JTEKT - Company History

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Financial history 1958–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1921
Origin 光洋精工+豊田工機
Founding location 大阪市生野区
Core business at founding Bearings
Listed 1949
President Kondo Yoshito President since 2024 (age 63, as of 2026)
Current priority Capital efficiency · Business restructuring Improving ROE and PBR, and restructuring the European and North American sites
Founding
In January 1921 Ikeda Zenichiro set up Koyo Seiko-sha in Ikuno-ku, Osaka, and began producing bearings. It was reorganised as a joint-stock company in January 1935 and listed on both the Osaka and Tokyo stock exchanges in May 1949. The other source is Toyoda Machine Works, separated from Toyota Motor in May 1941 to secure in-house the metal-cutting machine tools that volume car production could not do without. An independent bearing maker in Osaka and a keiretsu machine tool maker in Nagoya — two companies of different origin and different home ground, which came to face each other over the same product once Koyo Seiko began prototyping steering at its Kokubu plant in 1960 and Toyoda Machine Works began producing power steering in 1968.
The Decision
Every time it fell into the red, it handed over its independence and its name in exchange for scale. In the year to March 1979 Koyo Seiko, a year later than its rivals in slimming down, fell to a net loss of $29.9M (¥7bn); the entire board resigned and the company asked Toyota, its largest customer, for support. In the third-party share allocation of September 1980 Toyota Motor became its largest shareholder, and the independent maker out of Osaka turned into a keiretsu parts supplier. Twenty-six years later, in February 2005, it reached a basic agreement to merge Koyo Seiko and Toyoda Machine Works in order to sort out the steering businesses that overlapped inside the group, and in January 2006 both companies gave up their names and JTEKT was founded. In July 2009, in the middle of two straight loss-making years, it acquired the needle bearing business of Timken of the United States. The merger, though, left the sites of the two old companies doubled up in North America and Europe, and twenty years on that has still not been sorted out.
Today
All three businesses are in the black; what makes the losses is the restructuring in Europe and North America. Revenue for the year to March 2026 was $12.2B (¥1.93tn). By segment, automotive turned over $8.6B (¥1.37tn) for a profit of $295.3M (¥47bn), industrial machinery and bearings $2.2B (¥347bn) for $70.8M (¥11bn), and machine tools $1.3B (¥211bn) for $110M (¥17bn). Against a total of $476.1M (¥75bn), group operating profit came to only $156.8M (¥25bn), the difference of $321.2M (¥51bn) being taken up by other costs, chiefly the restructuring of the European and North American sites. On margin the 8.3 per cent of machine tools is the highest, ahead of the 3.4 per cent of the automotive business that carries seven-tenths of revenue. President Kondo Yoshito, who took office in 2024, has set improvements in ROE and PBR as numerical targets in his 2030 vision, and is selling down cross-shareholdings and rebuilding the profitability of Europe and North America.
Competition
In bearings and in steering the cast of rivals changes almost completely. In bearings the domestic competitors are Nippon Seiko and NTN, and in May 2026 those two announced a business integration, so that the rivals larger than JTEKT look set to become a single company. In steering the position is reversed — Nippon Seiko split off its own loss-making steering business in May 2025 and sold a majority stake to an investment fund. JTEKT has never let go of the product since the prototype work at the Kokubu plant in 1960; it set up the electric power steering joint venture Favess in 2002, and widened its range by taking in SONA KOYO of India in 2017 and the steering column business of Fuji Kiko in December of the same year. Holding bearings, machine tools and steering inside one company forces it to fight from a different position for each product at the same time.

Timeline

1921–1979Koyo Seiko and Toyoda Machine Works: two companies from different sources

  1. 1921Koyo Seiko-sha founded in Osaka; ball bearing production begins
  2. 1923First domestic technology in Japan for tapered roller bearings completed
  3. 1927Koyo Seiko stands first in domestic bearing output
  4. 1935Reorganised as a joint-stock company, Koyo Seiko Co., Ltd.
  5. 1941Toyoda Machine Works spun out of Toyota Motor as an independent company
  6. 1949Listed on the Osaka and Tokyo exchanges in May, Nagoya in July
  7. 1960Steering development and prototyping begin at Koyo Seiko's Kokubu plant
  8. 1961Sewing machine and machine tool divisions split off as Koyo Machine Industries
  9. 1968Toyoda Machine Works develops power steering for cars and starts production
  10. 1973AMERICAN KOYO BEARING MANUFACTURING set up in South Carolina
  11. 1977TOYODA MACHINERY USA CORPORATION established in Illinois
  12. 1979Koyo Seiko posts a net loss of ¥6.9bn; the whole board resigns

