Company history

In 1985 Akebono decided to let the Bendix agreement lapse at its expiry in November 1986 and switch partners to General Motors, reading GM’s early-1980s turn toward Japanese components as the opening. A project team under a vice president negotiated in secret while an executive stationed in Chicago — Nobumoto’s son Nobumoto Hisataka — gathered intelligence on GM. To its own largest shareholder Akebono meanwhile put a joint-venture proposal, 51% held by Akebono, that Bendix’s parent Allied could not possibly accept, staging the breakdown it wanted. In October 1986 it formed Ambrake Corporation with GM and built a plant at Elizabethtown, Kentucky, which began production in May 1988. The move into America cost close to $59.3M (¥10bn) — “a big gamble,” said Nobumoto Yasusada; “if it goes wrong the payback will be severe.” It was meant to win both a US market and the know-how to build whole brake systems rather than sink into component subcontracting. A friction-material plant, Amak Brake, followed at Glasgow, Kentucky, in 1994.

Nobumoto Hisataka became president in 1990 and chairman as well from 1994, though his father was reported to keep real authority for some time after retiring to honorary chairman. Under a one-man style in which the head of the company “looked at every business himself and approved everything,” staff had learned to wait for instructions; around 1996 Akebono misread what its customer wanted in the brake design for JR West’s 500-series Shinkansen and lost the order to a rival. From 1995 the younger Nobumoto rebuilt the organisation piece by piece — a new planning function, an independent aftermarket arm, annual salaries for managers from 1997 — and in April 1998 introduced the auto industry’s first internal company system, five self-accounting units for passenger cars, commercial vehicles, aftermarket, industrial and rail, and information, with presidents chosen by open internal application (one project leader appointed at forty-one). The company had previously been unable to see profit and loss even by division, let alone by product: ordinary profit was 2.3% of sales in the year to March 1997, below the 4% parts-industry average, and about 2% the following year on sales of $825.1M (¥108bn). The leading brake maker in Japan, with roughly 40% of the domestic market, was barely profitable — and with no keiretsu to shelter in, fixing that was survival.

As carmakers’ groups began to loosen at the end of the 1990s, the global reshuffling of the parts industry reached Akebono too. In August 1999 Delphi Automotive Systems, the world’s largest parts maker, spun off from GM, bought part of second-largest shareholder Nissan’s stake for about $15m to take 5.9% and fourth place — the first time Delphi had taken equity in a Japanese parts maker itself, made possible by Nissan selling down in its own restructuring. In August 2005 Akebono bought out the 50-50 Ambrake venture, by then inherited by Delphi, and took back control of its US business. A mid-term plan from April 2005, Global 30, set a 30% world share as the target and pushed through withdrawals from ABS and property, plants and sales bases in Guangzhou, Suzhou and Germany in 2004 and Thailand in 2006, a tie-up with Itochu in 2006, and an official supplier deal with the Vodafone McLaren Mercedes Formula One team in 2007. The year to March 2008 brought record figures — sales of $1.8B (¥185bn) and ordinary profit of $121.9M (¥13bn) — and the plan was renewed with the 30% goal intact.

The financial crisis drove the year to March 2009 to an ordinary loss of $84.5M (¥8bn) and a net loss of $174.3M (¥16bn), closing the Springfield plant in the US and forcing a reshuffle of domestic sites. In the middle of it, in September 2009, Akebono agreed to take over Robert Bosch’s North American brake business, completing the transfer that December. Two plants — Clarksville, Tennessee and Columbia, South Carolina — took the American operation to four, and brought the big US carmakers in at a stroke. Consolidated sales jumped from $1.5B (¥131bn) in the year to March 2010 to $2.7B (¥217bn) the next; the company’s own 85-year history calls this its “third turning point,” after Bendix and after GM.

