Hirokichi Yoshiyama
Profile
Performance in office
Tenure
Tenure
Background
Yoshiyama was a Hitachi career insider, and the 1976 edition of the corporate yearbook also records Hirokichi Yoshiyama as president. The Hitachi he grew up in had both fields built on imported foreign technology and fields developed in-house. A prime example was the electron microscope: after the war Hitachi won the orders for the first units at every former imperial university, driving NEC and Toshiba out of the competition. In the late 1960s Hitachi and JEOL microscopes accounted for half of world demand, and RCA withdrew.
Selection
He succeeded Kenichiro Komai as president in 1971. In the fiscal year ended March 1971, the year before he took office, net sales were ¥788.7 billion and ordinary income ¥46.5 billion, but in FY ended March 1972 they fell to ¥782.7 billion and ¥36.1 billion; the change came in the year expansion stalled. Under his predecessor Hitachi had kept building new plants, setting up the Software, Ome, Omika and Takasaki Works one after another in 1969 and 1970.
Initiatives
He opened the Production Engineering Research Laboratory in June 1971 and the Systems Development Laboratory in February 1973, and the Tsuchiura Works in June 1974. The Central Research Laboratory abandoned the Arsecon selenium-based camera tube, whose image burn-in it could not solve, in 1970, filed a basic patent for a different structure that same year, and in December 1972 upgraded Saticon development to a major project. It was completed as a product in 1975, and in 1977 Hitachi licensed the technology to RCA, which had invested in the same development for many years without success.
Career
Career
Hitachi
| Date | Position |
|---|---|
| 1971 | President |
| 1980 | Stepped down as President |