The Casio Mini: making the calculator personal (1972)

Creating a market by breaking the price

The heart of this decision was not a better calculator but the creation of a market that did not yet exist. Convention held that a calculator was an eight-digit office machine priced above $97 (¥30,000); the Casio Mini, a six-digit machine at $42 (¥12,800), was mocked inside the company and out as a toy. Tadao Kashio’s stated premise was the reverse of product-led thinking — not “if we build something new it will sell,” but “what do ordinary users want, and what would let the most people use it.” Reaching those users, rather than defending margins, was the maker’s mission as he defined it, and the Mini’s two-million-unit run in eighteen months proved a personal market had been there all along, waiting to be dug out.

The price was paid for in profit. Nikkei Business called it “a battered throne seized with cheap calculators,” and Casio accepted thinner earnings to take the installed base. Beneath the price sat a second, quieter choice: to hold LSI as custom silicon of its own design rather than buy the cheap standard chips most rivals used — keeping function and cost in its own hands. Those two choices together — a market opened by price, and a technology base owned outright — became the template Casio ran on, carrying it out of calculators and into watches, keyboards and cameras. That its expansion began not from a product it was asked for but from demand it manufactured is what marks the company — and it is the same reflex that would later scatter it across too many markets at once.