Minolta — Company History

From a trade that could not command a price to products with a high degree of workmanship

Tajima Kazuo (田嶋一雄), who handled exports of rayon and sundry goods at the Kobe trading house Tajima Shoten, was dissatisfied with the very goods he dealt in. In November 1927 he sailed from Kobe as a member of the Japanese Goods Travelling Trade Mission (日本商品旅商団) sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and spent some six months touring the Near and Middle East and eastern Europe. Early the following year, meeting a customer again in Cairo, he was told that imitations closely resembling the cotton cloth he had himself opened up were flowing in cheaply by another route, leaving him no time to enjoy the advantage of having gone first. Tajima concluded then that there is no pleasure in going on for ever with goods whose price will not hold, and that no business would stand unless it made products with a high degree of workmanship that other firms would find hard to copy.

That the object of the change should be cameras was settled by a visit, on the same journey, to the works of the Paris optical-armaments company SOM. Rangefinders were lined up there, mass-produced almost exclusively for the Japanese army, and he was told that the price passed at whatever the maker asked. The contrast with textiles, whose price would not hold, was great, and Tajima could not get the two characters for optics out of his head. Soon after he returned home, Willy Heilemann, who was importing German photographic supplies in Kobe, called on him bringing Billy Neumann, an engineer who had worked at an optical-instrument company in Paris. When the two of them together urged him to manufacture cameras, Tajima saw that the rangefinders he had seen in Paris and the camera in front of him were joined at the single point of being optical instruments, and decided to take the proposal up.

On 11 November 1928 Tajima opened a sole proprietorship, Nichi-Doku Shashinki Shoten (日独写真機商店, the Japanese-German Camera Shop), on the bank of the Mukogawa at Naruo village, Muko district, Hyogo prefecture. The site ran to 300 tsubo, the wooden building — partly two-storeyed — to 130 tsubo of floor area, and the staff numbered about thirty including himself. His father refused to make it a new venture of Tajima Shoten, saying the trade was too far removed from ours to be anything but dangerous, and went no further than handing over ¥5,000 from a matured life-insurance policy. The rest was met by borrowing from the head clerk who ran the family's lacquerware business, which at last brought the sum up to the ¥15,000 minimum required. In the Japan of that day the only large domestic maker of cameras was Konishiroku, and most of the market was held by imports from Germany and the rest of Europe and America. Just after the financial panic, an unknown workshop joined that market.

A decade of replacing imported parts one by one, and the fixing of the Minolta name

In March 1929, four months after the founding, the first machine, the Nifcalette, was completed. It was a bellows-type hand camera taking eight exposures on roll film, and both its lens and its shutter depended on imports. The price was ¥20 a camera, and from the third month output passed 100 units a month. But when trade turned downhill under the retrenchment policy, sales slowed, and Tajima once carried a hundred cameras to Tokyo to raise money and came home without selling one, refusing to cut the price. Working capital was got through again and again by borrowing from the family head clerk, and the total came to more than ¥50,000. In October 1930 resentment against the works manager and others led to a strike, and Tajima, yielding to Heilemann's forceful insistence, dismissed the whole workforce for a time.

In February 1931 the company launched the Nifcadox, which carried a shutter of its own manufacture; it sold well and the borrowings were repaid in full. On 1 July of the same year the sole proprietorship was reorganised as Molta Goshi Kaisha (モルタ合資会社), with its head office at Kitakyutaromachi, Higashi ward, Osaka. The works had more than seventy employees, but the head office was a small household of four, Tajima and his younger brother Tajima Toyojiro (田嶋豊次郎), who handled the accounts, among them. Then in November that year Heilemann, on whom the company had relied, gave notice that he was starting a business in camera parts and left; when the year turned, Neumann followed him, taking several workmen with him. Losing the pivot of its technique, Tajima resolved that from now on we shall do it with Japanese alone, and in April 1932 organised production by setting up finishing, lathe, shutter and painting departments and a general affairs section. Morale within the company rose rather than fell, and a mood grew up of making shutters in-house and using domestic lenses as far as possible. The departure of the two Germans in fact hastened the replacement of imported parts by home-made ones.

