Company history

THK begins with a man who had already lost a company. Born in 1924, Teramachi Hiroshi had built Nippon Thompson into a listed manufacturer on the strength of his own needle bearings. In July 1970 he speculated in azuki-bean futures through Daiichi Kogyo, a company he owned personally, and a crash left him roughly ¥600 million down; worse, it emerged that money Nippon Thompson had lent Daiichi Kogyo for trading purposes had gone into the speculation. Condemned as conduct unbecoming the president of a listed company, he was forced out. “Toppled by the commodity market,” the newspapers wrote.

In April 1971, at forty-seven, he set up Toho Seiko in Meguro, Tokyo — for him a second founding, powered, contemporary reporting suggests, by anger and stubbornness. He had assumed the industry would come and fetch him back. It did not. So he chose the harder route: to sell a machine component nobody else was touching and raise the demand for it himself, rather than fight incumbents inside a market that already existed.

The product was the LM Guide, on sale from April 1972 alongside ball splines. Linear motion in machines then ran on slide guides, whose flat faces rubbed and could not hold position accurately enough for NC control; ball bushings rolled, but touched the rail at a point and buckled under the weight of a machine tool. Teramachi cut grooves into the rail that the balls sat into exactly, converting point contact into line contact — thirteen times the load capacity and 2,210 times the life of a ball bushing. Full launch came in 1973, and adoption in 1978 by a major American machine-tool builder’s machining centres settled the product’s reputation. Around it he assembled the rest of the motion train — ball screws in 1979, XY tables in 1982 — and the first overseas arms, THK America in Chicago in 1981 and THK Europe in Düsseldorf in 1982. In January 1984 the company took the name THK: Toughness, High Quality, Know-how.

In November 1989 THK listed over the counter. For Teramachi the point of a listing was not prestige but tempo: linear guides had penetrated perhaps 15% of the Japanese market and 2–3% overseas, so the market he had invented could grow many times over — and plants and overseas sales networks had to be in place before it did. A capital-intensive business whose development spending carries real risk could not keep financing that from a founder’s pocket and bank credit, and equity was the answer. Colleagues who had followed him out of Nippon Thompson had reportedly been promised a listing from the start.

The effect he named first afterwards was not the cash. It was that a share price trading at some twenty times earnings told customers, without his salesmen saying anything, that THK must be making something very good — the particular predicament of a company whose product is only ever visible inside someone else’s machine. Improvement continued in parallel: the HSR series of 1981 took load from four directions, and the later SHS strung the balls on a resin retainer so they never touched, raising accuracy while cutting noise. By 1999 THK held roughly 70% of the domestic and 60% of the overseas linear-guide market, with dedicated plants at Yamaguchi and Yamagata and footholds in Taiwan, China, Ireland and the Netherlands.

The same share price, though, drew the founder into dealings with market operators, and in January 1997 he stepped down. His eldest son Teramachi Akihiro became the second president, inheriting a pure-play linear-motion maker that led the world. Akihiro spent 1998–2000 rebuilding order-taking, production and logistics so the company could absorb the violent swings of semiconductor and machine-tool demand. Teramachi Hiroshi stayed on as chairman, later ran Fuji Futures, and died in September 2012 at eighty-eight — a founder once thrown out of a presidency who had made a market from nothing and taken it to the top of the world.

In February 2001, twelve years after the OTC debut, THK moved to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The core business rose with the capital-spending cycle of semiconductor equipment, machine tools and robots: consolidated sales reached ¥119.2 billion in the year to March 2004, ¥147.1 billion a year later, and ¥208.7 billion by March 2008, just before Lehman. Overseas build-out ran alongside — France in 2002, then a three-layer presence in China (Shanghai trading in 2003, Wuxi manufacturing in 2004, Liaoning and a Chinese holding company in 2005), and Singapore in 2006. The policy was to own local support, including aftermarket demand, in every major machinery market.

In May 2007 THK bought Rhythm (the former Asahi Seiko, later THK Rhythm), a maker of ball joints and tie-rod ends for steering and suspension, and entered transport equipment. The logic was technical adjacency: the ball-circulation mechanics behind the LM Guide could be carried into spherical guides, and automotive parts requiring precision machining were where THK’s own technology should tell. Plants in Rayong, Thailand (2007) and Bac Ninh, Vietnam (2008) followed to sit inside the automotive supply chain.

From the year to March 2008 the accounts were split in two: industrial equipment at ¥168.3 billion and transport equipment at ¥40.4 billion. Transport ran an operating loss from its very first year — ¥2.2 billion, then ¥4.5 billion — and the financial crisis then hit both. Sales fell 14% to ¥179.2 billion in the year to March 2009 and another 36% to ¥115.3 billion the year after, with an ordinary loss of ¥8.8 billion and a net loss of ¥14.3 billion. The rebound was equally violent: ¥190.6 billion of sales and ¥21.6 billion of ordinary profit by March 2011.

In August 2015 THK took over the Linkage & Suspension business of TRW Automotive in Europe and North America — plants in the United States, Canada, Germany and the Czech Republic, folded in as THK Rhythm Automotive Michigan, Canada, GmbH and Czech. Eight years after Rhythm, the transport network went global in a single step, in service of the 2014 medium-term plan’s ¥300 billion sales and 20%-plus operating margin. TRA Holdings was set up in October 2017, the head office moved to Shibaura in Minato-ku the same month, and the fiscal year shifted from March to December — a nine-month transitional period in 2017 — to align with IFRS-reporting subsidiaries abroad.

The plan’s revenue target was beaten: the year to December 2018 brought record sales of ¥353.5 billion and operating profit of ¥52.8 billion. Then the swing reversed. US–China trade friction cut orders in 2019, and 2020 combined the pandemic with ¥9.4 billion of impairment and restructuring charges in transport equipment, producing ¥219.0 billion of sales, an ¥8.5 billion operating loss and a ¥10.0 billion net loss. Recovery in 2021–22 lifted sales to ¥393.7 billion, but a further impairment on the Korean affiliate Samick THK in 2022 confirmed that the second pillar’s economics had never arrived.

The answer THK reached for was to stop selling components alone. OMNIedge fits sensors to LM Guides and ball screws and monitors them in service — Teramachi Akihiro framed it as support for the running machine, not a product handed over at the loading dock. In January 2024 his son Teramachi Takashi became president, the first change in twenty-seven years, with Akihiro moving to chairman and CEO; Takashi has banned the word “domestic” internally and made the shift to a “manufacturing service business” his own mandate. In February 2026 the company set out a policy of ROE above 10%, an 8% dividend-on-equity floor with opportunistic buybacks, restructuring in industrial equipment with no sanctuaries, and selection and concentration in transport — the year to December 2025 having closed at ¥240.4 billion of sales, ¥14.4 billion of operating profit and a ¥69.9 billion net loss. Fifty-five years after a man locked out of his own industry sold a part nobody had asked for, THK is unwinding the pillar it bought and rebuilding the original one as a service.