Amada - Company History

In September 1946 Amada Isamu opened Amada Seisakusho in Takadaminami-cho, Toshima ward, Tokyo. The currency reform of that year had wiped the slate clean enough to start again: he drew ¥3,000 of savings from the post office and borrowed a surviving row house from relatives — the same patch of ground his father had left after a failed business, a place Amada himself called “the gravel pit.” The firm was one lathe and one man, taking in machine repairs and parts for the municipal waterworks. After ten years apprenticed, four and a half in the army and three and a half in other people’s factories, a tradesman finally had his own footing. He incorporated as a limited partnership in 1948 and as a joint-stock company with ¥1m of capital in October 1953, living on machine-tool repair and tool sales while he looked for a product nobody else was making. An acquaintance mentioned that the occupation forces cut metal with band saws.

The tip came with a warning about how Amada intended to work. Meeting the acquaintance by chance at Takadanobaba station, he was offered a joint venture and a sketch of an American machine — and cut him off before the sketch left the bag: “please don’t show me.” To look would be to owe. Investigating on his own, he found the field almost empty: metal-cutting band saws were led by DoAll of the United States and a German maker, imports ran ¥700,000 to ¥1.3m and reached only a few large firms, and ordinary machine shops made do with hacksaws and circular saws. The market was too small for the big machine-tool builders to bother with. That was precisely the opening a back-street workshop could take.

Design work began in the autumn of 1954 with about ¥20m of his own money, some twenty new machines, and nothing to copy from but foreign catalogues and patent filings. “We were a back-street shop with no money — we could hardly buy an imported machine to study. We collected catalogues and whatever else we could and studied those,” he told a trade journal in 1963. Three months of drawings later, in January 1955, the first vertical band saw — the Contour Machine — was finished: roughly ¥200,000 to build, priced at $1,389 (¥500,000). Building a product for a market that allowed neither import nor imitation set the pattern for Amada’s engineering ever since: reinterpret existing technology under a hard cash constraint and land it in a shape of your own.

The first machine made Amada a manufacturer; it also exposed the harder problem. “If it doesn’t sell, you can’t build the next one” — so Amada put selling on the same level as engineering. The Contour Machine was received as a new weapon in the die trade, cutting jobs that took an hour of machining down to about twenty minutes. Against the first-rank makers who could afford imports, Amada went after the far more numerous small shops: it shrank a 16-inch machine to 12 inches — the first small band saw anywhere — and sold it at $833 (¥300,000), while Hitachi ordered the 20-inch model at the other end. A horizontal cut-off machine for bar stock followed in March 1956, with a plant at Kawaguchi and branches in Osaka and Nagoya.

Making selling the axis eventually meant rebuilding distribution itself. Amada had sold through trading houses such as Ataka Sangyo; in April 1960 it hived the sales department off as AM Shoji, and from 1965 set about building a direct network of its own. The complaint that drove it was informational — through an agent you never learn what the customer actually needs, and you hand over the price conversation as well. The key to the field was installment finance: bundling credit with the machine so that cash-poor job shops and sheet-metal subcontractors could buy at all. Growth followed the sales apparatus rather than the technology. In January 1964 the company took the name Amada and in February folded AM Shoji and an affiliated engineering lab back into the parent, reuniting making and selling under one roof.

Capacity and capital moved together. Betting on the industrial belt forming along the Pacific coast, Amada took some 33,000 m² in what was then farmland at Isehara, Kanagawa, and began building in February 1961 — a project needing about $972,222 (¥350m) against paid-in capital of ¥8m. Two rights issues took capital to ¥50m by May, and on 15 June the shares went public on the Tokyo over-the-counter market, moving to the TSE 2nd section that October and the 1st section in 1969. Going public fifteen years after founding was extraordinarily fast for the time. With the network in place Amada then widened its line — 1965 technical tie-ups brought presses and press brakes into production the same year, and Seattle (1971), Birmingham and Düsseldorf (1972) carried the direct model abroad. At home it began absorbing the industry’s casualties: a 30% stake in the struggling Yodogawa Press in 1973, control of Sonoike Seisakusho from Mitsui and others that November, 80% of Saga Kikai Kogyo in 1974, the reorganizing grinder maker Sansho in 1977, a first stake in Washino Kikai in 1978. None of it was smooth — Amada broke off the Yodogawa arrangement in mid-1974 over delivery and quality failures and only resumed once the target had forced through its own layoffs — but band saws, presses, bending and shearing were now one lineup, and the phrase “king of sheet-metal machinery” dates from here.

Through the 1980s and 1990s Amada exported not a product line but a method. Amada Italia opened in Milan in 1982; the French press-brake maker Promecam Sisson-Lehmann was bought in 1986 to become Amada S.A.; subsidiaries followed in Austria (1986), Canada and Buena Park, California (1987) and Singapore (1989). A Beijing joint venture in March 1993 opened China in earnest, with Thailand (1995), Malaysia and Shanghai (1996) and Australia (1998) after it. In every market the rule was the same one written at home in 1965 — stand up direct sales and after-sales service together, never leave the customer to an agent — because sheet-metal machinery lives or dies on the fine-grained support that follows the sale.

