Hoshizaki - Company History

Hoshizaki began in February 1947 as Hoshizaki Electric, in Momozono-cho in Nagoya’s Mizuho ward, with ¥180,000 of capital. Sakamoto Shigetoshi — born in Shimane in 1908 — had quit Brother Industries to strike out on his own, and for the first stretch his former employer kept him alive: the founding trade was subcontracted sewing-machine parts for Brother. In that same first year he put out a product of his own, a slide rule called BANTO, named from his initials and those of the engineer who built it, and sold into the measuring-instrument shortage of the postwar years.

What followed was not a strategy so much as a search. A new company with no market of its own could only get in where the big firms had not yet arrived, so Sakamoto kept moving: the head office shifted in 1948, the works again in 1952, and in 1956 production settled at a new plant in Toyoake, Aichi — still the company’s home. Travelling with a delegation to American machine-tool makers in 1955, he noticed that water coolers were selling well there, bought one as a souvenir and carried it home.

The detour paid anyway. Because a water cooler and a drinks dispenser are much the same machine, an order arrived for vending units for the Nagoya Festival, and in October 1957 Hoshizaki went into juice vending machines. In a market where scarcely any vending-machine makers existed, the fountain-type dispenser became the mainstay, and for the first half of the 1960s Hoshizaki was, straightforwardly, a vending-machine company. The pattern that would define it was already set: don’t fix on a product, move light into whatever demand is unoccupied.

When the large electrical makers moved into vending in the 1960s the niche closed, the juice-vending boom broke in 1963, and Hoshizaki lost its mainstay. What it turned to was an ice machine the founder’s eldest son, Sakamoto Kiyoshi, had been developing on his own inside the company. The idea had come to him in 1960: stopping in Chicago on the way to a vending trade show in Miami, he fell into conversation with an American who held the patent on a large flake-ice machine and was told that water, paper and ice were what would grow. Back home he built ten prototypes and walked them into the restaurants of Nagoya’s Nishiki district, and sold not one — Japanese kitchens bought their ice from ice manufacturers, and that was that. What the failed calls taught him was that the demand was not for cheap ice but for hard, slow-melting cubes, so he moved the design upmarket, worked around the American patents with technology of his own, and in 1964 completed Japan’s first fully automatic ice machine. It went on sale in January 1965.

Then nobody bought it. Restaurants were unconvinced and the distributors were lukewarm, so Hoshizaki stopped asking them and went to the restaurants itself. Hoshizaki Tokyo was set up in December 1966, and over the next twenty-two years came the Tokai, Keihan and Kita-Kyushu companies, then Tohoku, Kanto, Shikoku, Chugoku, Shonan, Hokushin-etsu, Hanshin, Hokkaido, Kita-Kanto, Minami-Kyushu and finally Okinawa in 1988 — some fourteen wholly owned sales companies covering the country. The logic was the product’s, not the salesman’s: when a restaurant’s ice machine or refrigerator fails, the restaurant stops trading, so someone comes and fixes it today is what closes the sale. Through a distributor that promise is only as good as the distributor; in-house, sales and service are one thing. As the chain restaurant industry took off in the 1970s, that network became an asset no competitor could assemble quickly — and, because each company was run locally, a structure head office could not easily see into.

With the ice machine established, father and son pushed outward across the commercial kitchen: draft beer dispensers in 1970, commercial refrigerators in 1972 — first sourced from the specialist Fukushima Industrial, later brought in-house, turning a supplier into a competitor — then walk-in cold rooms, dishwashers and a second and third plant in Shimane. In December 1981 Kiyoshi, who had found the ice machine on that American trip twenty-one years earlier, led the company abroad for the first time with Hoshizaki America in California; a Georgia head plant followed in 1986, ending the reliance on exports. In 1987 he asked his father to hand over the presidency when he turned fifty. His father refused and stayed. Kiyoshi withdrew to run an affiliate, Nestor, with Hoshizaki’s stake cut to 14%, and the breach stayed open. The company renamed itself Hoshizaki Electric in December 1989; the founder held the presidency until his death in November 2003.

