Company history

Komatsu’s roots run back to Takeuchi Mining, led by the Tosa-born industrialist Meitaro Takeuchi, who worked coal and copper mines across Japan. To make and repair the machinery those mines needed, in 1917 he opened the Komatsu Iron Works beside the Yusenji copper mine in Ishikawa, installing Masujiro Hashimoto — a pioneer of the domestic motor car — as its first head. When the slump after the First World War forced the parent to retrench, the works was spun off, and in May 1921 Komatsu Ltd. was established in the small town of Komatsu with ¥1 million in capital. It set out in two trades at once — mining and excavation machinery, and electric cast steel — a mining company’s workshop that made its own machines.

Through the 1920s and 1930s the workshop grew into a maker of mining machinery and machine tools, steadied after 1925 by an incoming president brought in from outside when the parent’s troubles and the post-war recession pressed hard. Looking for products no one else made, in 1931 Komatsu answered a Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry request to localize farm tractors: modelled on a small Caterpillar machine, its two-ton crawler tractor became Japan’s first, and Komatsu — able to lean on its own cast steel — made tractors a new mainstay, building the Awazu plant in 1938 for integrated production. In wartime it built tow tractors and earth-moving vehicles, and in 1943 prototyped Japan’s first domestic bulldozer, reaching the war’s end before it could be mass-produced. The design know-how banked in those years would matter more than anyone then knew.

Peace brought crisis. When the ministry that had ordered tractors abruptly cancelled everything in 1947, Komatsu lost its mainstay — tractors and farm tools were over 60% of output — and a hundred-day labour dispute broke out. Yoshinari Kawai, the former farm-ministry official who had urged Komatsu into tractors and felt a duty to it, took the presidency, settled the dispute and cut some 700 jobs. His next lifeline was artillery: from 1949 Komatsu ramped up shell production for the US military during the Korean War, taking about $44.4M (¥16bn) of orders over 1952–1955 — roughly 40% of the nation’s shell orders — until shells reached 72% of sales, a perilous structure that rose and fell on a single customer’s orders. The escape was the bulldozer: Komatsu had completed the D50 in 1947 and improved it almost yearly, and in 1956, as the Korean boom faded, it converted the Osaka plant wholly to bulldozers, sending a decade of quietly banked development straight into mass production. Riding the government’s road-building plans and dam demand, construction equipment reached about 70% of output within three years — and a shell-dependent munitions maker had become, in effect, the Komatsu of today.

In 1960 the government unveiled its plan for capital liberalization, and the world’s largest maker, Caterpillar, entered Japan through a joint venture with Shin-Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. President Kawai protested to MITI but, judging the national policy impossible to stop, narrowed his entire response to one point — quality. In August 1961 he set up the Maru-A (“Ace”) task force under the executive Ryoichi Kawai; named for the ace in a deck of cards, it was to outrank any other matter in the company. Komatsu tore Caterpillar’s machines down, revised roughly 80% of all parts — about 3,200 of 4,000 — and, over fierce internal objection, even fitted American Cummins engines, setting aside its go-it-alone pride to close the one gap that mattered.

It worked emphatically. The 1963 D50A “Super” series cut complaints to a fifth of before, and Komatsu stretched its warranties as durability climbed. Backed by capital spending on the order of $138.9M (¥50bn) in 1969–70, it held a commanding 60–65% of the domestic bulldozer market, and a two-firm duopoly with Caterpillar-Mitsubishi settled into place. The outside pressure meant to threaten domestic makers had been turned into the lever for an internal quality revolution — the core of Komatsu’s competitiveness ever after.

Aiming to become a full-line maker, Komatsu pushed the cash and skills earned in bulldozers into neighbouring machines. In 1963 it formed Komatsu-Bucyrus with Bucyrus-Erie and Mitsui to localize excavators; in 1968 — about ten years behind the field — it began building hydraulic excavators with the “15-H.” Its share was still only 14% in 1974, a hard latecomer’s start, until the durability-improved “15HT-2” of 1972 began drawing job-site orders and the gap with Caterpillar-Mitsubishi began, slowly, to close.

Komatsu’s comeback was built on the breadth of its sales reach. From 1957 it had built a direct-sales network of branches and offices in every prefecture rather than relying on dealers, and the footprint laid down for bulldozers reached some 650 locations for hydraulic excavators — two to three times Caterpillar-Mitsubishi’s 200 or Hitachi Construction Machinery’s 350. Because the buyers overlapped with its existing bulldozer customers, that network carried the new machines directly, and in 1976 Komatsu took the No. 1 domestic share in hydraulic excavators despite entering late.

By 1987 it held 32% of the domestic excavator market and stood as the only maker leading in both bulldozers and hydraulic excavators at home. The years were not without turmoil — Chairman Kawai’s dismissal of President Nogawa in 1987 shook the top of the company — but the patiently built sales network and accumulated engineering held firm, and the two-firm duopoly kept Komatsu’s earnings base solid.

Alongside the comeback, Komatsu’s centre of gravity moved from home to abroad. It founded Komatsu America in 1970 to drive exports, and a sales mix that was just 12% export in 1969 flipped as the excavator line widened — by 1982 exports were 64% of revenue. To compete with global rivals it opened an advanced-technology research lab in 1985 and, in 1988, a construction-equipment joint venture with America’s Dresser. Through the 1980s Komatsu became a genuinely international company — the world’s No. 2 maker of construction equipment behind Caterpillar — its exposure to exchange rates and overseas cycles rising as its stature did.

The 1990s brought a costly detour. Under a “beyond construction equipment” banner, Komatsu poured investment from 1993 into silicon wafers through Komatsu Electronics, hoping to escape the brutal cycles of the machine business — but it could not catch specialists like Shin-Etsu, and by the late 1990s it withdrew, booking its first consolidated loss along the way. The lesson stuck: cyclicality was not to be diluted by diversifying away from the core, but overcome by creating distinctive value within construction equipment, using the overseas network built up since Komatsu America.

That conviction took concrete form. In 1998 Komatsu developed KOMTRAX, a system to monitor machines remotely — putting construction equipment online long before “IoT” was a word, and turning the fleet’s operating data into both a customer service and a leading indicator of the market that investors came to watch. When Masahiro Sakane became president in 2001, his “Dantotsu” (“unrivalled”) reform took the pain of restructuring all at once at the bottom of the cycle while nurturing products rivals could not match — engineering a V-shaped recovery and leaving behind, in his phrase, “a company that grows stronger with each generation.”

In April 2017 Komatsu acquired America’s Joy Global, a maker of ultra-large mining machines, at last completing the full mining lineup it had long sought and standing on the same ground as Caterpillar across both construction and mining equipment. Record consolidated sales of $21.3B (¥2.8tn) followed for the year to March 2022, underpinned increasingly by a parts-and-service business that cushions the swings of a cyclical market. Since then Komatsu has become a seller as well as a buyer: under its DANTOTSU Value mid-term plans it has shed unprofitable underground-coal operations and reshaped its China business while adding underground-mining specialists such as Australia’s MineSite Technologies, Germany’s GHH and Sweden’s Bracke. In 2024 the presidency passed from Hiroyuki Ogawa to Takuya Imayoshi, whose task is to decide how far to carry that pruning in the next plan.