Company history

Konica Minolta descends from two companies, both born in the imaging trade and unrelated until 2003. The elder is Konishiroku. In April 1873, in the Kojimachi district of Tokyo, Konishi Rokubei opened Konishiya Rokubei, a shop importing the photographic and lithographic-printing materials that early-Meiji Japan could not yet make for itself; photo studios and printers depended on those imports, and the shop supplied them. Within a decade it began manufacturing rather than merely importing, and in 1902 it built the Rokuosha works in Yodobashi — today’s Nishi-Shinjuku — to produce dry plates and printing paper, becoming one of Japan’s first makers of photosensitive materials. Domestic film followed in 1929, and in 1943 the firm renamed itself Konishiroku Photo Industry, writing “photo industry” into its very name. It listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1949.

The younger house, Minolta, grew up in the Kansai region as a camera upstart. In 1928 Kazuo Tajima set up a small workshop near the Mukogawa river in Hyogo to build compact cameras, and from 1931 every product carried the Minolta name. Through the 1930s Minolta built not only its own lens factories but an optical-glass works, giving it an integrated line that reached all the way down to the raw glass — an unusual depth for a Japanese camera maker of the era. It went on to make the country’s first twin-lens reflex camera and, in 1957, Japan’s first planetarium.

What links the two houses is that each drifted toward the office long before they met. Minolta moved into office copiers in 1961; Konishiroku would follow with electronic copiers in 1971. The same instinct — to carry an imaging and optical craft into the neighbouring business of the workplace — ran independently through both companies, and would one day be the logic that joined them.

The decisive turn came in January 1971, when Konishiroku began making and selling electronic copiers. A company that had sold nothing but film, cameras and printing paper put its first product into the office-equipment market — pushed by a ceiling on demand for photographic materials and pulled by the fast-growing copier market that Xerox had opened. It was the start of the long pivot away from the founding photographic trade, and the seed of the information-equipment business that would become the company’s core. In 1972 the Hachioji plant was rebuilt as a copier factory and camera and lens production was hived off to subsidiaries, physically separating the photo-materials and office-equipment lines.

Through the 1970s the company assembled the sales and production network a global office-equipment maker needs — a German subsidiary in 1973, a head office moved to Nishi-Shinjuku in 1978, the buyout of a domestic copier distributor in 1979. The push into North America came in a concentrated burst across 1986–87: it bought Royal Business Machines to secure a US sales base and set up paper and materials plants across the United States and Europe. Then, in October 1987, it dropped “photo industry” from its name and became simply Konica — announcing, in the name itself, its shift from photographic-materials veteran to office-and-information brand.

Through the 1990s Konica ran photographic materials and copiers side by side. But digital cameras were arriving, and demand for photographic film began to shrink after 2000. In 2002 Konica consolidated its domestic equipment-production subsidiaries to concentrate resources on office equipment — quiet preparation for the industry consolidation that was about to reshape it.

In August 2003 Konica merged with Minolta through a share exchange and became Konica Minolta Holdings. The groundwork was a 2000 tie-up to jointly develop polymerized toner, in the course of which both sides concluded that neither could develop the next generation of equipment alone. With film demand collapsing, the merger was an act of industry consolidation aimed squarely at office equipment: Konica brought high-speed digital copiers, Minolta colour laser printers, and the two ranges were complementary. Ahead of the deal Konica had already moved to a pure holding-company structure and adopted a board with a majority of outside directors.

The merger, though, created a company saddled with two founding trades it no longer wanted. In January 2006 Konica Minolta announced its withdrawal from both cameras and photo film — the camera line Minolta had built since 1928 and the photographic business at the root of Konica since 1873, closed at a single stroke. Digital photography had erased the demand for film, and rather than manage a slow decline the group chose a clean, total exit. The single-lens-reflex assets, including the Alpha (α) system, were sold to Sony, which would carry the mount into its own cameras; the camera business ended in March 2006 and the photo business in September 2007.

The exit was costly. Konica Minolta booked a $906.4M (¥105bn) special loss covering asset write-downs, the closure of sales outlets and some 2,243 job cuts, and fell to a net loss of $467M (¥54bn) for the year to March 2006. But it also freed the company to concentrate: it built up medical imaging, inkjet and materials in the very same years, expanded its North American office-equipment network, and in 2013 folded seven group companies together, dropped the holding structure and became simply Konica Minolta, Inc. — closing the ten-year holding-company chapter as one operating company built around office equipment.

Under Shoei Yamana — president from 2014, chief executive from 2016 — Konica Minolta tried to escape its dependence on office equipment by acquiring its way into new fields. The emblem of that push was the 2017 purchase of Ambry Genetics, a US gene-diagnostics company, meant to carry Konica Minolta into precision medicine on the strength of American medical data. It was the imaging house’s latest re-purposing of itself: from film to office, and now to medicine.

The bet did not pay. Ambry and the other non-office businesses never delivered the returns assumed at acquisition. Operating profit peaked at $572.4M (¥62bn) in the year to March 2019 and fell to $76.8M (¥8bn) a year later; then the pandemic hit office demand, and sales of copier hardware — together with the consumables and services that ride on it — fell away. Konica Minolta posted a net loss of $138.5M (¥15bn) for the year to March 2021, and the decisive blow landed in the year to March 2023, when goodwill impairments led by Ambry drove the net loss to $733.8M (¥103bn). The diversification had come due as a write-down.

In June 2021 Toshimitsu Daiko took over as president and chief executive, promising management “to scale” and rebuilding a board that — by then holding a majority of outside directors and its chair — had traced the serial acquisition failures to weak post-merger integration and an execution culture that could not meet its own targets. A 2023–25 medium-term plan committed to “selection and concentration”: Konica Minolta sold Invicro in 2024 and, in a deal signed that November and completed in February 2025, sold Ambry Genetics to Tempus AI for about $600 million. It cut roughly 5,200 jobs — its largest workforce reduction ever — and treated the year to March 2025 as a “results-reform year,” concentrating one-off costs to settle the failed 2017 acquisition strategy. By late 2025 profits were recovering and the company had raised its full-year outlook.