Fuji Electric - Company History

Fuji Denki Seizo was incorporated in August 1923 on a capital and technology tie-up between Furukawa Electric and Germany’s Siemens — the name “Fuji” is the two partners compressed into two syllables, fu for Furukawa and ji for Siemens. Of the ¥10 million of capital, Siemens subscribed ¥3 million, but the payment was settled as ¥1 million of machinery in kind and ¥2 million of technical compensation: no cash arrived. Furukawa was late to heavy electricals behind Hitachi, Mitsubishi Electric and Meidensha; Siemens, looking for technology exports out of the inflation of post-war Germany, met it on terms that suited both. What the arrangement embedded in the new company, alongside the technology, was a structural shortage of cash.

The Kawasaki works opened in April 1925 on an investment of ¥5.78 million and a 48,000-tsubo site; until then the company had kept itself going by importing and selling Siemens products and running down the stock Siemens held in Japan. The outlay exceeded half the founding capital, and with no cash from the German partner it was funded entirely by bank borrowing. A Siemens-dispatched foreigner ran the plant, which began with a switchboard and went on to generators, motors, transformers, fans, searchlights and water meters for the utilities. But in a market already held by the first movers, the latecomer struggled to sell: revenue peaked at ¥10.34 million in the year to 1928 and then fell for three straight years. Interest on the borrowings and depreciation on the fixed assets did the rest.

In 1931 the company cut 205 people — 16% of its workforce — froze pay and reduced allowances. President Natori Wasaku named the causes himself: the Siemens cash that never came, and a plant built entirely on borrowed money. He resigned that April, and Yoshimura Manjiro took over; falling product costs and a recovering economy wiped out the accumulated deficit within two and a half years, and the accounts for April 1935 carried the company’s first dividend, at 6%. Two months later Fuji Electric separated its telephone-equipment operation into a new company, Fuji Tsushinki Seizo — today’s Fujitsu.

Hydro development after the Manchurian Incident pulled the company into water turbines, which it began building in 1936 under a licence from Germany’s J. M. Voith. Between 1942 and 1944 the wartime plants came up in quick succession — Matsumoto, Fukiage, Toyoda and Mie. That network outlasted the dissolution of the zaibatsu and the postwar rebuild, and it decided far more than wartime output: Matsumoto would become the lead plant for power semiconductors, and Mie the base first for home appliances and then for vending machines. The technology banked through the joint venture, housed in plants built for the war, became the footing for every new business the company started afterwards.

Fuji Electric listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in May 1949, entered semiconductors in October 1953, and in the same year began building gas turbines under a tie-up with Escher Wyss of Switzerland. The power-development boom filled the order books — the backlog “has reached more than ¥3 billion,” a trade magazine reported in 1952 — but the same article placed the company precisely: “as a motor maker it is small compared with Toshiba, Hitachi and Mitsubishi, though it has a water-turbine division and a solid reputation in rectifiers.” Smallest of the big four in heavy electricals was the industry’s settled view, and it stuck.

Breadth kept being added: the Chiba works in 1961, a central research laboratory in 1963, and in 1968 the absorption of Kawasaki Denki Seizo, which brought the Kobe and Suzuka plants. What did not follow was profitability — no individual business reached a level that matched the first movers, and doing everything at once, at depth, remained beyond the company’s means.

In September 1969 Fuji Electric started making vending machines. The trigger was failure elsewhere: appliance sales were poor and the Mie plant was running short of work. Wada Tsunesuke, who proposed the move in 1966 and later became president, described what made it work — “we were ten years behind the industry, but we went in boldly with an integrated structure from the start: manufacturing the machines, leasing the capital equipment, and handling the vending materials.” Against incumbents such as Tsugami and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, the latecomer took the number-one domestic share in about four years. Writing off the field it could not win and moving the resources next door became the company’s standing pattern of restructuring.