In the middle of 1933 the name Minolta was given to a quick-shooting model whose lens and shutter sprang out at the press of a button. The name joined the initials of the English for Tajima's optical instruments, and carried over it also the sense of ripening rice field (稔る田), after a precept of his mother. In January 1934 came the Minolta Vest, a rigid-bellows camera using Bakelite in place of the sheepskin that had grown hard to obtain, sold at ¥19.50; it earned the nickname Osaka Castle and sold widely. In July 1936 the company acquired a site of about 600 tsubo at Amagasaki and set up the Nihon Kogaku Kikai Kenkyujo (日本光学機械研究所, the Japan Optical Machinery Research Institute), where the foreman Kitakaze Kumataro (北風熊太郎) and others were put to work on a twin-lens reflex. They slept and ate in one room while they developed it, succeeded for the first time in Japan, and at the end of 1937 the Minoltaflex went on sale. In the same year a lens works was built at Sakai. In September 1937, judging that a limited partnership could not go far enough in meeting a wartime economy, Tajima converted the firm into a joint-stock company and changed its name to Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko (千代田光学精工). Capital stood at ¥1.5m, and the three works together had grown to some 1,000 employees.

A naval order taken at a known loss, and an optical-glass works built to military order

In 1938, with materials for cameras growing hard to obtain, Tajima came to the conclusion that actively taking on military equipment in which our optical technique can be used is the one road by which we can also go on manufacturing cameras for civilian demand. After calling two and three times at the Navy Technical Department (海軍艦政本部) in Tokyo, he obtained an approach about seven-power, fifty-millimetre prism binoculars. But when the specification was examined, the works' estimated cost was ¥200 a unit against a delivery price fixed at ¥139.75, which at the target of 1,000 units a month worked out at a loss of about ¥60,000 a month. Opinion at the works was overwhelmingly that the order should be declined, but Tajima argued that even if we lose money on binoculars the company as a whole can stay in the black, and full production began at the Sakai works in November 1938.

On the heels of that order came a new process, the melting of optical glass. In January 1942 a notice arrived in the name of the head of the Navy Technical Department instructing the company to build a melting works for optical glass with all speed. At that time private manufacture of optical glass was concentrated entirely in the Tokyo area — Nippon Kogaku on the navy side, Ohara Optical Glass on the army side and others — and there was none at all in the Kansai. The navy chose Chiyoda Kogaku as the place to disperse production to. Tajima found a suitable site at Itami in Hyogo prefecture and began building from the summer of that year, but shortages of materials and of skilled hands meant that nearly two years passed before it could run, and the furnace was not lit until June 1944. That year some 800 students were assigned to the works under labour mobilisation, and the total headcount at the end of the year reached 2,600.

The main products in the last stage of the war were optical weapons — telescopes, binoculars, gunsights, bearing compasses, aerial cameras — and 95 per cent of capacity was given over to military demand. In 1945 air raids destroyed the three works at Mukogawa, Komatsu and Amagasaki. Two months after the surrender, when each employee was left free to decide whether to stay, the workforce fell to about 400. That the company held out at all was because the Navy Technical Department paid over ¥5m as part of the money owed for deliveries up to the end of the war; the episode of making binoculars in the knowledge of a loss thus turned into working capital. Nihon Sangyoshi (日本産業史) records that the vast wartime investment in developing optical weapons trained engineers and became the foundation for raising the quality and performance of optical machinery, while also saying that the counter-argument is nearer the truth: had that investment been directed at civilian uses from the start, larger results would have come sooner. The effect of military demand cannot be spoken of as an achievement. What remained to Minolta was the works at Itami where it could melt for itself the optical glass that other firms had no choice but to buy.

