Daifuku - Company History

Daifuku began in May 1937 as Sakaguchi Machine Works, an independent machine shop in Nishiyodogawa, Osaka, capitalized at ¥300,000 and employing about 150 people. Its main line was forging and pressing machinery for the steel industry — air hammers, rolling mills, plate levellers, hydraulic presses — plus cranes and dredgers. The Sino-Japanese war that broke out weeks later pushed Japanese steel into a historic expansion, and orders from the Osaka steelworks carried the shop through two capital increases and, in 1939, into a new plant at Mitejima, the site of its head office to this day, with a workforce near 400.

Growth came with a trading house behind it. From about 1939 the bridge builder Nippon Bridge and its parent Iwai & Co. took a hand in management; in May 1941 the general trading company Kanematsu invested and joined the board, and by the end of that year Iwai had withdrawn and Kanematsu stood alone. Textile traders squeezed by raw-material controls were moving into heavy industry, and Kanematsu had found its machine shop. Designated an Army- and Navy-supervised plant in 1943, the company built reciprocating engines for standard wartime ships alongside its presses and cranes, and in March 1944 it took the name Kanematsu Kiko. In March 1945 it dispersed production to a new plant at Fukuchiyama, north of Kyoto, to escape the air raids.

The name Daifuku was born of the occupation. In August 1947, with Kanematsu’s shareholding exposed to the antitrust law, Kanematsu Kiko became Daifuku Kiko — a coinage joining the dai of Osaka with the fuku of Fukuchiyama, proposed by the executive vice-president and liked for its auspicious ring in the China trade. The business behind the new name was in far worse shape. Even the Korean War boom missed it: the company carried an accumulated deficit of $166,667 (¥60m)–$194,444 (¥70m) and came within a hair of defaulting, survived a boardroom argument over whether to continue at all, cut about 40% of its staff and sold the plants where it had started. Fukuchiyama was spun off in 1953 and sold in 1957, concentrating everything at Mitejima.

What saved it was borrowed technology. Cut off from further money by Kanematsu and left with nothing but its own machining skill, Daifuku Kiko pushed into materials handling. Kanematsu’s Masuda Kenjiro talked Switzerland’s Bühler into a tie-up, and in 1952 president Senoo travelled to Switzerland to sign it, bringing back the chain-in-trough Bulk Veyor for grain, coal and cement; the first unit went to a Yokkaichi warehouse, then to Ajinomoto, Tokyo Gas and the Yawata steelworks coal yards. The second thread ran to Detroit: in the summer of 1954 Kanematsu’s Taguchi Shigeo became the first Japanese to visit Jervis B. Webb, and in 1956, through a contact at Toyota Auto Body made on a plate-leveller sale, Toyota Motor adopted the Webb conveyor. The licence was formally approved in December 1957, and the forged chain at the conveyor’s heart — which no established Japanese maker would touch — was localized on the strength of the founding forging trade.

The Webb conveyor arrived exactly as Japan began mass-producing cars. Toyo Kogyo (later Mazda) and a widening list of carmakers and warehouse operators followed Toyota, and by 1960 Daifuku Kiko was running at $3.3M (¥1bn) of annual sales and had repaid its borrowings from Kanematsu. Plate levellers, roller conveyors, stackers and cranes broadened the line; a plant at Komaki in Aichi opened in 1963 to sit close to the Tokai motor industry. Parent-company sales climbed from $27.5M (¥10bn) in the year to March 1969 to $127.7M (¥35bn) four years later.

The capital markets opened in step. Daifuku listed on the Osaka exchange’s second section in October 1961, Tokyo’s in July 1962 and Nagoya’s in October 1968, and in August 1969 — thirty-two years after its founding — it was promoted to the first section of all three at once.

