Company history

Toa Medical Electronics was set up in Kobe in February 1968 to sell someone else’s product: the blood cell counters made by Toa Tokushu Denki (today TOA Corporation). Nakatani Taro, who led the founding, had seen in the United States how preventive medicine was spreading testing to healthy people, and read a large future demand in machines that measure blood. Notably, the new company was funded personally rather than by the parent — a diversification set up at arm’s length from the electrical business it came out of.

The agency model lasted four years. In February 1972 Toa Medical Electronics took over the parent’s medical-electronics development and manufacturing operations and became an integrated maker of instruments. The reasoning was plain arithmetic: as long as it only distributed, the profit on each machine accrued to the manufacturer and the growing demand for automated testing could not be converted into earnings. Its core product — an automatic counter replacing the technician counting red and white cells under a microscope — traced back to Japan’s first domestic machine, developed in 1964 with Osaka University’s medical faculty. Against the imported Coulter machines it competed on a price small hospitals could justify and on close after-sales service.

With the Kakogawa plant in 1973 the company gained real production capacity, and by 1979 it held roughly 75% of the domestic market. Two habits formed in these years and never left. First, it made the consumables itself — diluents, hemolytic reagents, cleaners, sample containers — so that an instrument once installed kept selling reagents with every test. Second, it built a dedicated reagent plant in 1978, giving it in-house supply of both the durable and the disposable half of the business. That same year the product brand was changed to Sysmex, a coinage of “system” and “medicine” that would later be promoted to the company name itself.

The world market for blood cell counters was led by Coulter of the United States, and Toa Medical Electronics went after it early. A German subsidiary followed in October 1980 the representative office opened in 1972; in North America an office (1977) and a local company (1979) were backed by a distribution deal with Baxter. Reagents were produced locally, instruments shipped from Japan, and one distributor per country carried the line — a division of labour that lifted exports past 40% of sales by the year to March 1991.

At home the shift ran from semi-automatic machines that still assumed manual work to fully automatic ones that only needed the sample loaded. In autumn 1983 four models of the automated E-series arrived at once, priced from $77,901 (¥19m) to $157,908 (¥38m) so that clinics and large hospitals with very different testing volumes could each be met from the same range. Raising instrument performance and keeping reagents flowing were now the two wheels of the same profit.

Development and production were concentrated in parallel: the Kobe plant in 1986 gathered electrical, mechanical, chemical and optical engineers in one place, an Ono reagent plant followed in 1991, and the Techno Center in 1993 pulled R and D, logistics, information systems and service together. R and D ran at about 15% of sales, with roughly a fifth of all employees in development. Hashimoto Reizo, president from 1988, set two long-term goals — be world number one in cell counting, and lift everything else from 10% to 40% of sales in ten years. The listing came at the end of this build-out: the Osaka exchange in November 1995, Tokyo in July 1996.

Buying the German distributor Digitana in March 1995 set the template for the next fifteen years. Selling through agents was faster but surrendered the customer relationship and, with it, the reagent stream; one region at a time — Europe, then the Americas with a US company in 1997, then Asia with a Singapore headquarters in 1998 — the distributors were bought and converted to direct sales. In October 1998 the company took the name of its own product brand and became Sysmex Corporation, a renaming that was really a redefinition: a global in-vitro diagnostics maker rather than a Japanese instrument builder.

China followed in January 2000, and in March that year the shares moved up to the first sections in Tokyo and Osaka. The recurring half of the model was then bought outright: Kokusai Reagents in August 2001 gave Sysmex the core of its reagent business, with service, IT and laboratory-automation firms added in 2002 and 2004. By the 2000s reagent sales exceeded instrument sales, and the business had moved decisively from selling a machine once to selling a machine plus everything it consumes for years.

The result was an unusual position for a mid-sized Japanese company: a majority of the world market in blood cell counting, held since the late 1990s, in a diagnostics industry otherwise dominated by Roche, Abbott and Siemens. Those giants concentrated on the high-value clinical chemistry and immunoassay franchises and never pressed hard into cell counting; Sysmex took the category they left and made scale in it. The corollary was dependence on the world outside Japan, with overseas sales climbing past 80% and the yen-reporting parent increasingly exposed to currency and to foreign demand.

The cell-counting franchise did not extend by itself into the high-value territory the Western three hold, and personalized medicine — choosing treatment from a patient’s own genetic profile — demanded capabilities Sysmex did not have. It bought them. In June 2014 it took a stake in Riken Genesis, the genetic-testing company spun out of the RIKEN institute and then owned by Toppan Printing, and acquired the rest in 2016. The same month it opened “i-Square,” a new instrument plant at Kakogawa. Alongside the instrument-plus-reagent model, Sysmex now also sold the test itself: companion diagnostics for cancer drugs and gene panel testing.

Scale followed. Revenue grew from about $1.9B (¥185bn) in the year to March 2014 to $3.4B (¥509bn) in the year to March 2025, and group headcount roughly doubled to about 10,500 as overseas subsidiaries filled out. The pandemic years pulled testing demand forward; China then slowed, and growth had to come from the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific instead — the FY2024 split of roughly ¥255bn at home, ¥136bn EMEA, ¥123bn the Americas, ¥118bn China and ¥38bn Asia-Pacific shows how far the portfolio had spread.

In April 2023 Ietsugu Hisashi, who had run the company for about twenty-six years, moved to chairman and Asano Kaoru — from Kawasaki Heavy Industries, previously CTO and a builder of surgical robots — became president and CEO. It was the first handover outside the founding family, made on Ietsugu’s own reasoning that with roughly 90% of sales abroad this was no longer a company a founding family could run. The oligopoly above Sysmex has not changed; what changes next is whether AI-assisted analysis, companion diagnostics and genetic testing can become a second pillar as durable as the first.