Company history

Mori Rinpei founded Mori Seiki Seisakusho in October 1948 at Yamatokoriyama, a provincial town in Nara, to build textile machinery. The timing was good: in the reconstruction years textiles were Japan’s designated earner of foreign currency, and demand for spinning equipment was recovering fast. For a decade the company was a textile-machinery specialist and nothing else — a small regional maker living off a single national priority.

That priority did not last. From the late 1950s the industry shifted to synthetic fibres and moved production offshore, and domestic orders for textile machinery began to thin. Rather than hold a shrinking core, Mori Seiki stopped making textile machinery outright in May 1958 and started building high-speed precision lathes — a complete change of trade ten years after founding. The choice of a plain lathe was deliberate: of all machine tools it had the widest use and the deepest demand, which meant it could be built to forecast rather than to order and its process could be rationalized. Low cost, high volume became the operating principle from that day.

The rest of the era built the plant to match. The head office and works moved within Yamatokoriyama in January 1962; numerically controlled lathes went on sale in April 1968, putting the company into the NC transition early; and in December 1970 a second works opened at Iga in Mie prefecture — the site that would become the group’s manufacturing core.

Mori Seiki had entered machine tools late, and it overtook the incumbents by inverting how they worked. The trade custom was to build each machine to order with skilled hands and to keep capacity deliberately thin against the next downturn. Mori Seiki narrowed its range to mid-size general-purpose machines and built the SL-3 to forecast at roughly 200 units a month. On cost and export competitiveness, unlisted sales went from $5.8M (¥2bn) in the year to January 1972 to $80.4M (¥19bn) in the year to March 1979 — debt-free throughout, paying ¥15 a share. The company listed on the Osaka exchange in November 1979 and in Tokyo in November 1981, and reached the first sections of both in 1983.

Volume was underwritten by making almost everything itself. Where rivals bought ball screws and Curvic couplings from suppliers such as NSK, Mori Seiki machined those core parts at Iga; by 1987 a block-build scheme was combining eight basic units — beds, spindles, turrets — into 252 distinct CNC lathes, and FMS plants at Iga and Nara with automated warehouses and guided vehicles delivered inside a month. Direct sales followed the machines abroad: a German subsidiary in 1982, a US one in 1983, which through the 1980s made Mori Seiki one of the industry’s “big three” alongside Okuma and Yamazaki Mazak.

The economics were without peer. In the year to March 1989 the parent posted a 25.9% ordinary margin and a 24.1% operating margin — first in Japanese machine tools, more than ten points clear of second-placed Amada — on $390.6M (¥54bn) of equity and no debt. Plant per employee stood at ¥20.1m against Okuma’s ¥3.8m and Hitachi Seiki’s ¥2.6m. And at exactly that point the president began saying the model was finished.

President Mori described what the company had achieved as “doing a temple carpenter’s work by prefab.” With demand moving toward FMS and computer-integrated manufacturing, he argued, the basic performance of the machine itself had to be rebuilt — and he moved while the balance sheet was still comfortable rather than waiting to be forced. The cost was immediate: a plant designed for volume did not suit made-to-order work, equipment had to be replaced, and losses followed. At home the image of a volume producer proved durable, so the turn toward quality paid off first in bespoke machines for European and American majors.

Capacity kept growing through the transition — a Nara works in 1986, a second Iga works in 1992 — and in June 1999 Mori Masahiko took the presidency from his father Mori Yukio, three years earlier than planned. He had not been groomed as the heir; he had learned trade at Itochu, then earned the job inside the company on overseas development and a shift to cash settlement. He inherited a structure fifty years in the making: machine tools only, NC from early, and direct sales across Japan, the US and Europe.

Under him the group widened on both flanks. Shanghai opened in 2001, adding China to the three-pole sales network, and 40% of the grinder maker Taiyo Koki was acquired the same year. In 2002 Mori Seiki took over part of the business of the collapsed Hitachi Seiki, stepping into the consolidation of the Japanese industry. Then it pushed vertical integration upstream: a 33.5% stake in the foundry Watanabe Seikosho in 2005 and its own casting plant at Iga in 2006, so that the heaviest input in a machine tool was made in-house while rivals bought it. Switzerland’s DIXI Machines was absorbed in 2006, and the head office moved from Nara to Nagoya in 2004.

In March 2009 Mori Seiki agreed a business and capital alliance with GILDEMEISTER AG of Germany. The company had made a habit of investing ahead of each industry turn, but this was an order of magnitude larger than anything before, so it was not bought outright: the position was accumulated. The stake rose to 20.1% in 2011, the trade name became DMG MORI SEIKI in October 2013, and in April 2015 the German company was consolidated at 89.6% of voting rights — six years from handshake to control. The English name became DMG MORI CO., LTD. in June 2015, and a domination agreement in 2016 completed the European structure.

Mori’s stated reason for the slow route was that the merger was about fusing manufacturing with service and application work and “prospering together with customers and suppliers worldwide on a twenty-year horizon.” On that timescale, integration mattered more than speed. Manufacturing followed the same logic outward: a US plant established in 2011 and running in 2012, a Chinese plant at Tianjin in 2012 that began production in 2013 — machines built in the markets that bought them, under a single Japanese-German brand.

With the merger settled, spending moved to software and people. An advanced technology research centre opened at the Tokyo headquarters in 2017; Technium, a digital joint venture with Nomura Research Institute, followed in 2018 alongside a digital innovation centre in Tokyo and a digital plant at the FAMOT works in Poland; a global parts centre opened at Iga in 2019, a digital-twin showroom in 2020, and an additive manufacturing subsidiary in 2021. In July 2022 the company adopted a two-headquarters structure — a product development centre in Nara and the global headquarters in Tokyo — and, in the same month, raised parent-company pay by 24% on an annualized basis, an added $89.8M (¥12bn) of group payroll it described as the highest level in the industry. Treating engineer and service pay as strategy, not cost, was the point.

The 2023–2025 medium-term plan built on MX — machining transformation: fewer setups through process integration, plus automation, digital and green initiatives, sold as higher value per machine. It opened well, with revenue of ¥539.4bn and operating profit of ¥55.5bn in the year to December 2023, a 10% margin in year one, and shareholder returns pulled forward a year to a ¥100 dividend.

The last acquisitions filled gaps the German merger had left: horizontal boring machines and grinders, and distribution inside Japan. Kurashiki Kikai was bought outright in January 2024 and renamed DMG MORI Precision Boring; Taiyo Koki was taken to full ownership in February 2025; the machine-tool distributor Miyawaki Machinery Plant followed in March 2025, when the registered head office returned to Nara. Then the bill arrived. The year to December 2025 brought revenue of ¥515.0bn, down 4.6%, and operating profit of just ¥19.0bn after one-off charges — an SAP S/4HANA rollout, disposal of excess parts inventory and the seizure of the Russian plant (€91.8m). The 2025 plan was set aside for 2030 targets of ¥800bn in revenue and a 15% operating margin, leaving open the question of whether MX can lift unit prices and margins for long enough to get there.