Company history

A bearing is required wherever a machine transmits power — railways, machine tools, cars — and in 1916 Japan bought almost all of them from Europe. The First World War, by thinning that supply, exposed what the dependence meant: cut the imports and the whole machine industry stops. In November 1916, with backing from Shibusawa Eiichi, Yamaguchi Takehiko reorganised a partnership into a joint-stock company with ¥350,000 of capital in Shinagawa, Tokyo, and NSK became the first company to manufacture bearings industrially in Japan.

Its early customer was the Navy. Naval engineers filled the technical ranks, the first domestically made bearing went to the Yokosuka naval yard, and the first Japanese aircraft bearing was an NSK ball bearing. Civil demand followed the same precision logic — tapered roller bearings went into the Dat car of the pioneering Kaishinsha, and in 1932 into the axles of the national railway’s new petrol railcars, the first railway bearings made in Japan. Sales offices spread from Osaka in 1920 to Nagoya, Kokura and Sapporo, and the Tamagawa plant of 1935 imported Western automatic machinery to move to true mass production, which the military then turned to tank and aircraft bearings.

Most of the plants were designated for reparations at the end of the war, but Tamagawa and Fujisawa were exempted and became the base for rebuilding. Through the high-growth years NSK stacked up domestic capacity — Otsu in 1953, Ishibe in 1959, and in 1960 Kita Nippon Seiko in Maebashi, an operation that would eventually become NSK Steering Systems and, sixty years later, the subject of the company’s most difficult decision.

NSK opened NSK Corporation in New Jersey in December 1962 and NSK Deutschland in Düsseldorf in October 1963, building sales networks in the Americas and Europe at once. Germany was the home ground of SKF, so the office there was itself a provocation; what made it viable was moving in step with Japanese carmakers as they globalised. In 1964 a joint venture with Borg-Warner, NSK-Warner, took the company into automatic transmission components, and selling turned into making — Peterlee in the UK in 1974, Clarinda in the US in 1975, alongside new domestic plants in Saitama and Fukushima.

The economics of doing this were unforgiving. Exports were eaten by tariffs and import restrictions; local production in a market a twentieth the size of Japan’s could not reach scale. The Australian plant, four years into operation, was described by president Imazato Hiroki as a factory the size of a matchbox — 300,000 units a month, 3.5% share, accumulated losses — and NSK went inside the tariff wall anyway, having watched the import-blocking campaigns in the United States. The bill was paid in years rather than capital: it took more than a decade from the first UK survey in 1971 to reach 2.7% staff turnover, a 27% drop in defects and a recurring margin above 10%.

By the late 1980s NSK had covered every major region except Eastern Europe and China, adding a Korean plant at Changwon in 1987 just as Korean car exports began to rise. Bearings are a capital-goods business mixing standard and special products, and recovering that investment requires both geographic spread and scale. The decade of building sites was the run-up to the acquisitions of the 1990s — and it had also shifted NSK from a pure bearing maker to a bearing maker with an automotive parts business, the structural fact that would define it, for better and worse, for the next fifty years.

In March 1990 NSK bought 100% of UPI, the largest bearing maker in Britain — a company with roughly 3% of the European market acquiring the market’s incumbent. It was not a distribution deal but the wholesale purchase of European manufacturing capacity, and it lifted NSK to third in the world behind Sweden’s SKF and Germany’s Schaeffler. Frontier plants followed: Kunshan in China in 1995, a steering joint venture with Rane in India in 1997, and 70% of the Polish state enterprise FLT Iskra in 1998, a site that would later become the European core of the E&E business.

Then the demand side gave way. The collapse of the IT boom produced a net loss of ¥17.6bn in the year to March 2001 and another ¥2.6bn the following year, with revenue falling into the ¥480bn range. The capacity NSK had spent a decade accumulating ran backwards as fixed cost — the shock arriving precisely when the global build-out had finished. In April 2004, unusually early for a Japanese manufacturer, the company moved to a committee-based board structure, separating supervision from execution; an outside director who had joined on condition of a remuneration committee promptly enforced the rules on director bonuses in a loss-making year, which demonstrated that the delegated authority was not decorative.

Recovery followed: ¥22.3bn of net profit in the year to March 2005 and a peak in March 2008 of ¥772.0bn of revenue and ¥69.3bn of operating profit. The financial crisis then knocked revenue down by roughly ¥120bn in a single year, though NSK avoided a loss. It kept restructuring around the edges — spinning out ADTech in 2010 and NSK Technology in 2011, adding a Mexican plant at Silao in 2013 — and seeded electrification products, bearings for e-axles and ball screws for electric brakes, that would become the profit centres of the following decade. The dependence on cars, however, went untouched, and no shock absorber was built for the next downturn. Governance changed too: seven years after the committees were established, NSK was raided by the Fair Trade Commission over bearing price-fixing, and the damages claims ran on for years.

Uchiyama Toshihiro became president in June 2014 saying openly that the company should not confine itself to bearings, and the year to March 2015 delivered ¥974.8bn of revenue and ¥97.3bn of operating profit — a 10.0% margin that every subsequent medium-term plan would use as its benchmark. Widening the definition of the business, however, deepened rather than diluted the reliance on cars, and when the US-China trade conflict and falling global vehicle production arrived, operating profit fell to ¥23.6bn in the year to March 2020, a margin of 2.8%.

The year to March 2021 was worse in kind if not in scale: the automotive segment itself posted a ¥4.0bn loss, group operating profit was ¥6.3bn on a 0.9% margin, and net profit of ¥350m came within sight of the first bottom-line loss in the company’s history. Electrification investment was not being recovered, and the automotive parts business — steering above all — had become the structural problem at the centre of management.

The response was to move weight back toward industrial machinery and toward recurring revenue. In March 2021 NSK acquired Brüel & Kjær Vibro from Spectris, a condition-monitoring business built on vibration analysis of rotating machinery — the technical base for turning a component sold once into a monitoring and predictive-maintenance service sold continuously. Ichii Akitoshi took over as president in June 2021, and the largest item in his inbox was European electric power steering. Talks with thyssenkrupp on a steering joint venture broke down before March 2023, and with the European route closed, NSK turned to a domestic fund, Japan Industrial Solutions.

In April 2023 the steering business was split into ADTech and renamed NSK Steering & Control; in August, JIS took 50.1% of the voting rights against NSK’s 49.9%, moving it to equity-method accounting. The point was to detach the losses and repair the business from outside the consolidation — and it worked, converting roughly ¥9.0bn of losses into ¥4.3bn of profit in two years without changing the assets, the products or the customers. In September 2025 NSK bought the fund’s stake back and reconsolidated it, while stating that the standalone structure and the search for a strategic partner both continue. Sixty years after the business was founded in Maebashi, where it belongs is still undecided.

The larger answer came in 2026, with an agreement to combine with NTN under a joint holding company. NSK leads the domestic market but has long trailed SKF on operating margin, and against electrification, Chinese competition and a shrinking Japanese car industry, cutting European sites and repairing steering were judged insufficient on their own. Whether merging Japan’s two bearing champions is defensive consolidation or a platform for competing abroad will not be visible until the combination completes in 2027 and the numbers follow.