Company history

Sharp began in 1912, when Hayakawa Tokuji, a metalworking craftsman, set up on his own in the Honjo district of Tokyo, doing subcontract work on small metal fittings — belt buckles, fountain-pen caps. In 1915, at a stationer’s request, he developed the Ever-Sharp propelling pencil, patented in both Japan and the United States, and in making it moved from jobbing subcontractor to a maker of his own products. The company’s present name comes from that pencil. It took eleven years for a tiny metal shop to grow into a business of some 200 workers with a real presence in the stationery trade.

In September 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake took his wife and children, his factory and his patents all at once. Unable to repay his debts, Hayakawa signed the mechanical-pencil patent over for nothing and moved to Osaka, scraping a living by instructing the transferee’s factory. The total loss of eleven years’ work was, for a sole founder, effectively bankruptcy. Yet the disaster is what pushed Sharp toward becoming a Kansai-based electrical maker — the geographic starting point of its postwar coexistence with Matsushita.

Rebuilding at Abeno in Osaka, Hayakawa developed Japan’s first crystal radio receiver in 1925 and sold it at ¥3.5 — half the price of imports — following in 1929 with a vacuum-tube set at a tenth of the imported price. Localize a new technology, then get to market first at a fraction of the majors’ price: the pattern set with radios — “for radios, Sharp” — would recur, in changed form, through black-and-white televisions, transistor calculators and LCD panels. It was the template of a mid-tier maker that builds a brand by being first into the mass-price band.

The founder’s company found its footing in the postwar boom. In 1952 Sharp — then Hayakawa Electric — tied up with RCA of the United States and, a month before television broadcasting began, launched a 14-inch black-and-white set at $486 (¥175,000). It built a dedicated TV factory in 1954, reached 20,000 sets a month, and held the top domestic share for four straight years from 1953. Trade journals credited it with “a kind of foresight” for gearing up for a television boom before it came.

But the pattern that would recur throughout Sharp’s history first showed itself clearly here. As Matsushita and Hitachi entered in earnest, their sheer scale and keiretsu sales networks told, and within a few years Sharp’s share fell from first place. To keep its dealers viable it broadened into a full-line home-appliance maker from 1957, tripling white-goods capacity in three years — a follower’s diversification, but one that entrenched a nationwide dealer network.

The more consequential move was into electronics. In 1964 Sharp built the world’s first all-transistor calculator, the CS-10A — a 25-kilogram desktop machine at $1,472 (¥530,000). Having struggled to source LSI chips from American suppliers, the company resolved to make its own. In 1970 it renamed itself Sharp Corporation, skipped the Osaka Expo, and committed $20.8M (¥8bn) — some 70% of its capital — to bringing semiconductors in-house, rewriting its self-definition from an appliance maker into an electronics company.

The semiconductor bet was executed at a new research centre in Tenri, Nara — roughly 70% of Sharp’s capital, at a time when only integrated giants like NEC and Toshiba ran their own chip lines. “Sharp will be ruined by its semiconductor spending,” the trade press warned; management answered that three to five years of hardship were only to be expected. Owning its own LSI freed Sharp from bought-in component prices and underwrote the mass production that carried it through the calculator war with Casio — and in 1973 it put the world’s first LCD calculator, the EL-805, on the market, seeding the display technology that would define its next thirty years.

The sharp yen after 1985 made labour-intensive mass production untenable against Korea and China, and Sharp reinvented itself around what it judged its true core — TFT liquid crystal, semiconductor lasers, LEDs. Once “a byword for cheap goods, a 1.5-tier brand,” it was now, one magazine wrote, closing on the first tier, its margins topping even Sony’s and Matsushita’s. It set up an LCD division in 1986 and raised it to a business group by 1990.

In 1998 Machida Katsuhiko became president and declared that by 2005 every television Sharp sold in Japan would be an LCD set. His stated aim was “to make something Matsushita can’t take away” — a memory of how radios and TVs, both Sharp inventions, had been carried off by Matsushita on volume and sales power. The AQUOS brand launched in 2001, and in 2004 Sharp built a large-panel plant at Kameyama in Mie; the “made in Kameyama, for the world” tagline made the factory the embodiment of the brand, and the year to March 2005 brought record sales. Vertical integration maximized profit while demand rose — but was built to rebound as a depreciation burden the moment the market turned.

At the peak, Sharp doubled the bet. In 2009 it opened a Generation-10 LCD plant at Sakai — then the world’s largest, some $4.6B (¥430bn) including infrastructure — bringing its cumulative Kameyama-plus-Sakai LCD investment to around $10.7B (¥1tn). Then the premise failed on both counts: Samsung, LG, AUO and Innolux poured in matching capacity as panel prices fell, while the Lehman shock and a soaring yen shrank the TV market. Vertical integration turned into the heaviest burden in the company; the year to March 2013 brought a $5.6B (¥545bn) net loss, the largest in Sharp’s history, and in 2015 it cut some 3,000 jobs.

In August 2016 Sharp accepted investment from Taiwan’s Hon Hai Precision — a $3.6B (¥389bn) capital injection that took the group to roughly 66% of the votes. It was the first time in postwar industrial history that a major Japanese electronics maker had passed under foreign control. Under CEO Tai Jeng-wu, aggressive cost cuts and reward-and-punishment management turned the once loss-making panel business to profit from the year to March 2017, and Sharp returned to the Tokyo exchange’s First Section in December 2017.

The reckoning with self-reliance came last. In 2024 CEO Okitsu Masahiro halted large-panel production at the Sakai SDP plant and exited large LCD altogether, choosing an “asset-light” business that no longer builds finished goods from its own panels — letting go of the very symbol of the in-house creed that had begun with semiconductors in 1970. The Sakai site is being turned into an AI data centre; from 2025 Sharp recast itself into five segments and bet on AIoT appliances built with Hon Hai. A company that had always invested first and carried vast plant to fight the giants had crossed over to the side that holds no plant at all.