin fixed the company’s shape for four decades. It made one thing — thermometers — and made them because the country needed a home-grown substitute for imports, not because it had invented anything. Through the war economy and the controlled markets of the postwar years there was neither the capital nor the freedom to develop new products or expand abroad; the firm simply raised output as domestic demand grew, still trading under the Red-Line Thermometer name. More than forty years after its founding it remained a single-product measuring-instrument maker — and the finite domestic thermometer market was a hard ceiling. Escaping it, by taking up the new craft of plastic moulding, became the unavoidable strategic question of the years that followed.

The change came in January 1963, with a plastic disposable syringe. Japanese hospitals then sterilised glass syringes by boiling and reused them; a throw-away product looked expensive and wasteful, and the idea met real resistance. But reuse carried a cost the ledger did not show — the transmission of hepatitis and other infections — and on that single point Terumo overturned the convention, as Western hospitals already had. It carried the high-volume manufacturing it had learned making thermometers into plastic moulding and moved first in Japan, in effect creating the market it then led.

Disposability was not one more product but a change in the kind of business Terumo was in. It shifted the mainstay from a durable good used for decades — the thermometer — to a consumable used once, and with it came demand that was both steady and structurally rising. New plants at Fujinomiya (1964) and Ashitaka (1970) scaled up syringes, infusion sets and other plastic devices, and within a decade the thermometer maker had become, in substance, a maker of disposable medical devices.

The name and the map lagged the reality, and the company set about aligning them. It planted its own subsidiaries in the two markets that mattered — Terumo Europe in Belgium and a US venture with Kimble, both in 1971 — early for a mid-sized Japanese manufacturer, but disposables had to clear each country’s device rules and sterilisation standards on the ground. In October 1974 the firm finally dropped “Red-Line Thermometer” and became Terumo Corporation; a move to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange followed in 1985, giving it the standing to raise capital. Plant, listing and an overseas footing, assembled in sequence — the three things a company needs before it can begin buying other companies.

In June 1999 Terumo bought the heart-lung (oxygenator) business of America’s 3M and folded it into a new subsidiary, Terumo Cardiovascular Systems. Until then Terumo had been a maker of general consumables — infusion sets, syringes — with no presence in cardiovascular treatment, a field where building the research, clinical trials and regulatory approvals from scratch takes a decade and a fortune. 3M’s retreat from healthcare put the business in play, and Terumo took the shortcut: it bought a treatment area it could not have built in time. That deal set the template for everything after it.

Through the 2000s the acquisitions grew more frequent and reached further from the old consumables line: Vascutek of Britain (2002), Mission Medical of the US (2005), the neurovascular specialist MicroVention (2006), and a heart-valve business from Germany’s Kohler (2007). Each brought a category — catheters, brain-vessel devices, heart valves — that Terumo bolted on rather than grew. MicroVention in particular, later joined by Sequent Medical, would become the core of a neurovascular franchise. From the 3M deal onward, “buy the business and connect it” became not an exception but Terumo’s standing method of growth.

In April 2011 Terumo made its largest acquisition yet, buying the American blood-processing leader CaridianBCT. The deal briefly dented its balance sheet, but it let Terumo stand up a free-standing Blood Systems company and complete a three-part structure — cardiovascular, blood and plasma, and hospital care — that still frames the group. It also exposed the other face of the acquisitive method: integration is slow and costly. The blood unit earned only about ¥3.5bn on ¥71.8bn of sales in its first year and slid into the red in the mid-2010s, and it took the better part of a decade to make the business pay.

Under Shinjiro Sato, president from 2016, the buying continued — Sequent Medical (2016), a haemostasis business from Abbott/St. Jude and the aortic-stent maker Bolton Medical (both 2017) — filling out neurovascular and aortic lines the company had been slow to build itself. Revenue climbed from about $3.7B (¥328bn) to roughly $6.9B (¥1.04tn), and operating margin reached 18.5% in the year to March 2017 as high-margin cardiovascular products took over the mix. But the same long ramps recurred: the Rika automated blood-collection system, in limited release from 2022, took more than four years to approach break-even, held back by the plant-by-plant pace of installing and certifying machines in customer centres.

Two later shifts show the method turning outward. From the year to March 2024 Sato replaced “produce in the world’s optimal location” with a three-bloc plan — Japan and Asia, the US and Costa Rica, and inside China — as the pandemic, US-China friction and China’s volume-based procurement made supply chains that crossed borders freely a liability rather than an efficiency. Then in 2024 Hikaru Samejima took over as president, and in 2025 Terumo bought WuXi Biologics’ fill-finish plant in Leverkusen, Germany — its first use of the buy-and-connect reflex outside medical devices, aimed at contract drug manufacturing built around its own PLAJEX polymer prefilled syringes.