Minebea Mitsumi - Company History

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Financial history 1962–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1951
Founder Takahashi Seiichiro
Founding location 東京都板橋区
Core business at founding Manufacture of miniature ball bearings
Listed 1961
President Yoshida Katsuhiko President since 2023 (age 64, as of 2026)
Current priority M&A · Vertical integration Combining the eight core product lines and widening the automotive and semiconductor businesses
Founding
In July 1951 Nippon Miniature Bearing was established in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, as Japan's first maker specialising in miniature bearings. No volume production technology existed for bearings of small outer diameter, and within a year of its founding the company ran out of cash. The banks would not lend to an unproven precision component maker, so Aikawa Yoshisuke, founder of the Nissan zaibatsu, entrusted the rescue to Takahashi Seiichiro, one of his business contacts. Takahashi put in $5,556 (¥2m) in 1952 to become the largest shareholder and rebuilt the company out of his private wealth. It listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in October 1961, and in 1965 closed the Kawaguchi plant and moved every facility to the Karuizawa plant in Nagano Prefecture. A start on which the banks had turned their backs left behind a way of raising money that did not depend on lending at home.
The Decision
Within the same few years the company found itself on both sides of a takeover. When the Nixon shock of 1971 pushed the yen up, President Takahashi Takami got ahead of the exchange rate and moved production abroad, putting a plant in Singapore in February 1972 and one in Thailand in September 1980. When Japanese banks refused to lend, he raised the money for the plants through foreign bonds in Switzerland and elsewhere. In October 1981 the company absorbed four affiliated makers and changed its name to Minebea, and on the strength of that scale it launched a hostile bid for Sankyo Seiki from 1985. Held off by the target's banks, trading partners and union, it gave up in March 1988 — and in the middle of the fight the overseas investor Trafalgar Glen took about 23 per cent of Minebea itself. The scale built by merging had made the company a target in its turn.
Today
Machined components, only 17 per cent of revenue, generate close to half of operating profit. Of revenue of $10.5B (¥1.66tn) in the year to March 2026, Precision Technologies, which holds the bearings, came to no more than $1.8B (¥289bn), yet its segment profit of $393.3M (¥62bn) was 47 per cent of the $840.3M (¥133bn) earned by the four businesses together. The largest business by revenue, Semiconductor & Electronics, made $3.8B (¥596bn) in sales and $168.8M (¥27bn) in profit; Motor, Lighting & Sensing $3.0B (¥469bn) and $170.1M (¥27bn); Access Solutions $2.1B (¥333bn) and $108.1M (¥17bn). In January 2017 the company took over Mitsumi Electric in a share exchange and renamed itself MinebeaMitsumi, and it has gone on buying since — U-Shin, Ablic, Honda Lock, Hitachi Power Devices. The founding business, specialised in the narrow band of 22mm outer diameter and below, is covering the profit the added product lines do not earn.
Competition
Sankyo Seiki, given up on in 1988, was rebuilt fifteen years later under Nidec. The company that had held off Minebea's hostile bid with the help of its banks, its trading partners and its union was acquired and turned around by Nidec in 2003. In bearings, NSK, the third largest in the world, is moving to set up a joint holding company with NTN, so rivals larger in scale remain at home. Where MinebeaMitsumi keeps its competitive advantage is the band of miniature small-diameter bearings of 22mm outer diameter and below — the one place where the field is divided by dimension rather than by scale. In April 2025 it launched a tender offer for Shibaura Electronics as a white knight. For a company that had built itself by taking in indebted firms cheaply, a contest for a profitable specialist maker was a first; it held its ceiling at $41 (¥6,200) a share, was outbid on price, and the offer lapsed in September.