1980–2012Into Toyota's keiretsu, and the 2006 merger of Koyo Seiko and Toyoda Machine Works

  1. 1980Capital cut by three-quarters; third-party allocation makes Toyota the largest shareholder
  2. 1988TRW KOYO STEERING SYSTEMS set up with TRW INC
  3. 1989Toyoda Machine Works establishes TOYODA TRW AUTOMOTIVE in Tennessee
  4. 1990KOYO BEARINGS (EUROPE) established
  5. 1993SOCIETE DE MECANIQUE D'IRIGNY taken as a subsidiary
  6. 1998RULMENTI ALEXANDRIA of Romania acquired and renamed KOYO ROMANIA
  7. 2002Favess founded with Toyoda Machine Works, Toyota and Denso
  8. 2003Further stake in TRW KOYO STEERING SYSTEMS makes it a subsidiary
  9. 2006Koyo Seiko and Toyoda Machine Works merge; the name becomes JTEKT
  10. 2009Lehman crisis brings a net loss of ¥12.0bn
  11. 2009Timken's needle bearing business acquired in December
  12. 2010A second straight net loss of ¥19.4bn; operating profit all but vanishes

2013–2023Reform under presidents Agata and Sato, and the cost of North America and Europe

  1. 2013Agata Tetsuo becomes president, succeeding Ikawa Masaharu
  2. 2017SONA KOYO STEERING SYSTEMS of India taken as a subsidiary
  3. 2017Fuji Kiko made a wholly owned subsidiary, bringing in steering columns
  4. 2018Post-merger peak: revenue ¥1,441.2bn, operating profit ¥81.4bn
  5. 2019Daibea made a wholly owned subsidiary
  6. 2020Demand falls just before the pandemic; net loss of ¥3.8bn
  7. 2020Sato Kazuhiro succeeds Agata Tetsuo as president
  8. 2021Registered head office moves from Osaka to Kariya, Aichi
  9. 2022The business brand is unified as JTEKT
  10. 2024Kondo Yoshito becomes president; the 2030 vision follows in August
  11. 2025Sale of the European needle roller bearing (NRB) business completed

Founding Story

1921–1979Koyo Seiko and Toyoda Machine Works: two companies from different sources

For most of the twentieth century JTEKT did not exist as one company but as two, and where each of them came from decided how each of them moved. Koyo Seiko was an independent bearing specialist in Osaka with no parent to fall back on; Toyoda Machine Works was cut out of Toyota Motor to build the machine tools that mass production demanded. Both edged towards steering in the 1960s — one as a business it went looking for, the other as an order from its parent — and by the end of the 1970s one of them had run out of room to stand alone.

Koyo Seiko, 1921 — the Osaka bearing maker Ikeda Zenichiro opened up

Koyo Seiko's founder, Ikeda Zenichiro (池田善一郎), was born in 1896 on Shodoshima, an island in Kagawa Prefecture, and at seventeen went to Osaka, where he studied design in the evening division of the technical school that was the forerunner of Kansai University[1]. After a spell selling agricultural implements in Takamatsu, near his birthplace, he became convinced that bearings had a future, returned to Osaka, and around 1916 hung out the sign of Koyo Seiko-sha at a small workshop in Higashi-Shimizu-cho, Minami-ku, where he began experimental work on bearings. Then, in January 1921, Ikeda — barely twenty-five — built a factory at Ikaino in Ikuno-ku, Osaka, and started full production of ball bearings[2]. This is the period JTEKT today counts as its founding. The Japanese bearing industry of the day already had Nippon Seiko, founded in 1916[3], and the maker founded in 1918 that would later become Toyo Bearing Manufacturing (today NTN)[4]; Koyo Seiko started out as the next of the domestic bearing makers behind them.

