The Toyota City plant: full entry into automotive seats (1961)

Choosing to build next door

What the 1961 decision settled was not whether to go into seats but how. With a product designed differently for every customer, the route of pooling output in a general-purpose plant was closed from the start. NHK Spring stayed neutral in terms of capital while drawing close to its customers in the physical unit of the factory. The plant it built in Toyota City was the first of them. Kawasaki, Hiroshima and Ota that followed, and the joint ventures with Faurecia in Kyushu, Xiangyang and India, were the same drawing traced again.

This way of choosing copies the customer’s production plan straight onto your own utilization rate. When a model sells, the plant runs; when a model ends, only fixed costs remain until the next order is won. That the 2026 Medium-Term Management Plan puts the seat business on a lower-sales, lower-profit path and names competitiveness for successor-model orders as the issue lies on the extension of the line drawn sixty-five years ago. The day it built a plant next to Toyota was the day it gained volume — and equally the day it decided to leave its utilization rate to another company’s model plans.