Company history

The company began in 1944 as a subsidiary set up by NEC to make its own glass for vacuum tubes and cathode-ray tubes. The postwar dissolution of the zaibatsu separated it from the Sumitomo-affiliated parent, and when it restarted as an independent company in December 1949 it had just ninety employees — a division of a major electrical manufacturer on paper, a small enterprise in fact.

That size dictated the strategy. Architectural, automotive and container glass were large markets already held by large firms; the only opening was in special glass, where the technical difficulty was high and the entrants few. In 1951 the company succeeded in drawing tubing automatically and began mass-producing glass for fluorescent lamps; in 1960 it licensed tubing technology from Owens-Illinois of the United States to strengthen the base. Vacuum-flask glass, still blown by hand across the industry, was mechanised for volume production in 1962 and eventually reached a 100% domestic share. The pattern — take a niche the majors will not enter, then take it with machinery and volume — was set within a decade of independence, and it is the pattern that carried into everything that followed.

From around 1958 the company tried to enter CRT glass for televisions, but the Japanese government withheld permission to license the technology from Owens-Illinois for six years: Asahi Glass already held the domestic market with Corning technology, and no second supplier was to be admitted. The opening came in 1963, when television demand grew fast enough that the electrical manufacturers wanted two sources rather than one. In 1964 a company with ¥300 million of capital and about ¥3.8 billion in sales committed roughly $5.6M (¥2bn) to a dedicated CRT plant at Takatsuki in northern Shiga — the whole company staked on one site.

Nagasaki Junichi, who led the decision and later became the third president, framed it plainly: a business with a consistent prospect of growth should not be judged by whether one enters early or late, and if one enters at all it must be at a scale that fits the business. The Kohoku site was chosen for room to expand, abundant industrial water, transport and a good labour supply, with the layout for future capacity drawn in from the start. In 1972 the head office itself moved from Tokyo to Otsu in Shiga.

Volume production of black-and-white CRT glass began in 1965 and colour followed in 1967. As the second source in a market Asahi Glass had monopolised, the company took on Toshiba, Matsushita, Sony, NEC and Mitsubishi Electric in turn, and by 1991 led the domestic market with a 57% share. Worldwide, patents held by Corning and Owens-Illinois left effectively no room for new entrants, which protected the position it had won. Listing followed — the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges in 1973, the first section in 1983 — alongside a move into glass fibre in 1976. By fiscal 1981 CRT glass was 54% of sales: a components maker whose fate was tied to television, and whose concentration in CRT would weigh heavily when flat panels arrived.

In October 1987, with CRT still climbing toward its most profitable years, the company began producing substrate glass for TFT liquid-crystal displays. No LCD television market existed then; demand came from small monitors for notebook PCs and word processors, and the investment attracted little attention. But more than a decade of accumulated process knowledge was the reason it could move when the market finally arrived.

The decisive step came in January 2000, with full production by the overflow fusion process that Corning had pioneered and Nippon Electric Glass worked out for itself — the method that allows high-quality TFT substrate to be supplied consistently. Subsidiaries followed in Korea in 2002 and Taiwan in 2003, putting melting, forming and finishing next to Samsung, LG Display and AUO, whose concentrated purchasing demanded local supply. Customer, location and process were all shifted from CRT to flat panel at once.

The LCD television boom carried the company to its peak: consolidated sales of $3.1B (¥368bn) and operating profit of ¥100.9 billion — a 27.4% margin — in the year to March 2008, second in the world in LCD substrate glass behind Corning. Even after the post-Lehman correction, sales came within reach of that record again in fiscal 2010. CRT profits had been recycled into TFT substrate, and the cycle had worked.

From fiscal 2011 the substrate glass price fell as Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese panel makers brought production in-house and later entrants crowded in. By the year to March 2015 sales had dropped to ¥192.6 billion, close to half the peak, with an operating margin of 2.7%. The formula that had worked in CRT — invest ahead, supply a handful of large customers — guaranteed nothing in a display market driven by price. Under Matsumoto Motoharu, president from 2015, the company began looking for a way out of display dependence, starting support glass for semiconductors in 2016.

The most ambitious attempt was the 2017 purchase of PPG Industries’ European and US glass fibre business — three sites in the UK, the Netherlands and the United States — aimed at a place among the world’s largest fibre makers. Price competition from Chinese producers and weak European demand undercut it almost immediately; an impairment in the year to December 2019 contributed to a ¥33.7 billion net loss and exposed the structural deficit in composites. The Dutch subsidiary entered bankruptcy proceedings and left the consolidation in 2023. Meanwhile the fiscal year end had moved from March to December in 2017 to unify global reporting.

Under Kishimoto Satoru, president from June 2022, the company chose to clear the ground before growing. The Korean display sites were liquidated in 2023; fiscal 2023 closed with sales of ¥279.9 billion, an operating loss of ¥10.4 billion and a net loss of ¥26.2 billion, including impairments on Korea and on composites in Malaysia. The medium-term plan EGP2028 targets ¥400 billion of sales and a 12.5% operating margin by 2028, funded partly by ¥49 billion raised from selling non-core property. Growth is meant to come from two places: ultra-thin Dinorex UTG, an application of the overflow technology built for displays, now used in foldable phones and satellite solar-panel cover glass; and semiconductor support glass and probe-card substrates, with a glass-ceramic core substrate for advanced packaging targeted for around 2028. Behind it, the melting furnaces themselves are being converted to all-electric — from almost none in 2018 to most of the display furnaces by 2025 — cutting emissions while stabilising quality, and the know-how is now sold as an engineering service.