Fujikura - Company History
- Founding
- In February 1885 Fujikura Zenpachi 藤倉善八 began making cotton- and silk-covered wire at Awajicho in Kanda, Tokyo — said to be the beginning of the cable manufacturing industry in Japan. After Zenpachi died in 1901 his youngest brother, Matsumoto Tomekichi 松本留吉, set up Fujikura Densen Gomu Gomei Kaisha and ran two businesses with quite different customers, cable and rubberised waterproof cloth, inside one company. In March 1910 the two were separated and the cable division was made an independent joint-stock company. The head office was at Sendagaya in Tokyo and capital was ¥500,000. But where both Sumitomo and Furukawa had copper-producing capital behind them, Fujikura Densen alone was an independent with no group affiliation, and it started out carrying a disadvantage in procuring copper and in raising fresh capital alike.
- The Decision
- It has made itself a field where it cannot be beaten on price, and moved its resources there. Rather than remaining a cable specialist whose margins were held hostage to the copper price, in 1973 it began looking into a way of making optical fibre preform, and from 1976 three engineers started research on the fusion splicer, the machine that joins one fibre to another. Cable, like copper, heads towards a competition of volume and price, but nobody had a machine for splicing fibre out in the field. The postwar mainstay, power cable for electricity utilities, went the other way: in 2005 it was carved out into Viscas, a fifty-fifty joint venture with Furukawa Electric, and moved to joint operation. In 2024 even the conductor business — the copper wire the company was founded on — was split off into a separate company. Optical fibre and the splicing machines are kept in-house; the businesses that sell copper are put out to joint ventures and subsidiaries. That sorting is what produced a business mix in which telecommunications accounts for 55 per cent of revenue.
- Today
- The shape of the business is a concentration on telecommunications close to a single pillar. Of consolidated revenue of $7.5B (¥1.18tn) in the year to March 2026, the Telecommunications segment accounted for $4.1B (¥653bn), 55 per cent of the total, and of operating profit of $1.2B (¥189bn) that segment earned $965.5M (¥153bn). By region the United States reached $3.3B (¥522bn), 44 per cent of revenue. It is the result of using the optical fibre and fusion-splicing technology built up since the 1970s to clear out the loss-making businesses after a net loss of $360.6M (¥39bn) and to concentrate resources on generative AI and data centres. Supply and demand in optical fibre remain tight, however, and the question of how far to widen the investment in extra capacity is still open.
- Competition
- Every rival it fought was a zaibatsu house with more capital than its own. Before the war the domestic cable market was a three-company structure, the cable big three alongside Sumitomo Densen Seisakusho and Furukawa Electric, and Fujikura Densen alone, holding no copper-producing capital, lacked a backer. In optical fibre it ran alongside the other two under a joint research agreement concluded in 1975 with the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, Furukawa Electric and Sumitomo Electric; but where Furukawa Electric bought the optical fibre division of Lucent of the United States in 2001 and took second place in the world, Fujikura did not chase scale, leaning instead on splicing equipment and on thin, high-count cable. Its ground also parted from that of Sumitomo Electric, which put the automotive wire harness at the centre of its business. Having declined to chase scale, Fujikura took first place in the world in fusion splicers, and with ultra-high-count SWR and WTC cable it holds almost every hyperscale data centre in the United States.
Timeline
1910–1979Putting down roots at Kiba as an independent cable maker
- 1910Cable division split from Fujikura Densen Gomu; Fujikura Densen founded
- 1923Head office and works moved to Kiba, Koto-ku, Tokyo
- 1935Fujikura-type coaxial carrier cable developed; patents in seven countries
- 1949Shares listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange
- 1954Numazu works opened
- 1956Osaka works opened to supply raw material
- 1959Numazu Yodo starts up with Mitsui Mining & Smelting; copper ingot in-house
- 1961Designated to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
- 1965Sakura works opened
- 1970Suzuka works opened
- 1979Optical fibre loss of 0.27dB/km achieved
1980–2012From cable to Fujikura — going global, and leaving the power business
- 1980Fusion splicer for single-mode fibre developed
- 1984Fujikura (Thailand) Ltd. established
- 1988DDK (Thailand) Ltd. established to make connectors
- 1988Fujikura Europe Ltd. established
- 1990Head office building completed at Kiba; Fujikura Hong Kong Ltd. established
- 1992Trading name changed from Fujikura Densen to Fujikura Ltd.
- 1998Regional headquarters companies established
- 2003Former Fukagawa works site redeveloped; office block opens
- 2005Power business transferred to Viscas; integration with Furukawa Electric completed
- 2005Fujikura Dia Cable set up with Mitsubishi Cable Industries
- 2005America Fujikura Ltd. and AFL Telecommunications LLC established
- 2008Spanish wire harness maker becomes Fujikura Automotive Europe S.A.U.
