Koito Manufacturing - Company History

In April 1915 Koito Genrokuro opened a one-man shop in Kyobashi, Tokyo, selling railway signal lenses and coloured glass. The Fresnel lens — the stepped condensing lens used in lighthouses, signal lamps and vehicle headlamps — was almost entirely foreign-made, and Japan’s railway network was expanding fast. Importing them paid well, but supply and price stayed in foreign hands, which meant the trade could never be his to direct. From the outset Genrokuro’s stated aim was therefore to sell imports while learning to make the lens in Japan himself.

The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 burned down his Tsukishima works; he bought an existing factory in Osaki to keep production running, and when he moved back to Tsukishima in 1929 he renamed the business Koito Manufacturing — the moment the importer became a maker. The range then widened to automobile headlamps, floodlights, searchlights, aviation lighting and, before long, army lighting ordnance. A new Shinagawa plant in February 1935 became the base of in-house production, and in April 1936 the firm incorporated with capital of ¥2.5 million.

War took it further into electrical work: a Shibaura plant in 1940 and a Shizuoka plant in 1943 mass-produced aircraft electrical equipment while Shinagawa built lighting ordnance. Defeat closed Shibaura and pushed the company back onto railway parts; a listing on the Tokyo and Osaka exchanges followed in May 1949. Then, from around 1955, Japan’s motor industry entered its first real growth phase — and Koito had, in its lenses and lamps, exactly the component that growth would need in volume.

Koito staked itself on automotive lighting. To mass-produce an all-glass sealed-beam headlamp — lens, reflector and bulb fused into a single sealed unit — it built a glass works at Shizuoka and installed a line of American automatic machinery. For a company of its size this was a large gamble, and the structure showed it: in August 1957 the Shizuoka plant was spun out as a separate company, Koito Electric Industries, to carry the risk of the new production system. That October the sealed beams went on sale, with Toyota Motor among the first customers.

The focus paid. A 1961 integrated plant put pressing, electrostatic painting, automatic plating and assembly under one rationalised roof, and in January 1962 Koito Electric was absorbed back into the parent. Koito became the leading maker of automotive lighting in Japan with roughly 60% of the market; by 1968 annual sales were about $27.8M (¥10bn), of which 96% came from automotive lighting parts. A Chicago office opened in August 1968 to test the North American market, and in July 1978 halogen headlamps — brighter and longer-lived than sealed beams — went into production.

What that narrowing cost was everything the company had started from. The railway signal lamps, the marine and aircraft lighting, the searchlights — by the 1970s these had been left behind, and Koito had become a headlamp specialist whose fortunes rose and fell with the output of a handful of carmakers.

Headlamps are bulky, fragile and specific to one model, so they are made where the cars are assembled. As Japanese carmakers built overseas, Koito went with them: North American Lighting in Illinois in 1983, Thai Koito in Bangkok in 1986, a stake in Taiwan’s TYC in 1988, Shanghai Koito Automotive Lamp in 1989. A stake in Britax Vega in Britain in 1996 (renamed Koito Europe in 1999) and India Japan Lighting in 1997 completed the map; Koito Czech followed in 2001, and Guangzhou Koito and Koito Kyushu in 2005.

Between those two waves came the episode that made Koito nationally famous. In 1989 the American investor T. Boone Pickens acquired more than a quarter of its shares and demanded board seats and a higher dividend. The board refused both. Carried by its stable cross-shareholders, it controlled the general meeting regardless of who held the largest block, and it gave Pickens neither a seat nor its books. Asked to choose between the returns due to shareholders and the continuity of its ties to its trading partners, Koito chose the ties — and the case became Japan’s most-watched test of who a company belongs to.

Technically the period was one of steady generational change in the lamp itself. Discharge (HID) headlamps entered production in July 1996, brighter and more efficient than halogen, and in July 2004 Koito shipped the world’s first mercury-free HID headlamp — an early signal that it intended to lead the light source, not merely house it.

In May 2007 Koito began production of the world’s first LED headlamp. LEDs beat halogen and HID on life, power draw and — decisively for the carmakers — freedom of design, and by the late 2010s they had become the standard fitment on new cars. Having moved first, Koito took the major share of that conversion at Toyota, Honda and Nissan. Consolidated revenue rose from $5.4B (¥431bn) in the year to March 2012 to $7.7B (¥849bn) six years later, with ordinary profit up roughly 3.4 times over the same span; capacity followed the volume, from Alabama in 2007 to Indonesia in 2010, Mexico in 2012 and Gujarat in 2024.

Then the curve flattened. Revenue held above ¥800bn through the late 2010s, fell to $6.4B (¥706bn) in the pandemic year to March 2021, and recovered to $6.3B (¥950bn) by March 2024 — but operating profit peaked at $940.2M (¥104bn) in the year to March 2018 and has since settled in the ¥45–56bn range. The LED headlamp had become an ordinary part, and an ordinary part does not earn what a new one earns. The generational upgrades that had carried Koito for seventy years — sealed beam, halogen, HID, LED — had run out of rungs.

Under Kato Mitsuaki, president since 2020, the answer has been to make sensing a second business beside lighting. In January 2025 Koito took full ownership of Cepton, the Silicon Valley LiDAR developer it had co-developed with since 2018, betting that the volume-manufacturing discipline it learned in headlamps is exactly what LiDAR needs to reach automotive cost and scale. The corner of the car Koito owns — the place where light leaves the vehicle — is also where the sensors for autonomous driving want to sit. At 110 years, that adjacency is the company’s case for its next act, and the succession out of the founding Otake family, through Mihara Hiroshi to Kato, has put non-family management in charge of making it.