One product to each works, and the sidelines that carried the restart

Early in 1946 Tajima told a board meeting that as recovery advances, the day when the camera sees the light as a peacetime industry is certain to come, and set out a policy that put restarting production above everything. He first fixed the division of roles among the works that had escaped war damage, and negotiated with the navy's Toyokawa arsenal in Aichi prefecture to have part of the land and buildings released to the company. Production began under the new arrangement in April 1946, and in August the Minolta Semi went on sale, the first camera made in Japan to use a lens with an anti-reflection coating. It was the first machine of the postwar period. One product to each works was maintained at the head-office works, Sakai and Toyokawa, and optical glass was supplied to all of them from the Itami works. Cameras alone could not cover costs, and the company also took on sideline products — spectacle lenses, opera glasses, cut glass, vacuum tubes and microscopes.

With exports, the orders came before any selling. In the spring of 1947 an order arrived out of the blue from Johannesburg in South Africa, and 170 Semis were shipped. This counts as the first export of a Japanese-made camera after the war. Tajima's view was that soldiers of the occupation forces returning home had taken cameras with them and the reputation had spread by word of mouth. Early in 1949 a hundred cameras went to a distributor in the same city of Johannesburg, as the first postwar direct export made against a letter of credit. The financial reality, however, was hard: in July 1949 a ninety per cent capital reduction accompanying a write-off of claims brought capital down to $625 (¥225,000). Rising demand after the Korean War and repeated capital increases restored the position, and by May 1953 capital stood at $388,889 (¥140m); the shares were newly listed on 14 September that year.

At the time of listing, Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko had its head-office works in Osaka, works at Sakai, Toyokawa and Itami, and a lens design laboratory at Nishinomiya, and was introduced as distinctive in having an integrated system running from the lens to the camera. The product mix was 47.9 per cent Minoltaflex, 23.3 per cent Minolta 35 and 19.8 per cent Minolta Semi, the twin-lens reflex weighing heavily. Employees, fewer than 500 only two years earlier, numbered 887 at the end of March 1953 and about 1,000 by the time of the listing. Exports and the home market stood at three to seven, and the bulk of exports went to the central purchasing office of the United States forces. That year the company built a modern lens-polishing works under constant temperature and humidity inside the Sakai works, for increased output and new products, and committed itself to supplying its own lenses.

Opening the American market, and the first overseas sales tie-up in the Japanese camera industry

In February 1954 Tajima sent a member of the export section in his third year with the company to New York carrying thirty of the newest cameras. But Japanese goods then bore a strong impression of being cheap and nasty, and a partner willing to help sell them was not easily found. At the end of August Tajima went to America himself and negotiated with Bolsey, but the terms did not meet and it came to nothing; more than a dozen companies turned him down. In the autumn of the same year President Fink of FR proposed sales throughout the United States, on the absolute condition of a shutter with an MX contact synchronising shutter and flash. The mechanism was not yet being made in Japan, but Tajima said on the spot that he would undertake it, and on returning home told his engineers that this is precisely the parting of the ways for us and ordered them to concentrate all their strength on it.

Early in 1955 the engineers completed two models meeting the condition, among them the Minolta Autocord, and in March they were shown at the Photographic Manufacturers and Distributors Association exhibition in Atlanta. They were well received, a formal distribution agreement was signed, and full-scale selling began that summer. This was the first sales tie-up with an overseas partner in the Japanese camera industry. The two companies put the double brand FR-Minolta on the cameras and shared the guarantee of quality between them. The two models sold strongly, helped by a price less than half that of the rival German products. In April 1959 the company set up Minolta Corporation in New York as a sales company for the whole United States, amicably cancelling its contract with FR, which had failed to keep up with the times, and moving to a distribution network of its own. A base was also placed at Hamburg in West Germany.