- 2009Revenue falls after the Lehman shock
- 2012Net loss; in-house company system prepared
2013–2022The company system, a ¥38.5bn net loss, and the recovery from it
- 2013In-house company system introduced across four companies
- 2013Yonezawa Densen's cable business split off; wire harness unit renamed Fujikura Densou
- 2016Ito Masahiko becomes president
- 2016Viscas reorganised; distribution and overhead transmission return to the parent
- 2018Automotive products segment falls to an operating loss
- 2019Net profit falls sharply as extraordinary losses rise
- 2020Net loss of ¥38.5bn; restructuring losses booked
- 2021Second consecutive net loss; the company system is abolished in April
- 2022Record-level results restored; move to the TSE Prime Market
- 2022Okada Naoki becomes president and CEO, concentrating on optical fibre and optical connection
Founding Story
1910–1979Putting down roots at Kiba as an independent cable maker
Fujikura began in March 1910 as the cable division of a cable-and-rubber partnership, set apart and incorporated in its own right — alone among Japan's cable big three in having no zaibatsu capital behind it. Taking in the postwar rebuilding of the power and telephone networks, it grew from revenue of $30M (¥11bn) in the year to March 1957 to $468.3M (¥108bn) in the year to March 1979, and used the money to buy the technology the next era would rest on.
The cable division split out of Fujikura Densen Gomu
In March 1910 the cable division of Fujikura Densen Gomu Gomei Kaisha was separated out and incorporated as Fujikura Densen Co.[1] Capital was ¥500,000 and the head office was placed at Sendagaya in Tokyo[2]. The parent, Fujikura Densen Gomu, was a combined cable-and-rubber business founded in 1885, and the separation of the cable side brought Fujikura into being as a dedicated cable manufacturer. Before the war the domestic cable market settled into a three-company structure — the cable big three of Sumitomo Densen Seisakusho (today Sumitomo Electric), Furukawa Electric and Fujikura[3] — within which Fujikura stood as the one independent with no zaibatsu behind it, competing head-on with the two zaibatsu firms. It worked early at absorbing foreign technology, and in 1935 developed a coaxial carrier cable of its own design, the Fujikura type, taking out patents in seven countries including the United States, Britain, Germany and France[4]; from before the war it held its own against the other two on technical merit. From then on Fujikura's management was governed throughout by the conviction that an independent could survive only by making a difference on technology — a line carried through unbroken even as the business moved on to optical fibre and optical connectors.
In 1923 the head office and works were moved to their present site at Kiba in Koto-ku[5], and in May 1949 the shares were listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange[6]. Through the postwar rebuilding of infrastructure the company took in demand for power cable, communications cable and magnet wire, and laid out domestic volume-production sites from eastern Japan across to the Tokai region: the Numazu works in 1954[7], designation to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1961[8], the Sakura works in 1965[9] and the Suzuka works in 1970[10]. Alongside these it opened the Osaka works in 1956 to supply raw material, and in October 1959 began operations at Numazu Yodo, a venture tied up with Mitsui Mining & Smelting, bringing the supply of copper ingot in-house[11]. Through the 1960s and 1970s Fujikura, as an independent cable maker with no zaibatsu behind it, was in the position of following Sumitomo and Furukawa on production scale; but by absorbing the two great postwar infrastructure programmes — the transmission networks of the nine electric power companies and the telephone network of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation — it held its place among the cable big three, and it was in this period that it earned the money for the technical investment of the reconstruction years.
Preparing proprietary technology for the coming age of optical fibre
In the 1970s, moving in step with the communications infrastructure investment of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (today NTT), Fujikura entered the development of optical fibre and optical cable. In optical fibre the field took shape as three companies working side by side — Sumitomo Electric, Furukawa Electric and Fujikura[12] — and within it Fujikura built a position of its own in the peripheral equipment that optical communication needs in the field, above all the fusion splicer, the machine that joins one fibre to another by melting them together at high temperature. In cable alone the economies of volume production were beginning to tell slightly against the independent and in favour of the zaibatsu firms; this was also the period in which the policy took shape of holding the peripheral equipment and the mounting technology in-house, so as to place the business one step away from price competition in the cable itself. The origin of the later brand — Fujikura, the technology company — was formed here.
The way management resources were allocated in these years became the ground on which optical cable and the fusion splicer were later raised into the signature products of Fujikura, the technology company. The 1970s were the period in which the cable industry began to go optical and electronic, and in which cable alone was leaving the independent at a disadvantage of scale against the zaibatsu firms; for Fujikura too, how to raise pillars of business outside cable had become a question of management. Against the coming maturity of the postwar volume businesses — power cable, wire harness — a strategy of staking out ground early in optical devices, connectors, electronic materials and mounting equipment showed clearly in the research spending and the training of engineers through the 1970s, and this was the period that became the origin of the later spread of the business portfolio and of the rapid growth of the optical fibre business.
Notes
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
- Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
- Fujikura Ltd., annual securities report 有価証券報告書 — corporate history section↩
References & sources
- Fujikura Ltd. (annual securities reports), the source for the consolidated and parent-company figures used throughout, including the corporate-history section.
- Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Fujikura entry.
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