But the acquired business carried a great deal of low-margin work, and North America struggled from 2010 on. What compounded it was a production crisis from 2014. As US sales of large pickups and SUVs grew, Akebono accepted every volume its customers asked for: labour costs ballooned at Elizabethtown, Glasgow could not hire the people to run the equipment it had added, and chartered air freight to Mexico and Europe became routine. In the year to March 2016 the US operation carried more than $82.7M (¥9bn) of extra cost — $36.8M (¥4bn) of emergency freight, $25.7M (¥3bn) of labour — and headed for an operating loss of $89.1M (¥10bn). The company’s own verdict was that the root cause was “a culture, which should never have existed, of taking orders even at poor margins because sales came first.”

In November 2015 it emerged that $1.9M (¥210m) of aftermarket sales might have been booked before meeting the company’s own shipment criteria; an investigation committee chaired by an outside auditor was set up and results delayed to mid-December. The year to March 2016 set a sales record of $2.6B (¥281bn) and still produced an operating loss of $34.9M (¥4bn) and, with $108.4M (¥12bn) of US asset impairments, a net loss of $179.2M (¥20bn). The mid-term plan rewritten that year abandoned the pursuit of scale for profit, and a turnaround specialist was hired from outside to replace the North American management. Operating profit did recover to $73.4M (¥8bn) in the year to March 2018 — and then collapsed to $1.8M (¥200m) the next, with impairments of $138.5M (¥15bn) in North America and Europe and a net loss of $167.9M (¥18bn).

Out of cash, Akebono filed on 29 January 2019 for business-turnaround ADR, the out-of-court workout that restructures bank debt without touching trade creditors or customers — a private restructuring by a major listed parts maker. Through the eight months that followed it managed cash day by day, and in the US its financial condition effectively stopped new orders. On 18 September 2019 the process closed with 37 lenders waiving $513.7M (¥56bn) of debt. The turnaround fund Japan Industrial Solutions subscribed $183.5M (¥20bn) of preferred shares, and a plan began that included closing or selling six plants in Japan, the US and Europe. On 30 September, chairman and president Nobumoto Hisataka and two other representative directors resigned to take responsibility, ending more than half a century of father-and-son rule by the Nobumoto family; in October Miyaji Yasuhiro, formerly of Bosch and Nidec, became president and CEO. Debt-forgiveness and other extraordinary gains of $585.3M (¥63bn), set against $234.1M (¥25bn) of impairments, left a net profit of $233.2M (¥25bn) for the year to March 2020 and a reset balance sheet.

The plan was barely underway when COVID-19 and the semiconductor shortage hit. Sales fell to $1.2B (¥134bn) in the year to March 2021, more than 40% below two years earlier. As agreed, the two ex-Bosch plants in Tennessee and South Carolina closed in 2020, taking the US back from four sites to two; the Arras plant in France closed in June 2022, followed by the Gonesse R&D centre, and domestic production and headcount were rationalised. Raw-material and energy costs still delayed a return to profit in America, and ahead of the lump-sum repayment due at the end of June 2024 the accounts carried a going-concern note. “When we drew up the plan,” Miyaji said in 2023, “we had not envisaged a pandemic or a shortage of semiconductors.”

Akebono repaid the borrowings in June 2024 and completed the five-year plan on schedule, with the North American business still loss-making. The TSE’s 2022 restructuring had put the company in the Prime market; its largest shareholder is now JIS, which converted its preferred shares and held 50.76% at the end of March 2025, far above Toyota’s 5.7%. In 2024 Nagaoka Hiroshi, who had worked on chassis design at a carmaker, became president and CEO, and in August 2025 he published the first mid-term plan of the post-restructuring era: close the loss-making mechanical-products plant at Elizabethtown around December 2025, leaving a single US site making friction material; transfer the Guangzhou subsidiary; move production to a new plant in Indonesia. The targets are operating profit of ¥8bn in fiscal 2027 and ¥15bn in fiscal 2030 — back to the best figures in the company’s history — with motorcycle brakes for India and ASEAN as the next avenue of growth. Sales in the year to March 2026 were $1.0B (¥160bn) with net profit of $11.4M (¥2bn). “Get back quickly to where we were when we were earning our best profits,” Nagaoka says, “and then grow again from there.” Nearly a century into a company that has only ever made brakes, the question has become whether a deliberately narrowed base can grow.