Company history

Ball-bearing research began in March 1918 at the Nishizono ironworks in Kuwana, Mie prefecture, at a time when Japan imported nearly all of its bearings from Europe. Bearings are a capital-goods business — precision heat treatment, precision grinding — and a provincial workshop could not carry the equipment and the sales network at once. In May 1923 the ironworks tied up with the trading house Tomoe Shokai and began selling domestically made bearings under a three-letter mark, NTN, taken from the initials of Niwa Noboru, Tomoe and Nishizono. Manufacturing and selling belonged to different companies from the start; that division of labour was how a latecomer got into a market the Europeans held.

The bearing arm was incorporated separately in 1927, became a joint-stock company in 1934, and was renamed Toyo Bearing Manufacturing in 1937. War work took it to more than 1,500 employees and Japan’s largest bearing maker, and in 1939 it opened the Kuwana plant that has been the physical centre of the company ever since — flattened by bombing just before the surrender, held under reparations designation until April 1952, and still, in 2025, the site chosen to consolidate the metres-wide bearings built for wind turbines.

In May 1949 the company listed on the first sections of the Osaka and Tokyo exchanges — early for a Japanese bearing maker — and put the proceeds into capacity for the reconstruction boom. Through the 1960s it absorbed other bearing makers into a national plant network, and then went abroad ahead of its peers: a European sales company in Germany in 1962, on SKF’s home ground; an American one in New York in 1963; and in 1971 its first overseas plant, in Schiller Park, Illinois, followed by German production the same year. In a business of heavy, low-value-per-kilo standard parts, making them near the customer is the only real defence against freight and exchange rates.

The export brand became the company. Renamed NTN Toyo Bearing in 1972 and simply NTN Corporation in 1989, the firm dropped the name it had traded under since before the war so that its sign abroad and at home would be the same. The 1970s had already shown what its competitive instinct was: in the slump at the end of that decade it cut output early rather than holding inventory, turned back to expansion at the first sign of recovery, and got ahead of the shift to front-wheel drive with constant-velocity joints — while a domestic rival that fell into losses had to hand its rebuilding to others.

That second product line became the second pillar. NTN Driveshaft opened in Columbus, Ohio in 1989 to make constant-velocity joints in America, and NTN Transmissions Europe followed in France in 1998. The economics were deliberate: bearings are largely standard parts sold into a price war, so the higher value of drive components was there to carry the margin the bearings could not. From 2002 the company also went into China, in Shanghai, Pinghu and Guangzhou, partly through joint ventures.

Then came a rescue of a different kind. After the collapse of the IT boom and the sudden death of his predecessor, Suzuki Yasunobu — a production man in a company whose presidents had come from banking and administration, and facing a terminal diagnosis of his own — located the cause of the slump not in the economy but in the walls inside the firm. He pushed through the voluntary redundancies no previous president had touched, dismantled the vertical organization, and pointed everyone at a single goal: first in the world in constant-velocity joints. NTN returned to record profits.

Selling into Europe was no longer enough. To be designed into a European car, a supplier has to develop alongside the customer, on the ground — so NTN took a stake in the German driveshaft maker IFA-Antriebstechnik in April 2006, bought into the old French bearing house S.N.R. Roulements that July, and consolidated it in April 2008. With manufacturing, sales and development of its own in Europe, NTN became the world’s fourth-largest bearing maker, behind SKF, Schaeffler and NSK; the French company was rebranded NTN-SNR in 2010.

The bill arrived before the benefit. Demand evaporated within months of consolidation: revenue fell to ¥527.0 billion in the year to March 2009 for a net loss of ¥8.9 billion, with another loss the following year, as acquisition goodwill and the fixed costs of automotive plants met a collapse in volume. Integration and retrenchment had to be run at the same time, in the same factories.

Then the same European business produced a second blow. Charges under EU competition law over a cartel in automotive bearings drove extraordinary losses of ¥19.9 billion and ¥32.4 billion in the years to March 2013 and 2014, and net losses of ¥14.2 billion and ¥14.6 billion. A European expansion undertaken to fix the company’s competitive position had delivered, in five years, acquisition costs, a global recession and a regulator’s fine in sequence. Okubo Hiroshi took the presidency in June 2014 with the rebuilding in front of him.

Okubo’s answer was to move weight away from the price war in original-equipment bearings and toward higher-margin aftermarket and distributor channels. It worked for a while — revenue of ¥701.9 billion and a 6.2% operating margin in the year to March 2015, helped by a weak yen — and the company adopted a committee-based governance structure in 2019. But the underlying exposure did not change. A ¥19.3 billion extraordinary loss in the year to March 2019 produced another net loss, and the year to March 2020 brought a net loss of ¥44.0 billion, the largest in the company’s history, on ¥34.2 billion of mostly impairment charges. The pandemic year that followed lost another ¥11.6 billion. The overseas goodwill built up since S.N.R. and the concentration of sales on automotive customers had come due together.

Ukai Eiichi became president in April 2021, arguing that NTN had to stop simply selling bearings and start selling service — remote condition monitoring of wind turbines and the like. The company moved to the Prime Market in 2022 and recovered to ¥836.3 billion of revenue and ¥10.6 billion of net profit by the year to March 2024, but the three-year plan missed its 6% margin target, and Ukai said so publicly. In April 2024 he reorganized the company by product — bearings on one side, CV joints and axles on the other — so that losses would be visible where they were made, and committed ¥35 billion over three years to clear out, in his words, the projects that had been over-invested in and never became a business.

The plan named for a finish did not end in independence. NTN agreed to a management integration with NSK under a joint holding company — the rival it has faced for a century, once a partner in ventures and then a co-defendant in the cartel case. The logic is plain enough: NTN competes at the front of the field in technology and well behind SKF in margin, and the scale it needs is no longer reachable alone. Whether scale becomes profit, and how much voice the smaller partner keeps in a merger of equals, are the open questions.