Shimadzu - Company History

Shimadzu began in March 1875 in Kiyamachi-Nijo, Kyoto, where Shimadzu Genzo ran a smithy and started, as a sideline, repairing and building the physics and chemistry apparatus that Japan’s new schools and laboratories needed. The Meiji government was importing modern science wholesale, and almost every instrument in a classroom was a costly foreign object. Kyoto happened to hold the trades that could answer that — metalworking, glassblowing, joinery — and Genzo’s bet was that those crafts, combined, could make domestically what the country was buying abroad. In the early years the work was mostly repairs for the Kyoto Seimikyoku and for schools; in 1877 he built Japan’s first storage battery, and in 1878 a balloon that carried a man aloft.

The business widened under the founder’s eldest son, Umejiro, who took the name Shimadzu Genzo II, became the company’s first president, and was known in his lifetime as “the Edison of Japan.” At sixteen he built a Wimshurst influence machine unaided. Using one of those machines as a high-voltage source, he took the first X-ray photograph in Japan in October 1896 — barely a year after Röntgen’s discovery — and in 1908 completed the first fully domestic medical X-ray apparatus, delivering it to the army garrison hospital at Kokufudai. So closely did the plant work with the universities that it was called “the workshop of the Third Higher School and Kyoto Imperial University,” an early instance of industry–academia collaboration. With instruments, X-ray equipment and batteries all selling, Shimadzu opened a Tokyo office in 1906 and a Kyushu outlet in 1909.

Shimadzu incorporated in September 1917, forty-two years after its founding, with its head office in Kiyamachi-Nijo and branches in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka. Three months earlier it had cut loose the part of itself that had grown biggest: the storage-battery division was spun off as Japan Storage Battery, capitalised more heavily than the parent. The new company then walked straight into the First World War boom — orders it could not fill fast enough, exports to the United States, Australia and South Africa, and a first accounting period of only three months that still returned a profit and a dividend of just over 10%.

What followed was a deliberate move out of the laboratory. The Sanjo plant opened in 1919 to build reduction gears; materials testing machines came in 1923, and gear pumps and spinnerets for synthetic fibre in 1926. A maker of school apparatus was turning into a general instrument-and-machinery company. In April 1938 it listed on the Kyoto Stock Exchange, and the works it absorbed from Nippon Denki Keiki became the Nishioji plant.

The war years brought munitions work and, in 1944, the Murasakino plant. Defeat and the industrial reorganisation that followed pushed the company back to peacetime products, and in 1947 it commercialised Japan’s first electron microscope. In May 1949 it listed on the newly reopened Tokyo Stock Exchange. The postwar rebuilding of chemical plants, pharmaceutical firms and university laboratories all ran through instruments, and Shimadzu’s position as an analytical-instrument maker was fixed in those years.

In October 1956 Shimadzu opened an aviation equipment division, building instruments, hydraulics and Self-Defense Force equipment. It is tempting to read this as foresight about defence demand, but the simpler explanation is that the company had measurement and hydraulics skills learned on wartime contracts, plants and people that the air raids had spared, and a standing habit of accepting work that was hard and unremunerative. Aviation was where that inheritance was put, and it completed the four-segment shape — analytical instruments, medical systems, industrial machinery, aviation — that Shimadzu still has.

Specialisation was then pushed outward into subsidiaries: the cast-iron section became Shimadzu Metal Industry in 1962, Kyoto Keiso followed in 1963, and Osaka Maruju Radiation Service in 1966. Selling abroad started in 1968 with Shimadzu Europa in West Germany, and 1975 brought Shimadzu Scientific Instruments in the United States, with a precision-instruments arm added there in 1979. Analytical instruments were exactly the kind of high-value, expert product whose competitiveness had to be proved in Western markets, and Shimadzu chose direct sales and service rather than agents.

The 1970s tested all of it. When the company fell into the red, what pulled it back was not the aviation unit but new products from the measurement and medical side — CT scanners and environmental test equipment. The lesson recurs throughout Shimadzu’s history: the businesses that pay for the company are rarely the ones the company is proudest of building.

In June 1989 Shimadzu bought KRATOS GROUP PLC, a British mass-spectrometer maker — an unusual step for a company that had built almost everything itself. Mass spectrometry is indispensable in chemistry, pharmaceuticals and environmental analysis, and buying KRATOS delivered the technology, the customers and an international platform in one transaction rather than over a decade. The acquisition bore fruit in 1992 as a laser-ionisation time-of-flight instrument, and in 1991 the company opened its Keihanna laboratory to hold the underlying research.

In October 2002 Koichi Tanaka, an engineer at Shimadzu, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a method to identify and analyse the structure of biological macromolecules — applying matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionisation to mass spectrometry. A corporate engineer with no doctorate winning a Nobel is rare anywhere in the world, and it made visible both the accumulated depth of Shimadzu’s mass-spectrometry work and a research culture that let a junior employee pursue it. The Koichi Tanaka Mass Spectrometry Research Laboratory opened in January 2003, and from then on the company steered its R&D money and its overseas sales effort toward measurement above its other segments.

The same span built the sales network to carry those instruments: Singapore in 1989 as the Asia-Pacific base, a hydraulics venture in Tianjin in 1994, and a Shanghai trading arm in 1999 that became the group’s China holding company.

The instrument business kept extending its map — the Middle East and Africa from Dubai in 2007, Latin America from Uruguay in 2013, Korea in 2019 — until Shimadzu had direct sales and service in every major region. It also kept extending its dependence. Measurement instruments now account for more than 65% of consolidated sales, competing worldwide with Agilent, Waters and Thermo Fisher, while medical systems face Fujifilm, Konica Minolta, Siemens and GE, and industrial machinery and aviation remain specialist niches. A company this concentrated needs a second pillar.

The attempt came from the adjacent side. Shimadzu moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market in April 2022 and in September took control of Nissui Pharmaceutical through a tender offer, renaming it Shimadzu Diagnostics and entering in-vitro diagnostics and clinical testing. The logic was continuity rather than diversification: its liquid-chromatograph mass spectrometers and MALDI-TOF instruments already measure clinical samples, and reagents and culture media are what those samples are measured with. An alliance dating from 2015 had given it seven years to judge the partner before it paid. In January 2023 it opened Shimadzu Tokyo Innovation Plaza, and in April 2024 it bought California X-ray Imaging Service to extend medical systems in North America.

Under Yasunori Yamamoto, president since April 2022, the mid-term plan running to fiscal 2025 organises the company around four fields of social value — healthcare, green economy, materials and industry. Consolidated sales rose from $3.7B (¥482bn) with operating profit of $519.1M (¥68bn) in the year to March 2023 to $3.6B (¥539bn) and $473.3M (¥72bn) in the year to March 2025, with R&D spending of $190.8M (¥29bn) and an eleventh consecutive annual dividend increase. In 2025, a hundred and fifty years after the smithy in Kiyamachi-Nijo, the shape of the company is unchanged in one respect: it still earns most of what it earns by measuring things.