Timeline

1951–1989Specialising in miniature bearings, then moving production to South-East Asia

  1. 1951Nippon Miniature Bearing established in Itabashi, Tokyo
  2. 1952Takahashi Seiichiro invests and becomes the largest shareholder
  3. 1956Head office and plant move to Kawaguchi, Saitama
  4. 1959Sales alliance with MPB of the United States
  5. 1961Listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
  6. 1963Karuizawa plant built; domestic share reaches about 70 per cent
  7. 1965All facilities consolidated at Karuizawa; head office to Miyota, Nagano
  8. 1968NIPPON MINIATURE BEARING CORPORATION established in the United States
  9. 1970Reassigned to the first section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange
  10. 1971Buys SKF's REED plant and begins manufacturing in the United States
  11. 1972NMB SINGAPORE LIMITED established, funded by foreign bonds
  12. 1980NMB THAI LIMITED established; plants built at Ayutthaya and elsewhere
  13. 198899 per cent of bearing production is now outside Japan

1990–2008Trying to diversify, and searching for a way out of dependence on bearings

  1. 1981Four affiliated makers absorbed; renamed Minebea
  2. 1984NMBS set up; ¥30bn committed to a DRAM plant at Tateyama
  3. 1985Takes 19 per cent of Sankyo Seiki and demands a merger of equals
  4. 1985New Hampshire Ball Bearings brought into the group
  5. 1986Production of 256KB DRAM begins
  6. 1986Development and Technology Centre established
  7. 1987Moves into electronic components: PC keyboards, printers
  8. 1988Gives up the attempt to merge with Sankyo Seiki; ROSE BEARINGS acquired
  9. 1990PAPST-MINEBEA-DISC-MOTOR GmbH established in Germany
  10. 1994MINEBEA ELECTRONICS & HI-TECH COMPONENTS established in Shanghai
  11. 2002Sales of ¥279.3bn in the year to March; growth has stalled
  12. 2004Minebea-Matsushita Motor formed with Matsushita's motor company

2009–2024Kainuma Yoshihisa's strategy of combination, and the merger with Mitsumi Electric

  1. 2009myonic Holding of Germany acquired in full
  2. 2009Kainuma Yoshihisa becomes representative director and president
  3. 2010Minebea-Matsushita Motor made wholly owned; LED backlight plant at Suzhou
  4. 2013Minebea Motor bought outright from Panasonic and absorbed
  5. 2013MOATECH, Shiono Precision and PARADOX ENGINEERING acquired
  6. 2015Sartorius Mechatronics T&H GmbH acquired
  7. 2016Integration and share exchange agreements signed with Mitsumi Electric
  8. 2017Mitsumi becomes a wholly owned subsidiary; renamed MinebeaMitsumi
  9. 2017C&A TOOL ENGINEERING, INC. acquired
  10. 2019U-Shin made a subsidiary through a tender offer
  11. 2020Ablic made a wholly owned subsidiary
  12. 2021MMI Semiconductor acquired from Omron
  13. 2023Honda Lock made a subsidiary, renamed Minebea AccessSolutions
  14. 2024Hitachi Power Devices acquired from Hitachi

Founding Story

1951–1989Specialising in miniature bearings, then moving production to South-East Asia

The company that became Minebea spent its first fifteen years learning to make a part that nobody in Japan could yet mass-produce, and the next fifteen deciding where in the world to make it. Rescued in 1952 by one shareholder's private money rather than by a bank, it took about 70 per cent of the domestic miniature bearing market from plants in the Nagano highlands — and then, reading the exchange rate rather than its own technology as the real source of its competitiveness, moved production to Singapore and Thailand until, by 1988, 99 per cent of its bearings were made outside Japan.

A funding crisis one year in, and a rescue brokered by Aikawa Yoshisuke

Nippon Miniature Bearing Co., Ltd. was established in July 1951 in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo[1]. Its capital at the outset was no more than $2,778 (¥1m)[2]. It was Japan's first maker specialising in miniature ball bearings — the very small bearings whose domestic production the founders had conceived after learning that such bearings had been used in the instruments of the American B-29 during the war. The founding members were engineers and businessmen who aimed to make the precision machinery industry self-sufficient in a period of postwar shortage, and their purpose carried a national-defence dimension as well. Volume production of precision components proved difficult, and within a year of its establishment the company fell into crisis. A miniature bearing demands high accuracy in every part — inner and outer races, balls and retainer alike — and at the time no volume production technology for them had been established in Japan at all. The difficulty of the road from concept to mass production surfaced directly, and within a short time, as a cash-flow crisis.