The 1990s were spent laying a grid. Hoshizaki Europe B.V. opened in Amsterdam in 1992 and a British company followed in 1994; a Singapore representative office of 1996 became a subsidiary in 1999; a Beijing office opened in 1998 to study China. The sequence — survey, representative office, local company — became the house method. At home the Shimane plants expanded into beer equipment, a subsidiary was absorbed, and a refrigerator plant went up in Griffin, Georgia in 2001. By the turn of the century Hoshizaki was a full-line maker of commercial kitchen equipment with more of its business outside Japan than any of its domestic peers.

The founder died in November 2003, and Kiyoshi — who had kept his distance for sixteen years — came back and took the presidency in February 2005. What he did with it was to stop building and start buying. In February 2006 Hoshizaki acquired Lancer Corporation of Texas outright, a major American maker of beverage dispensers selling into restaurant chains, convenience stores and fast food; a North American holding company was created the same year, and Nestor and Sansei Denki were folded in at home. In September 2008 it bought Gram Commercial of Denmark, a long-established European commercial-refrigerator manufacturer with a Nordic sales and service network. A company that had spent twenty-five years assembling foreign operations one office at a time had decided to pay for the other decade instead.

Three months after Gram, in December 2008, Hoshizaki listed on the first sections of the Tokyo and Nagoya exchanges — sixty-one years after its founding and squarely in the wreckage of the global financial crisis. The stated aims were funding, visibility abroad, and employee incentives. The unstated one mattered more: a company that had never needed the capital market took on the obligation of explaining acquired businesses, on consolidated accounts, to outsiders. In the same three years it pulled its own group tighter, absorbing the Sakamoto Shoji and Hoshizaki Kaden sales arms in 2005 and winding up a failed venture in 2007 — buying abroad while consolidating at home.

After 2009 the map filled in fast: Taiwan and Hong Kong in 2010, a Chinese holding company in Shanghai in 2012, then in a single year India (Western Refrigeration), Korea and Brazil (Aços Macom) in 2013, Indonesia in 2014, Thailand and Malaysia in 2015, Vietnam in 2016, the Philippines in 2017. The chair moved with it. Kiyoshi stepped up to chairman in 2011 and Suzuki Yukihiko became the fourth president; Kiyoshi returned as chairman and president in 2014; in July 2016 the company dropped “Electric” from its name — refrigeration, warming, washing, beverages and cooking had outgrown the word — and in March 2017, at eighty, he handed the presidency to Kobayashi Yasuhiro, the first long-serving president from outside the founding family.

A little over a year later the network turned on itself. In September 2018 a whistleblower exposed fictitious orders at Hoshizaki Tokai — the showpiece subsidiary covering head office’s own territory, and therefore the one carrying the heaviest sales targets — placed with an outside contractor of long standing. The investigation delayed the accounts, and on 14 December 2018 the exchange put the shares under supervision, with delisting a live possibility; the quarterly report was filed on the 27th and the designation lifted the next day. A third-party committee reported in May 2019, putting the fictitious orders at roughly $275,204 (¥30m) and blaming a target-first sales-company culture and weak risk management at the centre. It was the other face of 1966: judgement devolved to companies close to the customer is judgement head office cannot see.

Kobayashi answered with a five-year vision to 2026 — $2.8B (¥450bn) of sales, ¥63bn of operating profit, return on equity above 12% — and with acquisitions aimed at specific gaps rather than at scale. Turkey (Oztiryakiler) opened the Middle East in 2019; after the move to the Prime market in 2022 came Brema of Italy in ice machines, Naomi in filling equipment and a Beijing kitchen-engineering firm inside six months; then Fogel of Panama and Technolux of the Philippines in 2024, a Vietnamese industrial refrigeration company and Structural Concepts of the United States in 2025. Each fills a regional or product hole in the same four core categories — ice machines, dishwashers, refrigeration, beverage equipment — laid over the older assets: an in-house service network at the counter, a full line above it, local manufacture and sales around it. Whether the bought companies earn their price, and whether the governance lesson of 2018 travels to a subsidiary network now spread across four continents, is what the next decade turns on.