Company history

Anritsu descends from two Meiji-era workshops that sold to the state. In 1895 Ishiguro Keizaburo founded Sekisha, a pioneer of wireline telegraph and telephone gear; after a merger with the Abe cable works it became Kyoritsu Electric, a designated plant for the Ministry of Communications, the Army and the Railway Ministry, making telephones, meters and cable. In 1900 Annaka Tsunejiro founded the Annaka Electric Works, the country’s first maker of radio equipment, which widened from wireless sets into transformers, capacitors and vacuum tubes.

What each firm accumulated was not only the equipment but the habit of proving it. Gear sold against government specifications had to be tested by its own maker, so the measurement skill sat inside the house from the beginning. Annaka became a designated Navy plant in 1905, and its Type 36 wireless set aboard the patrol vessel Shinano Maru sent the signal that opened the Battle of Tsushima in May 1905. Incorporated in 1917, it began building vacuum tubes, installed a domestic 500-watt transmitter at Tokyo’s Atagoyama broadcasting station, and fitted NYK liners with tube-based radio transmitters.

In March 1931 the two firms merged into Anritsu Electric, capitalised at ¥500,000 — the name taking one character each from Annaka and Kyoritsu — with its head office in Azabu, Tokyo, and a business spanning wireless and wireline equipment together with instruments. It built Japan’s first television transmitter in 1933 for Hamamatsu Technical College, and the country’s first automatic payphone in 1939. As the war economy took hold, military radio work swelled the payroll to some 9,000 people by the surrender.

In October 1950 the company was rebuilt as a “second company” under the enterprise reconstruction law, liquidating the wartime entity and converting to civilian demand. What replaced the military customer was another public one: from 1953 the first five-year plan of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation pulled in payphones, carrier equipment and line test sets, and by the plan’s end in 1957 NTT accounted for roughly 40% of sales. A dedicated NTT sales section followed in 1959, hard-wiring that dependence into the organisation. The Atsugi works opened in April 1961 and the shares listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange that October, moving up to the first section in 1968.

Through the 1970s the two pillars — communications equipment and instruments — shifted weight toward the second. Making equipment to specification had always required measuring it, and as the telecom network matured the demand moved from the boxes to the instruments that qualified them. Manufacturing was consolidated at Atsugi in 1978, and in 1979 a new head office rose at Hiroo in central Tokyo — production in Kanagawa, headquarters downtown, a split that held for the next three decades.

On 1 October 1985 the company dropped the old characters and became Anritsu Corporation — a rebranding around measurement rather than equipment, with a new production subsidiary at Koriyama, Fukushima, opened that March. Five years later came the move that defined the next thirty: in February 1990 Anritsu bought Wiltron Company of the United States, a specialist in microwave measurement, for about $180 million, acquiring at a stroke a high-frequency technology base, an American brand and a sales network. Renamed Anritsu Company, it became the group’s overseas hub, and through the 1990s its line evolved into test systems for cellular handsets — carrying Anritsu through the global ramp-up of 2G and 3G.

The structure was rebuilt around that centre of gravity. An executive-officer system came in 2000; the industrial machinery business was carved out in 2002 into what is now Anritsu Infivis; in June 2003 the registered head office moved to Atsugi and the device business was spun out in October. Purchases filled in the map: NetTest of Denmark in 2005 brought optical-communications measurement and a European base, positioned by president Toda Hiromichi as entry into service assurance — a fourth pillar for the measurement business. Anritsu EMEA followed in 2006 for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and new plants at Koriyama in 2009 and 2013 added capacity.

Successive medium-term plans — GLP2012, GLP2014, then GLP2017 — declared the goal plainly: global leadership in mobile test, with R&D accelerated toward LTE-Advanced and 5G. The market, however, moves in waves. Between generations, demand sagged: sales of ¥95.5 billion and net profit of ¥3.8 billion in the year to March 2016, ¥87.6 billion and ¥2.7 billion the year after, forcing cost restructuring even as 5G spending continued. In March 2015 a global headquarters building opened inside the Atsugi site, ending thirty-six years of a downtown head office and folding the corporate centre in with the factory — a structural reform pursued under president Hashimoto Yuichi, who handed the presidency to Hamada Koichi in April 2018.

Under Hamada the 5G cycle arrived in force. Group sales reached ¥107.0 billion with operating profit of ¥17.4 billion in the year to March 2020 and ¥105.9 billion with ¥19.7 billion the year after; test and measurement alone contributed ¥75.1 billion and ¥74.8 billion of that, with operating margins that made it the profit engine of the whole company. The plan period closed at ¥105.3 billion and ¥16.5 billion. Three group companies were absorbed into the parent in 2021 to run as a single global company, and a new brand statement, Advancing beyond, framed the ambition as reaching past “measurement” itself.

The problem was what comes after a peak. The next plan named four new domains — local 5G, industrial DX, 6G and data centres — and in January 2022 Anritsu bought Takasago Ltd. from NEC, a power-supply and instrument maker with battery-test technology; the group moved to the TSE Prime market that April and re-cut its segments into test and measurement, PQA and environmental measurement. The new segment was small — ¥6.4 billion of sales in its first year, ¥8.5 billion and ¥0.9 billion of operating profit by the year to March 2025 — but it bought a foothold outside communications.

In April 2024 Anritsu published GLP2026, putting return on equity at the centre of how it would be judged and setting a target of $1.3B (¥200bn) in sales and ROE above 15% by the year to March 2031 — roughly doubling a top line that had hovered near $660.1M (¥100bn) for some three decades. Hamada has been explicit that the point is to change how the company thinks, and that 5G and 6G mobile business alone cannot get it there; he expects 6G to replace 4G as the working network and to become a business from around 2027, with the intervening years an interregnum. The year to March 2026 came in at ¥117.5 billion of sales and ¥14.8 billion of operating profit, alongside a ¥10 billion buyback and a raised interim dividend under a DOE-linked policy.