Kyocera - Company History

Kyocera's first eleven years turned a 27-year-old engineer with no capital and no reputation into a supplier the American semiconductor industry leaned on. Shut out by the large Japanese electronics makers, the company went instead to the source of the technology those makers were licensing, and by 1970 was firing ceramic packages inside the United States — in a plant a customer had talked it into buying.

Listed in Osaka in 1971 and on the New York Stock Exchange nine years later, Kyocera spent the proceeds of its packaging position on widening what it made and what it owned — four companies absorbed in a single month, a camera maker the year after, and a name change to match. Then it put its money somewhere no ceramics firm was expected to go: a start-up telephone company built to undercut NTT.

In fifteen years the company that had lived off ceramic packages became one whose largest division sold telephones, and it bought its way further in — AVX taken with paper in 1990 and floated again five years later at a large gain. Then Intel switched its packaging to plastic, the founding business lost a mainstay's worth of sales in a stroke, and Inamori left the chairmanship.

Kyocera passed ¥1 trillion in sales, cut ten thousand jobs the following year, and went on adding businesses by acquisition long after its founder had left the board. By 2025 the pattern had run out of road: the first medium-term plan in the company's history withdrawn two years after it was set, an activist fund on the register, and a return on equity of 0.7 per cent.