A diversification carrying the condition, centred on light

Facing the recession of 1957, Tajima decided that to ride out the swings of the trade cycle, cameras alone will not do, and instructed the company to examine diversifying its business. He attached one condition to it, however: diversification it may be, but do not forget the starting point — centred on light. Along that line the company excluded in advance products with no direct bearing on optics or imaging, such as electronic calculators, typewriters and cash registers, and narrowed the field to a few items: copiers, microphotographic equipment and enlarging projectors. This judgement, which cut the range of diversification by the commonality of the technology rather than by the product field, laid the ground for making the copier a mainstay later on. In the year to March 1958 results worsened under the blow of the recession and the company passed its dividend for the first time.

Research and development on copiers began in 1959, and in 1960 the first machine, a diazo (blueprint) model, appeared. Several wet electrophotographic copiers followed. Looking at the sales mix for the year to March 1961, cameras made up 81.0 per cent while office copiers accounted for 3.2 per cent, magic lanterns and projectors 5.3 per cent, interchangeable lenses 3.5 per cent and optical glass 0.2 per cent. Entry had been made, but office equipment was still a product kept at the edge. Outside cameras, the planetarium — which began in Tajima's liking for the stars since boyhood — was taken up for in-house development from 1956, and first demonstrated publicly at Hanshin Park in 1958. Tajima overrode calls within the company to stop, on the ground that only five firms in the world made such a thing.

In February 1962 a Minolta Hi-Matic was carried aboard the spacecraft Friendship 7 flown by Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn, and the photographs of the earth taken with it were shown in newspapers and on television around the world. It was disclosed afterwards that Glenn had himself examined more than twenty models from countries across the world, narrowed them to four, and finally chosen the Hi-Matic. The Hi-Matic was a model that added automatic exposure to the Uniomat, which carried the world's first programme shutter combining aperture and shutter in a single set of blades. Judging that if he let this chance pass there would be no other occasion to make the brand name and the company name one, Tajima went ahead in July that year with the change from Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko to Minolta Camera. Thirty-four years after the founding, the name of the product became the name of the company.

What the 1965 recession showed about the danger of staying where one is strong

In the recession of 1965 Minolta Camera suffered the heaviest damage of any company in the industry. The cause lay not in market conditions but in the product mix. Because it had put its strength into middle-grade twin-lens reflex models, the field in which it had been strong, it was slow to turn to the high-grade single-lens reflex. That is how Tajima looked back on the course that led to two consecutive passed dividends. While issuing the orders economise on expenses, but do not cut research and development and hurry the development of a high-grade single-lens reflex, he shut himself in the president's office and went through the owners' registration cards one by one, satisfying himself at first hand about the real state of demand. Tajima, who was also chairman of the Japan Camera Industry Association, took on in the spring of that year the part of putting together a recession cartel of the twelve major firms — the first since the association had been founded.

The recovery was quick. A single-lens reflex brought out in 1966 sold well as the single-lens reflex came into general use, and helped carry the company out of the recession. In the same year Japanese camera production overtook West Germany's in both units and value. The export ratio passed 50 per cent from 1965 onwards, and in the spring of 1970, taking a lesson from local distributors having been drawn into price wars, the company moved to selling direct to retailers throughout the United States. As at 1983 something over 80 per cent of turnover was exported, a ratio that put the company among the highest in Japanese industry. In December 1968 the Minolta Space Meter, an exposure meter modified for space use at NASA's request, orbited the moon aboard Apollo 8.

In October 1970 an approach came from Leitz of West Germany asking Minolta to make part of a camera under subcontract. There was no little opposition within the company. Leica was a byword for the finest cameras, catching up with Leitz's technical level had for years been a goal for the Japanese, the Japanese were already ahead of the West Germans in mass-production technique — so why subcontract? Tajima said that you cannot know anything until you try it, ordered a positive examination, and gave the go-ahead in the spring of 1971. A mutual technical co-operation agreement was signed in June 1972, and the following year the jointly developed high-grade 35mm camera, the Leitz Minolta CL, went on sale. Tajima's reason for overriding the objections came down to one point: in international relations co-operation matters more than competition.

