Nihon Kohden - Company History

Ogino Yoshio read electrical engineering at Waseda and spent the war as a technical officer at the Army Science Research Institute, working on television and the photophone. Defeat destroyed the profession he had trained for, and he chose to rebuild it on the border between medicine and electronics. In August 1951 he founded Nihon Kohden in Bunkyo, Tokyo, with twelve people, installing a former army medical officer with wide connections in the medical world as the first president while running the business himself. The company name came from the photoelectric effect and electron optics he had handled at university and at the institute — 光電, “photoelectric,” with “Nihon” and “Industries” attached. To raise working capital he pledged not only his own house and land but property borrowed from relatives and friends.

The founding idea did not pay. The market for medical electronics was still tiny, and a capital-poor start-up could not live on it. So Nihon Kohden lived on hearing aids instead: the Trio line it inherited from another workshop qualified for state subsidy under the 1949 welfare law for the disabled, which meant prefecture-by-prefecture contracts and fitting tests. The devices, built from surplus US Army parts, performed unreliably enough that engineers travelled with a full toolkit to adjust them on site. It was laborious, low-margin work — and it bought time.

What the time bought was remarkable. Four months after incorporation, in December 1951, the company completed the ME-1D, the world’s first eight-channel all-AC direct-writing electroencephalograph, delivered to a national sanatorium the following year; battery power had been the assumption in EEG until then. In November 1951 it had already prototyped the world’s first electrical ocular (intracranial) blood-pressure meter, its first patent application. From 1957 a portable electrocardiograph, in 1960 Japan’s first multi-purpose polygraph, in 1964 the world’s first patient monitor. Ogino Yoshio formally took the presidency in 1956, and on the tenth anniversary, in November 1961, Nihon Kohden listed on the second section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange — the first specialist medical-electronics maker to do so. Sales had multiplied roughly thirtyfold in a decade.

The engine of the growth years was the move from vacuum tubes to transistors, begun in 1958 and carried through the 1960s into integrated circuits. Small, light instruments followed one after another, and the company built the industrial frame to match: the Tomioka plant in Gunma from 1962 as its volume base, a national network of branches placed around university medical faculties, a standards committee to regularize products, and a service organization able to support them anywhere in Japan. The discipline was academic as well as industrial — the Japan Society of Medical Electronics and Biological Engineering was founded in 1962, with Ogino Yoshio on its preparatory committee arguing that medical and biological knowledge belonged inside engineering.

Then the ground gave way. Competition and a long strike had already broken a decade-plus dividend streak in the term to July 1973, and the oil shock of October 1973 that followed ended the high-growth era: a company whose sales had been doubling every five years fell to a heavy loss again in the year to August 1974 and cut staff at the Tomioka works. Management answered with the “Crisis Breakthrough 2-4 Campaign”: stronger selling, thinner inventory, lower costs, compressed payroll. It did not work at once. Only after two further failures did Ogino Yoshio, in the term beginning August 1976, put a name to the way back — the “0-1-2-3 Plan”: zero debt, a first-section listing, a 20% dividend, and the return of three bonuses a year, all by the thirtieth anniversary. The dividend resumed that same term after three years; sales passed $43.5M (¥10bn) for the first time in the year to July 1979; the 20% dividend came in 1981 and the first-section listing in 1982. All four targets were met.

Abroad, Nihon Kohden’s instruments were mostly sold under other makers’ brands, and its own name meant little in Europe and America. A well-received showing at the American Heart Association’s 1976 meeting convinced management that share in the United States was the same thing as standing in the world market. In November 1979 it opened Nihon Kohden America in Torrance, California, with three people — a direct-sales and service beachhead whose EEG business would later hold roughly 70% of the US market. A Germany subsidiary followed near Frankfurt in 1985, and by the end of the decade the company held its own sales base in two of the three great medical-device markets.

Because medical devices are sold under regulation and reimbursement rules that differ in every country, going global meant incorporating locally, again and again. A Shanghai joint venture in 1990 opened China; the brand name was unified as “Nihon Kohden” in 1992; then Singapore in 1996, Italy in 2001, Spain in 2002, Korea and France in 2004. Emerging markets followed in a second wave — India in 2011, Brazil in 2012, the UAE in 2012, Thailand and Colombia in 2013, Malaysia in 2014 — until the network reached more than fifty countries.

Development moved outward too. In 1999 the company set up a US laboratory near Los Angeles, its first overseas R&D function, and in 2014 an innovation centre in Cambridge, Massachusetts — a shift from selling abroad to developing alongside the American research hospitals that set the standards in bedside measurement.

The deeper change was in what Nihon Kohden was willing to build itself. Measurement it had mastered in-house; treatment and clinical information it had not, and could not reach by accumulation alone. So from the late 2000s it bought: Benefix in 2006 for medical information, Nihon Bio-Test Laboratories in 2008, and in December 2008 Neurotronics in the United States — its first acquisition in neurology. Defibtech, an AED maker in Guilford, Connecticut, followed in 2012, and in 2015 the company set up Orange Med near Los Angeles as its foothold in ventilators. A single-category instrument maker was becoming a portfolio.

In June 2015 Ogino Hiroichi became president — the founder’s grandson, third generation of the family in the chair, but a career insider who had joined after a Keio master’s in 1995 and reached the board in 2012. He pulled the company together physically and organizationally: a combined technical development centre in Tokorozawa, Saitama, in 2016 concentrated R&D, and in April 2017 eleven domestic sales subsidiaries were absorbed into the parent, ending the separation between head office and the Japanese field.

Then came COVID-19. Demand for ventilators and patient monitors — the two things Nihon Kohden had spent seventy years learning to make — surged at once. The year to March 2021 set records at $1.9B (¥200bn) in sales and $253.8M (¥27bn) in operating profit; the following year went higher still, $1.9B (¥205bn) and $282.4M (¥31bn). The long-range vision BEACON 2030 and its first medium-term plan ran straight through the boom, and its second phase, from 2023, through the normalization that followed.

The acquisitions did not stop: Ampsleedy in Charlottesville in 2021 for digital health, Software Team of Milan in 2022 for medical software, and in November 2024 a 71.4% stake in NeuroAdvanced, parent of the US maker Adtech, deepening neurological monitoring again. The US companies were reorganized under a holding structure in 2023, and new bases opened in Vietnam in 2024 and Saudi Arabia in 2025, the latter a regional headquarters for the Middle East. The shape that resulted has two layers — direct channels in North America, Europe and Japan, and local subsidiaries across the emerging markets — carrying a business that now aims at three domains rather than one: measurement, treatment, and information.