Opening an aviation equipment division (1956)

The 7% that did not move for seventy years

To read this as foresight — an early claim staked on defence demand — is to make the reasoning too tidy. What Shimadzu actually had in 1956 was measurement and hydraulics skill acquired making munitions during the war, plants and people that had survived the air raids intact, and a culture of technical regard that had long accepted “difficult work that does not pay.” The aviation equipment division was chosen as the place to put those holdings. It looks less like finding a market than like providing somewhere for the technology to go.

It is hard to argue, though, that the division carried the company. It was 7.4% of sales in the year to March 1961 and 7% in the year to March 2025 — very nearly unmoved across seventy years. When Shimadzu fell into the red in the 1970s, what rebuilt the business were new products such as CT scanners and environmental test equipment. And yet the 1994 alliance with AlliedSignal of the United States came out of this small division, as did Hidetoshi Yajima, who became president in 1998. The worth of a business is not measured by its share of sales alone.