Then the first oil shock hit a business made entirely of other companies’ capital spending. Parent sales fell from $127.7M (¥35bn) to $73M (¥21bn) and $59.2M (¥18bn), with ordinary profit down far harder. The response was to rebuild the production base: in April 1975 Daifuku set up the electronics subsidiary Contec and opened the Hino plant — today’s Shiga Works — midway between Osaka and Tokyo, fixing the policy of concentrating manufacturing on Shiga that would run until the Osaka plant was folded in in 1999. And in February 1983, a quarter-century after licensing Webb’s technology, it opened Daifuku U.S.A., its first overseas subsidiary, to sell automated guided vehicles and conveyor systems into the North American car plants — this time on its own account.

In May 1984 the company took the name it exports under: Daifuku Co., Ltd., closing the gap between the Japanese trading names it had carried since 1937 and the Latin script it needed abroad. Subsidiaries followed the customers — Canada in 1985, Singapore in 1986, then Thailand, Taiwan, Malaysia, Korea and Indonesia between 1991 and 1995 — laying a supply network across the car, electronics and logistics industries of Asia on the back of Kanematsu’s trading reach. At home the 1990s ran the other way: peripheral businesses were pushed into subsidiaries while manufacturing was consolidated, the Osaka plant’s equipment moving to Shiga in March 1999.

China came next. Daifuku set up in Shanghai in March 2002 and added car-wash and conveyor ventures there in 2005, the same year it opened Daifuku India, while a 2004 purchase of Kito’s logistics-systems business filled out the product line. Then, in December 2007, it bought Jervis B. Webb outright — the company that had taught it chain conveyors fifty years earlier. What Daifuku wanted was not the symmetry but Webb’s airport baggage-handling business, a field it could not have built in the time available; the acquisition gave it a North American base in automotive and airports at a stroke. In March of the same year Contec listed on the Tokyo exchange’s second section.

Webb set the pattern for seven straight years of buying. Britain’s Logan Teleflex (2011) brought European airports; Daifuku Webb Holding, formed in 2011, gathered the North American companies under one roof; Hitachi Plant Technologies’ clean-room transport business (2012) added semiconductor and LCD handling; Wynright (2013) brought e-commerce warehouse automation in North America; and New Zealand’s BCS Group (2014) brought airports in Oceania. By the end of it, four businesses — airports, e-commerce logistics, automotive and semiconductors — were covered across North America, Europe, Greater China and Oceania, each acquired company renamed Daifuku and placed under a regional holding structure.

The network bought between 2007 and 2014 was waiting when three waves arrived together: e-commerce warehouse automation, semiconductor and electronics capital spending, and airport baggage systems. Consolidated sales rose from $2.2B (¥267bn) in the year to March 2015 to $4.2B (¥460bn) four years later, with operating profit up from $123.1M (¥15bn) to $501.8M (¥55bn) — 1.7 times the revenue, 3.7 times the profit. The pandemic’s surge in logistics automation pushed sales to $4.3B (¥602bn) by March 2023.

Growth was accompanied by structural tidying aimed squarely at foreign investors. In March 2022 Daifuku made a tender offer for its listed subsidiary Contec and took it private in April, ending fifteen years of the parent–subsidiary double listing that the June 2021 revision of the Corporate Governance Code had put under scrutiny for its conflict with minority shareholders; the parent itself moved to the Tokyo exchange’s Prime market in the same restructuring. In June 2024 it moved its financial year-end from 31 March to 31 December — a nine-month transitional period — ending eighty-seven years of March closing so that consolidation with calendar-year overseas subsidiaries, and comparison with foreign peers, would run on one basis.

Leadership turned over alongside. Shimodai Hiroshi, who came up through the factory-automation and logistics-systems sales side and drove the global build-out, moved to representative director and chairman in 2025, handing the presidency to Terai Tomoaki, whose career ran through clean-room transport and the overseas subsidiaries. The line held: consolidated sales for the year to December 2025 reached $4.4B (¥661bn) with operating profit of $673.6M (¥101bn), a 15.3% margin and the best in the company’s history. What remains for Terai is the question the acquisitions posed — how to point a four-axis global structure, assembled by purchase, at the next round of growth.