Anritsu - Company History

Anritsu Electric, born of the wartime consolidation of two telecommunications makers

In March 1931 Anritsu Electric Co., Ltd. was established with capital of ¥500,000 through the merger of Annaka Electric Works Ltd. and Kyoritsu Electric Co., Ltd.[1] Annaka Electric Works, founded in 1900 by Annaka Tsunejiro (安中常次郎), was the progenitor of radio equipment manufacture in Japan; it had widened its output from wireless sets to transformers, capacitors and vacuum tubes, and belonged to the line of domestic makers that carried the growth of the telegraph and telephone business[2]. Kyoritsu Electric traced its own line to Sekisugisha, the pioneering maker of wire telecommunications equipment that Ishiguro Keizaburo (石黒慶三郎) started in 1895; after a merger with Abe Electric Wire Works it developed into a manufacturer of wire telecommunications equipment — telephones, instruments and cable[3]. Each firm had some thirty years behind it when the two were brought together, in one of the consolidations of the telecommunications equipment industry in interwar Japan. The name Anritsu was coined by taking one character each from An(naka) and (Kyo)ritsu. At incorporation the head office stood at Fujimicho, Azabu, Tokyo[4], and the business was the manufacture and sale of radio and wire telecommunications equipment and measuring instruments.

The technical stock the two parents brought with them reached back into prewar radio development. Annaka Electric Works was designated a supplier to the Navy Ministry in 1905[5], and the picket ship Shinano Maru, carrying the company's Type 36 wireless telegraph set, sent the historic signal Enemy fleet in sight at the opening of the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905[6]. Incorporated as a joint-stock company in 1917, Annaka Electric began making vacuum tubes[7], and became known for installing a domestically built 500W broadcast transmitter at the Atagoyama transmitting station of the Tokyo Central Broadcasting Station, and for fitting vacuum-tube radio transmitters to Nippon Yusen's Asama Maru, Tatsuta Maru and Terukuni Maru[8]. After Anritsu Electric was launched in 1931 it built Japan's first television broadcast transmitter, in 1933, and delivered it to Hamamatsu Technical College (today the Faculty of Engineering of Shizuoka University)[9]; at the end of 1939 it developed the first automatic payphone made in Japan[10]. As the war deepened, production of military radio ordnance grew, and by the surrender the payroll had reached some 9,000[11].

In October 1950 Anritsu Electric set up a second company under the Enterprise Reconstruction and Reorganisation Law[12]. It was one of the firms that, in the course of the dissolution of the zaibatsu and the corporate rebuilding carried out under the Allied occupation, liquidated the old legal entity and began again as a new one — a reconstruction that carried with it the shedding of wartime dependence on military demand and a conversion to civilian markets. Riding the network expansion of the first five-year plan of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, which began in 1953, Anritsu Electric supplied payphones, carrier transmission equipment and line test sets, and by 1957, when the first plan ended, business with the public corporation accounted for about 40 per cent of total company sales[13]. In 1959 it created a First Sales Section as a market-specific organisation dedicated to the public corporation[14], hardening its reliance on government demand into organisational form as well. In April 1961 it opened a new works at Atsugi in Kanagawa Prefecture, and that October listed its shares on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange[15]. In August 1968 it was reassigned to the first section[16], winning the capital market's endorsement during the postwar expansion of communications infrastructure.

The turn to measurement, and the 1985 renaming to Anritsu

Through the 1970s Anritsu Electric ran its business as a manufacturer producing on two pillars, communications equipment and measuring instruments, but a structural shift was under way in which the weight of measurement steadily grew. In May 1978 it moved the radio equipment manufacturing divisions from Gotanda in Tokyo to the Atsugi works, completing the concentration of manufacturing at Atsugi[17]. In June 1979 it finished a new head office building on the site of a former company dormitory in front of Hiroo underground station, and moved its head office and sales divisions there[18]. The division of labour — production at Atsugi, head office and sales in central Tokyo at Hiroo — became the company's geographical shape for the next thirty-odd years.

In March 1985 it established a production subsidiary, Tohoku Anritsu Co., Ltd., at Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture[19], and on 1 October the same year changed its corporate name to Anritsu Corporation[20]. The change rewrote 安立 in katakana as アンリツ, and marked a turning point that carried with it a redefinition of the brand as a company whose main business was measuring instruments. Hashimoto Hirokazu (橋本裕一), the sixth president, said years later that what lay behind a history of more than 120 years was having remained an entity that society needed, and identified three sources of the strength to break through crises: being advanced, being adaptable, being dependable. The half-century and more from the founding of Anritsu Electric in 1931 to the renaming in 1985 was the history of a process by which the accumulation of core technologies in measurement became the company's centre.