Koyo Seiko put its weight behind technical development, and in 1923, at a new plant in Nakagawa-cho in Ikuno-ku, it completed the first domestic technology in Japan for tapered roller bearings[5]. At the time these were said to be so difficult that nobody but Timken can make them, and by breaking that jinx Koyo Seiko built the highest reputation in the industry[6]. Switching from the carburised steel it had used to imported bearing steel, and bringing in new American grinding machines ahead of its rivals and modifying them in-house, it led on both materials and machine tools, and by 1927 it stood first in domestic bearing output[7]. On 18 January 1935, against a background of government and public-sector demand and the shift to a wartime economy, Koyo Seiko-sha — until then Ikeda Zenichiro's sole proprietorship — was reorganised as a joint-stock company, Koyo Seiko Co., Ltd., with capital of ¥1 million. After the war it listed on both the Osaka and Tokyo stock exchanges in May 1949 and on the Nagoya Stock Exchange that July[8], giving the independent bearing specialist a footing in the capital market.

Koyo Seiko had begun as a bearing specialist, but in April 1960 it started development and prototype work on steering at its Kokubu plant. With the post-war motor industry getting to its feet, this was a decision to step into automotive components adjacent to bearings. In August 1961 it separated its sewing machine and machine tool divisions to form Koyo Machine Industries, concentrating the business on two pillars: bearings and steering. The path of consolidating its ground as an independent automotive parts maker while continuing to expand took its shape from this selection and concentration in the 1960s. Until the years when it was taken into the Toyota group, Koyo Seiko held its position as an independent bearing maker and leaned steadily further into automotive components.

Toyoda Machine Works, 1941 — a machine tool maker spun out of Toyota

The founding of Toyoda Machine Works goes back to an idea of Toyoda Kiichiro (豊田喜一郎). Mass production of cars was impossible without purpose-built machine tools, and relying on outside suppliers took time. There was no choice but to build them in-house, and to do that the machine tool department had to be separated into an independent company. The company history records that Kiichiro resolved on independence in full knowledge of how hard the economics would be, on the grounds that a machine tool company is a business that does not make money, but Toyota Motor absolutely needs one[9]. What forced the pace was the law: the Machine Tool Manufacturing Industry Law of 1938 and the earlier Automobile Manufacturing Industry Law (promulgated in 1936) could not both apply to the same company, which made hiving off the machine tool department unavoidable[10]. So in May 1941 Toyoda Machine Works was separated from Toyota Motor as an independent company charged with producing metal-cutting machine tools[11]. Where Koyo Seiko had moved into automotive components of its own accord as an independent, Toyoda Machine Works was built into its parent's production plan from the first day.

The inaugural general meeting of Toyoda Machine Works Co., Ltd. was held on 28 April 1941 at the head office of Toyota Motor. Nominal capital was ¥8 million, of which half — ¥4 million — was paid in, and ¥3 million of that was contributed in kind by Toyota Motor[12]. The remainder was to be offered publicly as conditions allowed, the first public offering by a Toyoda-group company. Toyoda Risaburo took the post of president, Toyoda Kiichiro that of vice-president and Kan Takatoshi (菅隆俊) that of managing director[13], and trading began on 1 May. The original plan had been to find a factory site midway between Koromo and Chiryu, but soft ground there threatened machining accuracy and the idea was dropped; through the good offices of Ono Ichizo (大野一造), mayor of Kariya, the company acquired the present site of 57,252 tsubo at Kariya for ¥2.83 per tsubo and began building[14].

In September 1968 Toyoda Machine Works succeeded in developing power steering for cars and began production. A machine tool maker had moved into manufacturing automotive components, and it established itself as the supplier of power steering for Toyota vehicles. In October 1977 it set up TOYODA MACHINERY USA CORPORATION in Illinois and began building a machine tool sales network in the United States. From a Toyota-group machine tool maker to a Toyota-group steering maker, Toyoda Machine Works shifted the weight of its business. Toyoda Machine Works never stepped into bearings, and Koyo Seiko had let go of machine tools; through the 1960s and 1970s the two divided the ground between them.

From the 1973 move overseas to the crisis of 1979

In November 1973 Koyo Seiko set up AMERICAN KOYO BEARING MANUFACTURING CORP in South Carolina as a joint venture with AMERICAN KOYO CORP, beginning local production in the United States. Pushing a global build-out as an independent bearing maker reflected its standing as roughly the third-largest domestic bearing maker, alongside Nippon Seiko and Toyo Bearing[15]. It was also a judgement that, with the yen expected to strengthen after the oil shock, production capacity should be put in place in the market where demand was, and it became the starting point for the European sites that followed. Running through Koyo Seiko in the 1970s was a drive to make the existing business more efficient and create new sources of earnings at the same time, and with the speed available to a company with no parent it pushed one overseas investment after another.