Because the founder Tominaga Goro (富永五郎) moved on to set up another company, Aikawa Yoshisuke (鮎川義介), founder of the Nissan zaibatsu, asked Takahashi Seiichiro (高橋精一郎), one of his business contacts, to rebuild it. Takahashi Seiichiro invested $5,556 (¥2m) in 1952 to become the largest shareholder, and thereafter devoted his private wealth to the rescue. In 1959 he brought his eldest son, Takami, over from Kanebo to join the management. Riding out the crisis on the financial strength of an individual rather than on bank lending or outside capital was unusual even by the standards of the company's peers, and it created the template for the top-down management that followed. Because the Takahashi family's assets and personal network were poured into the company directly, that founding circumstance became the base on which both the speed of later management decisions and a distinctive approach to funding that did not depend on bank relationships would rest.

In 1966 Takahashi Seiichiro's eldest son, Takahashi Takami (高橋高見), became president at the age of 38 and led the company from the top until his sudden death in 1989. From his entry into management in 1959 he personally drove both a thoroughgoing policy of making parts in-house and the opening of overseas markets, bringing to Minebea the international outlook he had acquired at Kanebo. The exceptionally high in-house ratio, extending to the retainers on which the business was founded, held through the 1980s as well. About all Minebea buys from outside is bar stock and balls. Plenty of firms call themselves bearing makers, but we are the only one that makes its own retainers — the part that holds the balls in place, said Takahashi Takami[3]. Less than fifteen years separated the rescue on one man's money, brokered by Aikawa, from a generation that tied it to volume production technology of its own and to expansion abroad.

Seventy per cent of the domestic market, held with 500 types in stock at a country plant

In 1956 the head office and plant moved to Kawaguchi in Saitama Prefecture; in 1963 a new plant was built at Karuizawa; and in 1965 all facilities were consolidated at Karuizawa and the head office moved to Miyota in Nagano Prefecture[4]. A structure with rural plants at its base, rather than large urban works, was thus fixed at an early stage. Sales channels were built out alongside capacity: in 1959 the company entered a sales alliance with MPB, the largest miniature bearing maker in the United States, and reorganised its sole agent, Shin-Eiwa Shoji, into Nippon Miniature Bearing Sales[5]. It listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1961 and was reassigned to the first section in 1970[6]. To secure labour and hold down the cost of land while producing miniature bearings in large volume and to a stable quality, siting the plants away from the cities was the rational choice. The consolidation at Karuizawa was more than a merging of sites; it was also groundwork for raising capacity and quality control at the same time. Building a volume production system by designing around the constraints of labour and land put the company among the earlier examples of the approach in postwar Japanese manufacturing.

By 1963 the company's domestic share of miniature bearings had reached around 70 per cent. It achieved this by holding 500 types in stock at all times, so that even small orders across a wide range of specifications could be filled immediately. Instrument, electronics, office equipment and consumer appliance customers could all procure small lots from the same plant on short lead times, and that is what sustained the company's near-monopoly at home. In 1968 it established NIPPON MINIATURE BEARING CORPORATION in the United States[7]; in April 1971 it set up the sales company N.M.B. (U.K.) in Britain; in May it listed on the first sections of both the Osaka and Nagoya stock exchanges; and in September of the same year it bought the REED plant from SKF of the United States, taking it into manufacturing on American soil[8]. Exports already accounted for close to 70 per cent of sales in 1968, and from 1966 the company was designated an export-contributing enterprise by the Minister of International Trade and Industry[9]. Assembling both a sales network and a production base in the American market within a single year was, for a mid-sized manufacturer of the day, unusually fast, and it settled a management policy of pursuing overseas expansion on several fronts at once.

The thoroughness of in-house production underpinned the cost competitiveness of that expansion abroad. Takahashi Takami later described the founding business as the company's legs. If development is the head and marketing and brand are the face, manufacturing is the legs and hips. The legs are not an area of intellect, so nobody wants to do that work; but now that developing new products rarely translates into profit, the firms that are strong 'below' are the more competitive, and this is an age in which strength in the legs is valued, he said[10], and he never relaxed the insistence on holding everything down to the retainer in-house. Exports to the United States, with a market share of 1 to 2 per cent in 1964, accounted by 1985 for 35 per cent of the segment below 16mm outer diameter in the product types NMB produced[11]. Accumulated volume production technology and direct control of the American sales channel pushed the company towards production overseas.

