Shibaura Mechatronics - Company History

Spun out of Toshiba’s Tsurumi works, and geared to war production

On 12 October 1939, Tokyo Shibaura Electric — today Toshiba — separated its weapons and machinery divisions into a new company, Shibaura Kyomachi Seisakusho, incorporated with capital of ¥5 million[1]. Toshiba subscribed for 98,800 shares, 98 per cent of the total, and the remaining 1,200 were spread among people connected to Toshiba, making it a subsidiary wholly owned in substance[2]. It had no individual founder: it was a legal entity created around the machine-building function of Toshiba’s Tsurumi plant. The new company leased Buildings No. 5 and No. 10 of that plant in Tsurumi-ku, Yokohama, machinery included, took over 600 employees from Toshiba, and began operating in December of the same year[3]. On the 21st of that month it changed its name to Shibaura Seisakusho, taking up the venerable name of the old Shibaura Seisakusho, which had made heavy electrical machinery, machinery and weapons for half a century since the Meiji era[4]. At its founding the company had no president but a chairman: Momota Sadaji (百田貞次), concurrently a director of Toshiba, became representative chairman[5].

In the early years roughly 70 per cent of production was war-related[6]: the Tsurumi plant made electromagnetic chucks, motors of various kinds and electrical equipment for aircraft. In August 1940 the Kawasaki plant came on stream, given over almost entirely to military goods — inertia starter motors, radio power units for aircraft — and was designated a Navy-controlled plant[7]. In January 1942 the Ofuna plant, today the Yokohama Works, began operating[8], and the core manufacturing base was complete. In September 1943 the company bought the Obama plant of Sakai Sen’i Kogyo (酒伊繊維工業) in Fukui Prefecture and converted it into a site for building inertia starter motors for naval aircraft[9]. Mitsubishi and Matsushita were bidding for the same plant; the purchase was carried by the resourcefulness of accounting manager Nishino (西野), later president of the company, who secured the first permit ever issued by the newly formed Industrial Facilities Corporation (産業設備営団) and raised ¥13.5 million in cash the same day[10].

A near-fatal reconstruction, and the small-motor business that carried it

Defeat took the military orders away, and Shibaura Seisakusho faced a double ordeal: converting to civilian products while cutting away surplus people and plant. In 1948 a dispute over redundancies set labour sharply against management and escalated into an indefinite strike, answered by the company with a lockout[11]. From 1948 to 1950 shareholders’ equity was negative, and the business traded on the edge of bankruptcy[12]. It sold the Kawasaki, Omori, Obama and Ofuna plants and their sites one after another to fund severance payments and working capital[13], and only in 1951 did equity turn positive and the company stand on its own feet. Buyers were few and the plants went cheaply — a measure of how hard rebuilding was in the post-war years.

What carried the revival of Shibaura Seisakusho through the recovery was the small-motor business based at the Obama plant. Acting on an instruction from Toshiba chairman Ishizaka Taizo — have them make motors for washing machines and household electric well pumps — the company moved into motors for domestic appliances[14]. Output of 2,000 to 3,000 units a month around 1952 rose on the spread of home appliances to 300,000 units a month in the year to March 1969[15]. The rayon pot motor, a wartime product, was also well received, adopted across Japan’s rayon mills and then exported[16]. Through the high-growth years Shibaura Seisakusho was the core of the machinery business inside the Toshiba group — the supplier of production equipment for the parent’s appliance and electronic-component plants, and of small motors — and it accumulated volume-manufacturing technique.

With that base established, in October 1969 Shibaura Seisakusho listed its shares on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange[17]. Thirty years after its founding, Toshiba’s machine-building arm was set up to be run as an independent listed company, opening the way to raising capital publicly and to a higher profile. At the time of listing its mainstays were production equipment for Toshiba and small motors for home appliances, and motor output at Obama was expanding in scale year by year. In February 1972 it transferred up to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange[18], moving into the main market. This was a period of consolidating an independent footing as a listed company while keeping a powerful captive customer at its back.

Higher-value motors, and the first moves towards vacuum and semiconductor equipment

Through the 1980s Shibaura Seisakusho developed a run of higher-value motors out of the small-motor technology it had accumulated. In 1982 came the RP motor, whose proprietary core structure made it small, thin and long-lived; in 1983 the IC motor, with the control circuit built in. Both were hits[19]. The stepping motor, whose speed could be set at will, found growing demand in floppy-disk drives and industrial machinery and became the best-seller of the new-product development office[20]. Cigarette vending machines, water-jet cutters and Cartesian robots were added as further sources of income. In June 1990 Suzuki Saburo (鈴木三郎), a Toshiba director and head of its Kansai branch, became president, and the outgoing president Watanabe Ryo (渡辺亮) withdrew to an advisory role[21]. Throughout this period Toshiba held 61.6 per cent of the shares[22].

While it sharpened volume production in motors, Shibaura Seisakusho was also laying groundwork in precision machinery with the growth of the semiconductor industry in view. In October 1991 it merged with Tokuda Seisakusho, a company strong in vacuum equipment, carrying the business on as the vacuum equipment systems division and the Sagami plant, and made Shibaura Eletec a subsidiary[23] — taking in the technology that would become the foundation of the later semiconductor production equipment business. It tidied its business structure through functional spin-offs, founding Shibaura Jihanki (芝浦自販機, vending machines) in June 1993 and Shibaura Engineering in April 1994[24], and in July 1997 moved its head office to Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo and its registered head office to Yokohama, Kanagawa[25]. Manufacturing was concentrated at the Ofuna plant in Yokohama while administrative functions sat apart — a two-site arrangement that held the company’s position within the Toshiba group while preparing it for the decisive reorganisation of 1998, when the centre of gravity would move from motors to precision equipment.