Company history

Makita began in March 1915 when Mosaburo Makita — the twenty-one-year-old son of a Nagoya lumber dealer — borrowed money from his father to take over Meiji Electric, a failing electrical concern, and reopened it as Makita Electric Works. He started with fifteen or sixteen hands, among them the seventeen-year-old Jujiro Goto, who would one day run the company. The trade was motors, transformers and switches — selling them and, above all, repairing them — for the electric-lighting and electric-railway companies of the day. Japan’s electrical industry was still immature; Makita’s entry came three years before Matsushita (today’s Panasonic), in an early-Taisho moment when the power grid was reaching provincial cities and even a young, small operator could find room to sell and mend electric machinery.

Makita weathered the interwar downturns, reincorporated as a joint-stock company in 1938, and through the Second World War concentrated on the motors that drove textile, machine and woodworking equipment. In 1945 it moved its plant to Anjo in Aichi — still its head office today. But the postwar years exposed the ceiling of the business. Once the breakup of the zaibatsu was called off around 1950 and giants such as Matsushita and Hitachi resumed full production, a small maker of general-purpose motors had no way to win on scale. Makita fell behind the mass producers and entered a period of real difficulty — the pressure that would soon force it to change trades entirely.

In 1955 Jujiro Goto — a hand from the founding days — was asked to take the presidency, and he read the danger early. With the majors back in commodity motors, he declared a “change of trade” in 1957 and turned the company toward something it could own. In January 1958 Makita launched Japan’s first portable electric planer, electrifying a task that carpenters had until then done by hand, and followed it with an electric groove-cutter and a stream of new machines. From that single product it built out a line of drills, sanders and other power tools and re-pointed the whole company at a narrow, specific customer: the construction and woodworking trades. Narrowing to the jobsite was precisely how Makita sidestepped a head-on fight with the motor giants.

In 1962 it renamed itself Makita Electric Works, listed on the Nagoya exchange, and began the move that would define it — a company-owned nationwide after-sales network. Power tools wear out and need frequent repair and consumable parts, and by keeping the service centres in its own hands Makita turned that servicing into a source of loyalty: the tradesman who could get his tool fixed fast learned to ask for Makita by name. Growth was extraordinary. By 1968 the company carried no debt, paid high dividends, ranked among the market’s favourite stocks, held a large share at home, and already exported to some fifty-five countries — with sales in the year to February 1968 running more than eighteen times their level of nine years earlier.

From 1970 Makita began planting that sell-and-service model abroad. It opened Makita USA that year — its first overseas subsidiary — added a new plant at Okazaki at home, and through the 1970s set up sales companies across Europe and Oceania (France, the UK, Australia and more), even listing in Amsterdam and trading as an ADR on Nasdaq. In a single decade it went from a domestic tool maker to an international one — the export decades that would eventually push most of its revenue offshore.

Under Masahiko Goto, president from 1989, Makita pushed past exporting into producing and buying abroad. It built a European manufacturing base in Britain, and in 1991 acquired the German chainsaw maker Sachs-Dolmar, folding an outdoor-equipment line into the company. That same year, in its seventy-sixth, it shortened its name to simply Makita. Through the early 1990s it opened sales and production bases across China, Eastern Europe and Latin America, giving it direct reach into every major region.

By the 2000s the shape of the company had set: roughly four-fifths of sales came from outside Japan — Europe above all, then North America and Asia — and Makita stood beside Germany’s Bosch and America’s Stanley Black & Decker (the former Black & Decker) as one of the world’s three big power-tool makers. That geographic spread steadied it against any one country’s downturn, but it also made the yen a permanent variable in its results; it adopted US GAAP in 2001, and later IFRS, to be read more easily by the investors who now sat all over the world.

The next contest was already visible. Through the early 2010s — the years of Shiro Hori’s presidency, from 2013 — the jobsite began switching from corded tools to cordless ones running on lithium-ion batteries, and the fight with Bosch and Stanley Black & Decker moved onto that ground. Makita widened its cordless range and pressed development of brushless-motor professional tools, even as revenue growth flattened into a plateau after the long climb. How fast to commit to a battery-powered future was the question that plateau posed — and the answer would fall to the next president.

In 2017 the presidency passed to Munetoshi Goto, a career insider from the overseas-sales side who knew the fifty-five-country network first-hand. In 2022 Makita made the decisive call: it ended production of petrol-engine products — the chainsaws, brush-cutters and blowers it had long sold for outdoor work — and committed fully to lithium-ion cordless machines. Tightening European rules on engine noise and emissions, better battery output, and an industry-wide race to cordless all pointed the same way, and Makita chose to draw its business back to the electric line it had run on since 1915.

The payoff showed in the numbers. After a squeeze from raw-material costs and currency swings left operating margin at 3.7% in the year to March 2023, the shift to cordless — a shared battery platform used across many products, higher-powered brushless tools, and rising demand for battery-run outdoor equipment — helped lift it to 8.9% and then 14.2% two years later. Cordless tools also sell at higher prices than corded ones and pull batteries and chargers along with them, giving the revenue a more repeat-purchase, recurring character.

In 2025, its hundred-and-tenth year, Munetoshi Goto changed how Makita treats the cash its own network throws off. Where the company had always self-financed its factories and subsidiaries out of that cash, its 2025 integrated report put “balance-sheet management” at the centre — designing a proper cash level and dividing it deliberately among growth investment, shareholder returns and reserves. It set a floor under the annual dividend and a total-payout ratio of at least 35%, launched a share buyback, and added a special dividend for the anniversary — keeping the product engine unchanged while redirecting the accumulated cash toward returns and growth. It also set a target to halve greenhouse-gas emissions by fiscal 2030 against 2020, arguing that cordless machines cut the exhaust of the engines they replace.