Meiko - Company History

Meiko began as a deliberate narrowing. Naya Yuichiro, born in December 1943 and an engineer at Showa Musen Kogyo (today SMK), had worked on circuit boards and concluded that consumer electronics would keep demanding denser wiring — and that the double-sided board, then the advanced product, was where the demand would grow. In 1974 he fitted out a shed of about ten tsubo (some 33 m²) in his own garden and began designing and making board patterns; in November 1975 he incorporated it in Ayase, Kanagawa as Meiko Denshi Kogyo (名幸電子工業), with a single stated purpose — the manufacture and sale of printed wiring boards. The logic of staying with one part was that each generation of electronics deepened the same craft: the products changed, the accumulated process did not.

Orders arrived with the arcade boom — game boards for Space Invaders in 1979 — and the company built rather than bought. A new head office and plant in Ayase in 1980 put design through finished board under one roof; that December a multilayer press took Meiko out of two-layer work and into the high-density boards it had no orders for yet. Subsidiaries followed the widening product line: Multitech in 1982 for single-sided boards (now Meiko Tech), a Yamagata joint venture the same year, a Fukushima plant in 1990. In April 1991 the name became simply Meiko.

The hard lesson came in between. After the 1985 Plaza Accord the yen’s surge pushed Meiko’s customers to manufacture abroad, orders collapsed, and the company booked the first loss of its life — Naya has called it the worst stretch of his fifty years, one in which he asked competitors as well as customers for work. It recovered on home game consoles and on an early read that automotive boards were the next use. What it had lost in 1985 was not technology but proximity: in November 1997 Meiko put up a building at Yamagata for build-up boards, the density technology that mobile phones and notebook PCs then needed — and within a year it was carrying that method offshore itself.

In August 1998 Meiko set up a Hong Kong company as its trading and procurement window, and in December established a manufacturing subsidiary in Panyu Nansha, Guangdong. The Guangzhou plant did not start production until January 2001 — a two-year build that says what kind of move this was. It was not chasing the lowest labour rate; it was the answer, thirteen years late, to 1985. If the customers’ factories had crossed the water, a board maker that stayed home was standing where the work no longer reached.

Capital followed the same sequence. Meiko registered its shares with the Japan Securities Dealers Association in December 2000, twenty-five years after founding, and listed on the JASDAQ exchange in December 2004 — a public balance sheet assembled precisely while the offshore build-out began, and one that funded what came next. The founding family kept control throughout: Naya himself has held roughly 18% of the shares, and the family and related companies together some 24–25%, so an owner-run company and a listed one have coexisted ever since.

The second Chinese base came in July 2005, in Wuhan, Hubei, with the plant running from July 2006. Guangdong put Meiko next to the electronics assembly cluster of the south; Wuhan bought inland cost in the centre. Together the two would supply the world’s handset, automotive-electronics and industrial-equipment makers for the better part of two decades, and would carry the overseas share of sales past 80%.

In January 2007, with Chinese output barely at full stride, Meiko incorporated Meiko Electronics Vietnam in Hanoi. What moved there was not machinery but a way of running a plant — local staff trained in Japan and then handed the factory, the pattern established in Guangzhou. An EMS plant opened in 2009, an R&D centre the same year, a PCB plant in 2011; Meiko Electronics Thang Long followed in 2014. On that reading, a site shifting from China to Vietnam costs the company relatively little.

The exception to the build-it-yourself rule came in March 2008, when Meiko took over the circuit business of Japan’s Victor Company — boards for DVD players and car navigation — for $12.6M (¥1bn), against consolidated sales of $759.7M (¥79bn) that year. It bought technology, customers and 147 people. It did not buy the market: the contract was signed in January 2008 on an assumption of “sustained expansion in digital consumer electronics,” and within half a year Meiko was delaying the Vietnamese and Wuhan start-ups and winding up the Yokohama plant it had just acquired. Acquisitions have stayed a supplement ever since — a Vietnamese EMS stake in 2019, two embedded-systems firms in 2022 — while the growth axis remained its own construction.

Domestic capacity kept pace with the offshore build rather than shrinking behind it: an Ishinomaki plant in 2013, Meiko Techno in Yamato, Kanagawa in 2015 for assembly, video and industrial equipment. The listing migrated in step with the company’s size — Osaka Securities Exchange JASDAQ in 2010, Tokyo Stock Exchange JASDAQ in 2013.

The years to March 2019 and March 2020 looked like a plateau — sales of about ¥118.9bn then ¥115.4bn on automotive and industrial boards — but operating profit fell from ¥8.9bn to ¥5.1bn, a drop of 43%, as the US–China trade war shrank orders at Wuhan. The plant was then taking more than 30% of consolidated sales, and the concentration that had been an advantage read, at once, as structural risk. Diversifying into Vietnam moved up the priority list.

Demand then turned Meiko’s way. Vehicle electrification lifted automotive boards, and servers and data centres bid for high-layer-count boards; sales rose from ¥119.2bn in the year to March 2021 to ¥151.2bn, ¥167.2bn, ¥179.4bn and ¥206.8bn in the year to March 2025 — a record, reached in the company’s fiftieth year. Institutional catching-up ran alongside: the First Section of the TSE in 2021, the Prime Market in 2022, embedded-systems subsidiaries the same year, a Tendo plant and Meiko Electronics Hoa Binh in 2023, the Ishinomaki works spun off as Miyagi Meiko in 2024.

The old move is still being made. As Meiko’s smartphone customers pull their supply chains out of China, the company raised capital spending for the year to March 2026 from $200.5M (¥30bn) to $340.8M (¥51bn) — a 70% increase, most of it extending the Vietnamese plants; by March 2025 its fixed assets in Vietnam were 2.5 times those in China. Fifty years on, the product line has climbed from double-sided to multilayer to build-up to thick-copper automotive and high-layer-count data-centre boards without ever leaving the printed wiring board, and Naya Yuichiro, 82, remains president — a tenure of unusual length for a listed Japanese company, with succession now being prepared around Sakate Atsushi and Naya Shigeru.