From durable good to disposable: the plastic syringe (1963)

One argument — infection — that remade the business

The heart of this decision was not a better syringe but a change in what Terumo sold and how demand behaved. For forty years the company had lived off the thermometer, a durable good bought once and kept for decades — a business with a hard ceiling, since the domestic market was finite and each unit rarely sold twice. The plastic disposable syringe inverted that: a device used once and discarded generates demand that recurs and compounds. Against a hospital culture that boiled and reused glass syringes and saw throw-away goods as wasteful, Terumo had only one argument, but it was decisive — reuse spread hepatitis and other infections, and no economy of reuse was worth that. On that single point the convention gave way.

What the switch really created was a manufacturing base and a demand curve Terumo would build on for half a century. The high-volume moulding skill carried over from thermometers, the plants at Fujinomiya and Ashitaka, the widening line of infusion sets and disposable devices — these turned a single-product measuring-instrument maker into a maker of consumables whose sales rose with the sheer volume of medical care. Every later Terumo — the catheters, the blood systems, the prefilled syringes — is an extension of the disposable-device franchise begun here. The company’s technical depth in things used once and thrown away starts with this decision.