But Koyo Seiko's independent course ran into a wall at the end of the 1970s. In the year to March 1979 it posted a net loss of $29.9M (¥7bn) and accumulated losses of $38.6M (¥9bn)[16]; the entire board resigned and the company turned for help to Toyota Motor, its largest customer and also a major shareholder. Toyota sent in five directors including a president, and at the June shareholders' meeting president Ikeda Iwao (池田巌) stepped back to a chairmanship without representative authority, succeeded by Imura Eizo (井村栄三), president of the Toyota-group company Tokai Rika, a man known as a turnaround specialist[17]. The new management raised a rebuilding programme called NL (New Light) 80, and pushed through a slimming-down: asset sales of more than ¥10bn including the site of the old Tokushima plant[18], cuts of some 1,200 to 1,300 employees[19], and the closure of the Tokyo and Takamatsu plants. This choice — an independent maker out of Osaka effectively rebuilding under Toyota's wing — led directly to the third-party share allocation of 1980 that made Toyota its largest shareholder[20].

Toyoda Machine Works, for its part, followed Toyota's expanding overseas production into the United States and Europe. The two companies divided their strengths between them — bearings for Koyo, steering and machine tools for Toyoda — while both widened their product ranges as automotive technology changed, through the switch from rear-wheel to front-wheel drive and the arrival of electric power steering. From the 1970s into the 1980s two companies of different origins ran in parallel inside the same Toyota keiretsu, and this two-headed arrangement lasted into the early twenty-first century. That each had built its own separate network of sites in both North America and Europe fed straight into the difficulty of running the merged company as one, and formed the prototype of the reform agenda of later years.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. 光洋精工50年史 (Fifty Years of Koyo Seiko, Koyo Seiko, 1969)↩
  2. ジェイテクト 有価証券報告書 第125期 (JTEKT annual securities report, 125th term, year to March 2025), History section↩
  3. NSK corporate history (official)↩
  4. NTN corporate history (official)↩
  5. 光洋精工50年史 (Fifty Years of Koyo Seiko, Koyo Seiko, 1969)↩
  6. 光洋精工50年史 (Fifty Years of Koyo Seiko, Koyo Seiko, 1969)↩
  7. 光洋精工50年史 (Fifty Years of Koyo Seiko, Koyo Seiko, 1969)↩
  8. ジェイテクト 有価証券報告書 第125期 (JTEKT annual securities report, 125th term, year to March 2025), History section↩
  9. 豊田工機二十年 (Twenty Years of Toyoda Machine Works, Toyoda Machine Works, 1961)↩
  10. 豊田工機二十年 (Twenty Years of Toyoda Machine Works, Toyoda Machine Works, 1961)↩
  11. ジェイテクト 有価証券報告書 第125期 (JTEKT annual securities report, 125th term, year to March 2025), History section↩
  12. 豊田工機二十年 (Twenty Years of Toyoda Machine Works, Toyoda Machine Works, 1961)↩
  13. 豊田工機二十年 (Twenty Years of Toyoda Machine Works, Toyoda Machine Works, 1961)↩
  14. 豊田工機二十年 (Twenty Years of Toyoda Machine Works, Toyoda Machine Works, 1961)↩
  15. NSK corporate history (official), on domestic market share↩
  16. 経済展望 (Keizai Tenbo), vol. 51 no. 13, Keizai Tenbo-sha, July 1979↩
  17. 経済展望 (Keizai Tenbo), vol. 51 no. 13, Keizai Tenbo-sha, July 1979↩
  18. 経済展望 (Keizai Tenbo), vol. 51 no. 13, Keizai Tenbo-sha, July 1979↩
  19. 銀行時評 (Ginko Jihyo), vol. 13 no. 9, Ginko Jihyo-sha, September 1979↩
  20. 銀行時評 (Ginko Jihyo), vol. 13 no. 9, Ginko Jihyo-sha, September 1979↩

References & sources

  1. Toyoda Machine Works (Twenty Years of Toyoda Machine Works, 1961), on the separation from Toyota Motor, the inaugural general meeting and the choice of the Kariya site.
  2. Koyo Seiko (Fifty Years of Koyo Seiko, 1969), on Ikeda Zenichiro's founding, the first domestic tapered roller bearings and the move into steering.
  3. Keizai Tenbo, July 1979, and Ginko Jihyo, September 1979 — contemporary reporting on the Koyo Seiko loss, the resignation of the board and the request for support from Toyota Motor.

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Data API

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