Shifting production to Singapore and Thailand after the Nixon shock

When the Nixon shock of December 1971 drove the yen up against the dollar[12], President Takahashi Takami decided to move production to South-East Asia. When the company set up a local manufacturing company in Singapore in 1972[13], Japanese banks refused to lend, judging it beyond the company's financial strength, and it raised the money to build the plant through foreign bond issues in Switzerland and elsewhere. There was no calculation involved. It was simply that our only way to survive was overseas — the remark shows the character of the decision at the time[14]. On the move into Singapore he said: Next year we shall shift 60 per cent of the Karuizawa equipment to Singapore, so Karuizawa will be an empty shell[15], making no secret of his willingness to hollow out the domestic base in exchange for production in Asia. The experience of relocating abroad by means as unusual for a mid-sized maker as foreign bond issues rooted in Minebea both a way of raising money that did not depend on bank relationships and a habit of deciding quickly.

In 1980 it established NMB THAI LIMITED[16] and built plants in provincial locations such as Ayutthaya. The machinery installed was state of the art, laid out so that the finished product emerged at the end of a 250-metre straight line, and this was combined with a yield-first operating policy that placed 20 per cent of the whole workforce on inspection. Through the 1980s the overseas share of volume bearing production kept rising, and the Karuizawa plant switched to the role of a mother plant training Thai staff. Solving at once the twin problem of making very small parts in huge quantities and to high precision, through mechanisation and a thick inspection process, became the basic form of Minebea's production in South-East Asia. A two-layer structure — exploiting the local labour cost advantage while keeping quality control Japanese — began to work.

At the root of Takahashi Takami's judgement lay a fatalism about exchange rates. It is the currency relationship that is the single biggest reason our products sell, not superior technology or productivity, he said[17], insisting repeatedly that the source of export competitiveness was the exchange rate and not Japanese diligence or production technique. Every time the yen rose, domestic rivals lost ground on price, while the company, having raised its overseas production ratio ahead of them, had the wind behind it. By 1988 it had moved 99 per cent of bearing production abroad and held an earnings structure detached from the domestic business cycle. Behind the transformation of a single-product specialist into a multinational in fifteen years lay funding that did not rely on the banks and a choice of sites that got ahead of the currency.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. MinebeaMitsumi, securities report for the 79th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  2. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  3. Nikkei Business, 12 December 1983, Astonishing acquisition strategy on the way to a ¥100bn company↩
  4. MinebeaMitsumi, securities report for the 79th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  5. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  6. MinebeaMitsumi, securities report for the 79th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  7. MinebeaMitsumi, securities report for the 79th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  8. MinebeaMitsumi, securities report for the 79th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  9. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  10. Nikkei Business, 12 December 1983, Astonishing acquisition strategy on the way to a ¥100bn company↩
  11. Nikkei Business, 3 February 1986↩
  12. Yomiuri Shimbun, 15 August 1971↩
  13. MinebeaMitsumi, securities report for the 79th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  14. Nikkei Business, 15 November 1982↩
  15. Shukan Toyo Keizai, 22 April 1972↩
  16. MinebeaMitsumi, securities report for the 79th term (FYE March 2025), corporate history section↩
  17. Nikkei Business, 3 February 1986↩

References & sources

  1. Nikkei Business (Nikkei-McGraw-Hill / Nikkei BP): 27 Dec 1971 (The 1970s reconsidered); 15 Nov 1980 and 15 Nov 1982, editor-in-chief interviews with Takahashi Takami; 12 Dec 1983, Astonishing acquisition strategy on the way to a ¥100bn company; 25 Jun 1984, Does Minebea have a chance?; 3 Feb 1986, profile of Takahashi Takami, president of Minebea; 18 Jan 1988; 28 Apr 1997, Minebea: managing the Asian plants across the grain; 1 Feb 1999, editor-in-chief interview with Hagino Goro.
  2. Shukan Toyo Keizai (Toyo Keizai Inc.): 22 Apr 1972, What NMB's ultra-Japanese management is after; 11 Nov 1972, A conglomerate declaration.
  3. Yomiuri Shimbun: 24 Apr 1949 on the ¥360 to the dollar rate; 15 Aug 1971 on the suspension of dollar-gold convertibility, and 16 Aug 1971 carrying the full text of Nixon's address.
  4. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Minebea entry.

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