Hirose Electric - Company History

In August 1937, weeks after the war with China began, Hirose Keizo founded Hirose Shokai in Akasaka, Tokyo, to make and sell electrical insulating materials and components for communications equipment. It was a small entrant in a market where the line between military and civilian demand had already blurred: the same insulators and parts went into army and navy radio sets and into commercial broadcasting gear. In April 1945 the firm built its first plant of its own, far from the capital, at Yugawara in Kanagawa — a dispersal made to escape air raids and wartime controls on materials.

That defensive move turned out to matter most after the war. Yugawara came through unburned, and in a country rebuilding around radio and then television receivers it was one of the few sets of working machinery available. In June 1948 the business incorporated as Hirose Shokai Seisakusho; that October, the Yugawara plant began producing circular, rectangular and coaxial connectors. It was the pivot on which everything since has rested. A connector is a standard part fitted into very nearly every electronic device, and the money in it comes not from breadth of catalogue but from depth in one part — from design that answers each customer’s particular demands, and from yield. Hirose would spend the next seventy-five years proving the point and never seriously leaving the product.

From power connectors for communications gear, the line widened to rectangular types for the inside of equipment and coaxial types for high frequencies. In 1959 Hirose’s connectors were approved to Japanese Defense Agency and US military standards, and in 1963 its own Mini-Con 1300 series was judged to stand comparison with European and American products — the point at which a small subcontractor became a technically credible specialist. In August of that year the company took the name it still uses, Hirose Electric.

Scale came from the telephone network. In 1965 the Mini-Con series was adopted for the key-telephone connectors of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation, and from 1966 Hirose supplied them as one of only three certified makers; annual sales passed $2.8M (¥1bn) in the year to May 1967. In 1967, anticipating computers, it developed Japan’s first domestically engineered printed-circuit-board connector, which met the desk-calculator boom of 1969 head-on. In 1968 its HRM coaxial connectors were used in quantity on the Intelsat III satellites that carried the Mexico City Olympics, and a distribution agreement with America’s Cherry added microswitches to the catalogue.

Hirose Keizo died in May 1971, and in December 1972 the company listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. The listing prospectus describes an unusual firm: second in the industry with a 15.9% share, selling mostly direct to the telephone monopoly, NEC, Matsushita Communication Industrial, Mitsubishi Electric and Hitachi — and, of the top five makers, the only one not built on a joint venture or a licence from a foreign company. Four plants, 628 employees at the May 1972 year-end, and technology entirely its own.

Hirose grew by geography, not by product. Domestic capacity moved north — Tohoku Hirose Electric at Miyako, Iwate, in 1974, Koriyama Hirose in 1982 — while the overseas map filled in behind its customers: the United States in 1980, a joint venture with Korea’s Daeduck in 1985, West Germany and the United Kingdom in 1988, then Malaysia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Hong Kong, Dongguan and Shanghai in China, a European holding company in the Netherlands, Suzhou, and Singapore by 2010. Promotion to the first section of the Tokyo exchange in November 1984 secured the funding base. In three decades the company added nine countries and no new product category.

The mid-1990s showed what the single theme could earn. Sales reached ¥60.6 billion in the year to March 1996, up 17%, on mobile phones and PHS handsets, base stations, car navigation, personal computers and peripherals, semiconductor production equipment and prepaid-card readers for pachinko parlours; in industrial connectors Hirose held the largest domestic share. Two habits drove it. One was the ambush product — a house-developed part readied before the demand for it appeared, so that new products ran to more than ten thousand items, roughly 30% of the line, and salesmen could propose rather than quote. The other was fabless manufacturing: with PC customers demanding one- or two-week lead times, Hirose left volume production to some 200 cooperating factories and carried neither their plant nor their payroll.

The arithmetic was extraordinary — an ordinary profit margin of 19.2% in the year to March 1995 against 6.0% for the thirty leading Japanese component makers — and it was earned in other companies’ workshops around Miyako. The last piece of tidying belongs to this era too: from 2010 Hirose began buying out the Korean joint venture it had entered in 1985, reaching 100% ownership in 2015, and in 2011 it consolidated headquarters functions and production engineering into a new Yokohama Center.

The smartphone rebuilt Hirose’s income statement. Consolidated sales rose from ¥94.8 billion in the year to March 2012 to ¥125.7 billion three years later, with operating profit of ¥32.6 billion; multi-pole connectors alone accounted for ¥101.4 billion of that revenue against ¥16.2 billion for coaxial. The driver was structural rather than cyclical — as more functions were packed onto each handset’s boards, the number of connectors per device kept rising — and it placed a mid-sized Japanese specialist near the centre of the global handset supply chain.

The peak came after the pandemic. Sales reached ¥163.7 billion in the year to March 2022 and ¥183.2 billion the year after, at an operating margin of 25.5% — a figure almost unheard of for a parts maker, and the clearest measure of what depth in one product plus fabless production can do. Around it the corporate form was tidied up: the registered head office moved from Tokyo to Yokohama in July 2020, and the company entered the Prime market in April 2022. After a pause in the year to March 2024, revenue recovered to ¥189.4 billion in the year to March 2025.

The concentration that produced those margins is also the exposure. With earnings tied to the smartphone cycle, the mid-term plan Hirose 2027 aims to spread the base into automotive electrification, industrial equipment and data centres — and in June 2025 the company broke an eighty-seven-year pattern to pursue it. Kamagata Shin, who began his career at NTT Data in 1990 and joined Hirose in 2002, became president, the first outsider to the founding family and the engineering line to hold the job; Ishii Kazunori, president since 2011, moved to the chair without representative rights. Debt-free, with an equity ratio above 80%, Hirose is trying to buy its way out of a single-market dependence with the cash that dependence generated.