Casio — Company History

Casio began in April 1946 as a back-street workshop. Four Kashio brothers — led by the eldest, Tadao Kashio — set up Kashio Seisakusho in Mitaka, Tokyo, in the scarcity of the postwar years. In June 1957 they mass-produced the 14-A, the world’s first compact all-electric calculator, and founded Casio Computer the same month. Calculators then were mechanical or relay-driven, and the only electronic machines were room-sized banks of vacuum tubes; nothing purely electric was small enough to sit on an office desk. Into that gap Casio put a precisely engineered relay machine — and vaulted from a family workshop to a national maker.

The choice underneath the 14-A set the company’s course: rather than improve a product that already existed, Casio offered a means of calculation no one was yet using and dug out the demand itself. It built a Tokyo factory for volume production in 1960 and, in 1965, released an electronic desktop calculator, leading the generational shift from relay to electronics. But that shift frightened its founder as much as it favoured him. Seeing Sharp’s electronic calculator at a 1964 trade show, Tadao Kashio later wrote, felt like “cold water down my back” — proof the ground was moving under the whole industry.

What followed was the calculator war: Sharp, Canon, Sony and Toshiba fought through the late 1960s to make the machines smaller and cheaper, and Casio stood at the centre of the fight on both technology and price. In May 1970 it set up Casio, Inc. in New York and listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, planting at once an overseas sales base and public capital for the battle ahead.

In August 1972 Casio launched the Casio Mini at $42 (¥12,800) and broke the settled rule of its own industry — that a calculator was an eight-digit office machine costing more than $97 (¥30,000). A six-digit machine sold for personal use was ridiculed inside the company and out as a toy, but it opened a market no one had served: it sold more than two million units in eighteen months. Tadao Kashio framed the logic as the inverse of product-led thinking — not “build something new and it will sell,” but ask what ordinary users want and what would let the most people use it. That month Casio moved up to the First Section of the Tokyo exchange.

The price was paid for in profit — Nikkei Business later called it “a battered throne seized with cheap calculators” — and beneath it lay a quieter, decisive choice. As LSI chips arrived, calculator makers had to pick between cheap standard silicon and costly custom parts of their own design; most took the standard route, and only Casio, Sharp and TI chose custom, keeping function and cost in their own hands. That owned technology base is what let Casio cross out of calculators entirely: into the digital wristwatch in 1974 and the Casiotone electronic keyboard in 1980 — instruments aimed not at trained musicians but at people who had never played. Subsidiaries in London (1975), Hong Kong and Yamagata (1979) knit development, manufacturing and sales into one international base.

In April 1983 Casio released the G-SHOCK (DW-5000C), a shock-resistant watch built on a single defiant idea — “a watch that won’t break when dropped” — that cut against a trade built on precision and refinement. It found no natural home in Japan at first; its earliest believers were American professionals — firefighters, police and the military — who valued the thing for what it could take. The same demand-creating reflex carried Casio further still: in 1995 the QV-10, the world’s first digital camera with an LCD screen, opened yet another category.

By then Casio had spread across calculators, watches, keyboards, electronic dictionaries, cameras, mobile phones, LCD panels and semiconductors — and the breadth became the liability. In the year to March 2002, after the IT bubble burst, Casio fell to a net loss: the first time the cost of over-diversification showed as a number, a simultaneous downturn across too many products that no single hit could reverse. Digital cameras revived earnings for a few years, but the 2008 financial crisis brought two straight years of losses, and the smartphone then swallowed the compact-camera market that even the slim, fast-shooting EXILIM could not hold.

From 2010 Casio made the systematic retreat it had never made before: it left TFT-LCD panels, folded its mobile-phone business into a joint venture with NEC, and exited semiconductor packaging in 2011. Restructuring, paired with a high-margin watch business centred on G-SHOCK, rebuilt profitability on a smaller base — but left the company dangerously reliant on a single line. In 2015 Kazuo Kashio handed the presidency to Kazuhiro Kashio, and in 2018 Casio closed one of its signature businesses, exiting the compact digital cameras it had pioneered with the 1995 QV-10.

The retreat became a redefinition. By the late 2010s two businesses — the G-SHOCK-led watch line and educational scientific calculators — earned most of Casio’s segment profit, while dictionaries, keyboards and system equipment were shrinking or loss-making. In June 2023, about a year after moving to the Tokyo exchange’s Prime market, Casio named Yuichi Masuda its first president from outside the founding family — appointed on a platform of human-capital management and governance reform (he also took on the chief HR officer role), a historic break for a company the Kashio family had led since 1946.

Masuda kept the founder’s demand-creation creed but added a test it had never faced: whether each business could earn above its cost of capital. On that basis Casio cut into what remained — halving its electronic-instrument lineup and pulling out of unprofitable regions, stopping new hardware development in electronic dictionaries — and concentrated on consumer watches and EdTech. Then, in November 2024, a ransomware attack forced Casio to sever infected servers, halting parts of its supply chain into the Christmas selling season and pushing cybersecurity up beside restructuring as a second front.

The reckoning stayed unfinished. In June 2025 Masuda stepped down after about two years — a short tenure the business press read against the strain between family ownership and outside management — and Shin Takano succeeded him, pledging to continue the structural overhaul and to sharpen a merit-based system. Eighty years on from the Mitaka workshop, the task Casio has set itself is narrow and hard: to carry a founding instinct for creating demand into just two pillars — watches and educational calculators — and to build a second leg so the company no longer stands on G-SHOCK alone.