The company took its present name, Fuji Electric Co., Ltd., in September 1984. By December 1987 the subsidiary Fuji Electric Reiki held 40% of the domestic vending-machine market, and it listed separately in 1988. A business magazine put the arithmetic plainly in 1985: “Fuji Electric missed the appliance boom and went into a slump — and at that very brink, by starting vending machines in 1969, the consumer division came back to life.” Between 1994 and 1996 production companies followed in China, the Philippines and Malaysia.

From 1999 the company ran four internal companies — electrical systems, control components, electronics and consumer products — a divisional structure that solved coordination on paper and duplicated investment in practice. Then the sorting began. It bought Sanyo’s vending-machine business in 2002, moved substation equipment into the Japan AE Power Systems joint venture in the same year, and in 2004 sold down Fuji Logistics to Toyota Industries. “The three firms that clung to being ‘general’ had their day,” a magazine wrote in 1997, “but the sign is fading year by year.” Fuji Electric kept the businesses where it could plausibly be first and pushed the rest outside into joint ventures and disposals — for a company born of a joint venture, running things with a partner was never foreign.

In October 2003 Fuji Electric split itself apart. The electrical-systems, control-components, electronics and R&D operations were hived off into four subsidiaries, and the parent renamed itself Fuji Electric Holdings and became a pure holding company. A general electrical maker had turned itself into a portfolio of operating companies, each with its own profit and loss.

The point of the structure showed up quickly in what left. In April 2008 the water-environment business merged with an NGK subsidiary to form Metawater; that October the switchgear and control-components business passed to Schneider Electric. Both were possible because each business already stood as a separate legal entity with a partner able to take it whole. The group kept combining businesses with outside capital while making the parent lighter.

Then the cycle turned. Consolidated sales for the year to March 2008 were $8.9B (¥922bn) with operating profit of $346.5M (¥36bn); a year later Lehman had reversed everything — sales of $8.2B (¥767bn), an operating loss of $201M (¥19bn) and a net loss of $783.7M (¥73bn), with $196.7M (¥18bn) of restructuring charges booked as extraordinary items. Weak HDD-motor sales in electronic devices were the centre of it, but the deeper problem was that a diversified portfolio met the demand shock all at once. The divisional structure meant every loss-making business was now visible on its own line — and dealing with them was the first task handed to the next president.

Kitazawa Michihiro became president in April 2010, succeeding Ito Haruo, and that year the company brought out SiC power modules. Silicon carbide runs hotter and at higher voltages than silicon, and its uses were widening into EV inverters and renewables just as Fuji Electric needed a field of its own. Against Infineon and Mitsubishi Electric it chose the one combination nobody else had in the same house — power devices paired with its own power-electronics control — and pointed the investment there. The loss of 2009 did the arguing for the narrowing.

In April 2012 the company reversed its own 2003 decision: it absorbed Fuji Electric Systems and took back the name Fuji Electric Co., Ltd., absorbed the device and retail-systems subsidiaries, and took over the transmission and distribution business from Japan AE Power Systems. Nine years of running separate operating companies gave way to running one. Capacity investment followed at Matsumoto in 2013 and a power-electronics technical centre at Suzuka in 2016 — a vertically integrated pitch from device to system.

Recovery came slowly and then quickly: operating profit of $10.3M (¥900m) in the year to March 2010, $312.7M (¥33bn) by 2014, $506.3M (¥56bn) by 2018. Sales passed ¥1 trillion for the first time in the year to March 2023, and the year to March 2025 set records again at $7.5B (¥1.12tn) of sales and $616.1M (¥92bn) of net profit, with EV power semiconductors doing the pulling. Kitazawa moved up to chairman and CEO in April 2022 and Kondo Shiro took the presidency; that November Fuji Electric and Denso agreed a joint power-semiconductor investment of $1.4B (¥212bn), of which the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry would subsidise $465.3M (¥71bn), to secure capacity at Matsumoto before EV volumes arrive. A company that began by borrowing Siemens’ technology because it had no cash had, 101 years on, brought in a customer to help pay for its factory.