That accumulated contact turned out to be a sellable asset. By 1990 Amada was telling visitors that what it manufactured in its showrooms was processing software: some 60,000 programs on a mainframe, of which about 60% of any customer’s requirement could be met by modifying something already on file. No company that sold through dealers could have built such a library. The shift from selling a machine to selling a system with the know-how inside it was less a new idea than the invoicing of a by-product of twenty-five years of direct selling. Its limits were visible at once — software was only a fifth of sales, the number of companies coming to the showrooms had fallen by nearly half, and nine-tenths of those customers were small firms with little appetite for full factory systems.

At home the long work of consolidation went on. The rescued firms were renamed into the parent brand in April 1989 — Sonoike became Amada Sonoike, Washino became Amada Washino — and merged in outright later (Amada Metrecs in 2000, Amada Machinix in 2003). Absorbing the companies taken in from 1973 onward took roughly thirty years. Through all of it the business stayed pointed at one thing: by the year to March 2006, metal-working machinery was 99% of ¥221.8bn in sales. The lead product moved from band saws to presses to bending to lasers, but the field never changed.

In 2003 Okamoto Mitsuo became the fourth president and declared a “second founding.” As customers moved from mass production to high-mix, variable-volume work, selling them a single machine no longer answered the problem; Amada would combine lasers, punching, bending and welding and design the productivity of the whole shop — engineering rather than machinery. For a company whose pride was its selling, this was a change on the floor as much as in strategy: the salesman who quoted one machine now had to propose a factory. In March 2007 a development centre and a dedicated laser plant were completed at Fujinomiya, and the laser business that would become the core of the company starts from that investment.

The financial crisis hit in the middle of the turn. From ¥284.2bn of sales and ¥44.9bn of operating profit in the year to March 2008, revenue fell to ¥225.8bn and then to ¥136.0bn in the year to March 2010 — an operating loss of ¥9.6bn and a net loss of ¥3.7bn, the first operating loss since the founding, with sales at roughly 48% of the peak in a single step down. The response assumed no recovery in demand: the European and American service networks were redrawn, Amada Machine Tools Europe was set up, and Vietnam was added. Solution selling and region-by-region service optimization were being layered onto the old “Amada that sells” while the firm was still bleeding.

In March 2013 Amada took over Miyachi Technos — micro resistance and laser welding for lithium-ion batteries and electronic components — through a tender offer, later renaming it Amada Weld Tech. Adding joining to cutting, punching, pressing and bending widened the span of the metal-working process it could cover. It also marked a change of motive: unlike the rescue purchases that ran from 1973, this was a deal done to acquire a technology from a healthy company. Sales recovered to ¥256.5bn in the year to March 2014.

In April 2015 Amada moved to a holding-company structure as Amada Holdings, splitting sheet-metal sales and service into a subsidiary named Amada, development and manufacturing into Amada Engineering, and cutting blades into Amada Machine Tools, so that each business carried its own governance as the group’s company count kept rising. Isobe Tsutomu became the fifth president the same year and used the structure for global M&A. It paid immediately on the numbers: ¥304.0bn of sales and ¥42.5bn of operating profit in the first year under the new form, six years after the operating loss.

The clearest use of the structure came in 2018, when Amada bought two companies at once on opposite sides of the Pacific — Marvel Manufacturing of the United States, a saw maker with more than a century behind it, renamed Amada Marvel, and Orii Mec, the press feeder and uncoiler specialist bought from Namura Shipbuilding and renamed Amada Press System. Marvel was in a sense a return to the beginning: the metal-cutting field opened by the 1955 Contour Machine, reinforced by buying an American original. Running both integrations under separate operating subsidiaries kept the load off the parent, and the group grew without breaking stride — ¥338.1bn of revenue and ¥45.3bn of operating profit in the year to March 2019.

Then the structure was undone. In April 2020, five years after adopting it, Amada absorbed its own subsidiary and took back the plain name Amada Co., Ltd. The holding layer had served the integrations, but for a company concentrated on one business it duplicated governance and slowed decisions — the machine-tool maker Okuma had reached the same conclusion and reversed course within a couple of years in the 2000s. The pandemic year, with sales down to ¥250.4bn, made the cost of slow decisions plain. Amada moved to the TSE Prime market in April 2022, with sales back to ¥365.7bn and operating profit ¥49.9bn in the year to March 2023, and Yamanashi Takaaki became the sixth president in April 2023. Amada Weld Tech was folded into the parent in 2024, continuing the fifty-year habit of resolving every acquisition into one company. In 2025 came the largest purchase yet: H&F, for presses above 3,000 tons, and Via Mechanics, for drilling high-end circuit boards — $459.1M (¥69bn) spent not to rescue anyone but to buy dimensions Amada lacked.