Company history

Ikeda Zenichiro, born on Shodoshima in 1896, went to Osaka at seventeen, studied design at night school, and around 1916 hung out the sign of Koyo Seiko in a small workshop to experiment with bearings. In January 1921, aged twenty-five, he built a plant in Ikuno, Osaka, and began producing ball bearings in earnest — the date JTEKT dates itself from. In 1923 the company mastered tapered roller bearings, then said to be impossible outside Timken, by switching to imported bearing steel and importing and modifying American grinders ahead of rivals; by 1927 it led domestic bearing output. It incorporated in 1935 and listed in Osaka, Tokyo and Nagoya in 1949 — an independent bearing specialist with no parent behind it.

Toyoda Machine Works began the opposite way. Mass-producing cars requires purpose-built machine tools, and Toyoda Kiichiro judged that Toyota had to make its own rather than wait for outside suppliers — accepting, as the company history records, that machine tools were a business that "does not make money" but was indispensable. Legislation forced the timing: a single company could not be covered by both the 1936 automobile law and the 1938 machine tool law, so the machine shop division had to be cut out. Toyoda Machine Works was separated from Toyota Motor in May 1941 and built its plant at Kariya. Where Koyo moved into car parts on its own initiative — prototyping steering at its Kokubu plant from 1960 — Toyoda Machine Works was inside its parent’s production plan from the first day, and reached steering from the other side, developing power steering in 1968.

Koyo’s independence broke at the end of the 1970s. Where NTN Toyo Bearing cut output 40% as soon as it fell into loss in FY1976, Koyo held profits and dividends a year longer and cut late — and in the year to March 1979 posted a net loss of ¥6.882bn against ¥8.869bn of accumulated deficit. The entire board resigned, and the company turned to Toyota Motor, its largest customer and a major shareholder. Toyota sent five executives including a new president, and a restructuring plan sold over ¥10bn of assets, closed the Tokyo and Takamatsu plants and cut some 1,200–1,300 jobs.

In August 1980 Koyo Seiko wrote down three quarters of its capital, then issued 76 million new shares to Toyota Motor at ¥600 — making Toyota its largest shareholder. The Osaka independent became a keiretsu supplier, its decisions folded into Toyota’s procurement strategy. That capital tie is what later made the merger conceivable at all.

It also produced a duplication that grew for two decades. Koyo formed a North American steering joint venture with TRW in 1988; Toyoda Machine Works set up its own Tennessee steering venture in 1989. Koyo bought French steering operations at Irigny in 1993 and Dijon in 2000. Two Toyota-group companies were building parallel plant networks in the same regions for the same products, for the same customers.

The consolidation began in 2002, when Toyoda Machine Works, Toyota, Denso and Koyo jointly founded Favess to develop and sell electric power steering — an experimental merger in which engineers from both sides worked under one roof as hydraulic gave way to electric. The two companies agreed in principle to merge in February 2005 and combined in January 2006 as JTEKT, bringing bearings, machine tools and steering into one company, restoring a domestic bearing player alongside NSK and NTN, and settling the group’s steering business into a single firm.

The merged company hit ¥1,157.6bn of revenue and ¥77.6bn of operating profit in the year to March 2008, then took the full force of the financial crisis: FY2009 operating profit fell to ¥22.4bn with a ¥12.0bn net loss, and FY2010 brought ¥769.7bn of revenue, ¥0.4bn of operating profit and a ¥19.4bn net loss. Fixed costs and overseas plants built for an expanding market became the problem when demand halved.

In the middle of those two loss years, JTEKT agreed to buy Timken’s needle bearing business, closing in December 2009 — twelve plants in seven countries and 3,400 people, in the one product category it lacked for world leadership in automotive bearings. Recovery validated the arithmetic: ¥955.4bn of revenue and ¥39.9bn of operating profit in FY2011, ¥1,355.9bn and ¥74.1bn by FY2015.

Under Agata Tetsuo, president from 2013, acquisition continued — Sona Koyo Steering Systems in India in 2017, Fuji Kiko for steering columns the same year, Daibea in 2019, Yutaka Seimitsu in 2020. Revenue peaked at ¥1,441.2bn in FY2018 before global auto adjustment and trade friction pulled operating profit down to ¥37.6bn and a ¥3.8bn net loss in FY2020, and further to ¥15.9bn of operating profit in FY2021. What had not been resolved through all of it was how three asset-heavy businesses — bearings, machine tools, steering — were supposed to be run as one.

In June 2021 the registered head office moved from Osaka to Kariya, Aichi — fifteen years after the merger — and in April 2022 the KOYO and TOYODA brands were unified as JTEKT, sixteen years after. The external traces of the two predecessor companies were finally gone, which had the effect of exposing the internal question that remained.

Results recovered: ¥1,678.1bn of revenue and ¥62.6bn of operating profit in FY2023, ¥1,891.5bn and ¥72.8bn in FY2024, the highest revenue since the merger, with automotive at ¥1,344.4bn against ¥358.0bn in industrial and bearings and ¥188.9bn in machine tools. But high turnover at North American plants kept production unstable, and the company said publicly it would plan on that continuing and build systems that depend less on people.

Kondo Yoshito, appointed president in 2024 and the first career production-engineering insider in the role, opened by saying plainly that he could not find a single phrase expressing the company’s value to society — that holding too many technologies had left it without one face. His 2030 vision names that problem directly: shift from a reactive to an active business model, improve ROE and PBR after years of trading below book, sell down cross-shareholdings, and restructure the North American and European operations whose duplicated footprints date back to the years before the merger.