Why the copier did not grow for twenty years, and the channel opened in Europe

The copier business entered in 1960 stood among the early movers and yet its sales did not grow for a long time. Its share of the whole stayed below 10 per cent right through the 1960s, and only reached the 20 per cent range in the second half of the 1970s. Tajima gave two reasons. One was that almost all the staff for the copier and other non-camera divisions had been transferred from the camera division, so that engineers used to handling cameras weighing a few hundred grams found themselves facing objects of some tens of kilogrammes and having to learn photoreceptors, developer and photosensitive paper — unknown fields — from the beginning. The other was that Tajima himself had gone on demanding something original!, which made development take all the longer. Looking back on it now, he adds, it may have been a hard thing to ask.

The sales channel was opened one piece at a time by the manager posted to Europe. Ota Yoshikatsu (太田義勝), who went out to Germany again in November 1975 as head of the information-equipment business for the European region, set out to sell under the company's own brand copiers that were then still supplied mainly as OEM to foreign makers; he began by separating the information-equipment division from the sales subsidiary in Hamburg and renting a new office in Hanover. When I told my superior of the day that OEM is not real business, he said, then you go and do it yourself, Ota recalls. He tried one approach after another — building a direct sales network, attaching it to the camera bases, buying local companies, looking for agents — and when the model shown at the 1979 Hanover Messe was well received, thirteen aircraft were chartered one after another to carry copiers from Japan.

In 1979 the company succeeded in developing a developing system without parallel anywhere in the world, and with that technology entered the plain-paper copier field in earnest. The sales mix moved from this point. In the year to March 1975 cameras and accessories had been 78 per cent and office and special equipment 22 per cent, but by the year to March 1985 the order had reversed, with copiers at $288.4M (¥69bn) (46 per cent) against cameras at $169.4M (¥40bn) (27 per cent), and information equipment including other office machines and microphotographic equipment together exceeding half. Turnover itself rose from $65.6M (¥24bn) in the year to March 1971 to $630.5M (¥150bn) in the year to March 1985, a multiple of 6.4 in fourteen years. In August 1982 Tajima Kazuo handed the presidency to his eldest son Tajima Hideo (田嶋英雄) and withdrew to the chairmanship.

Integrated production that only two firms in the industry had, and the capital that supported it

The strength Minolta held in this period was visible from outside as well. In an article introducing Asahi Optical in 1971, the journal Shoken (証券) wrote of the working of optical lenses that almost all camera makers other than Nippon Kogaku Kogyo and Minolta Camera, which carry out integrated production from the melting of the glass used the Ohara Optical Glass works. Only two firms in the industry worked from the melting of the glass, and one of them was Minolta. The works built at Itami during the war on naval order had, thirty years later, become the difference against its competitors. That plant pays, however, only for as long as the products into which the lenses go continue to sell. If the products stop selling, the same plant remains as a fixed cost.

The capital side that supported integrated production and exports also changed its character over these twenty years. At Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko in the year to March 1961 Tajima Kazuo was the largest shareholder with 8.4 per cent, followed by Daido Life with 7.1 per cent and the Bank of Kobe with 5.0 per cent. By the year to March 1980, however, the top ten at Minolta Camera ran Taiyo Kobe Bank 8.20 per cent, Daido Life Insurance 7.19 per cent, Nippon Life Insurance 5.37 per cent, Sanwa Bank 4.97 per cent and Saitama Bank 4.86 per cent, and the founder's own name had disappeared. A register headed by banks and insurance companies was nothing unusual among Japanese companies of the day. In Minolta's case, however, that structure was also the source of the funds that let it go on managing the business by putting the plant in first and chasing demand afterwards.

The autofocus single-lens reflex that struck a market of the middle-aged and old

In late February 1985 Minolta Camera held launch events for general users in Tokyo and Osaka for its autofocus single-lens reflex, the α-7000. Both halls were packed beyond capacity, yet the reception inside the company was mixed. A considerable proportion of the camera enthusiasts who crowded in were grey-headed, middle-aged or elderly, and one heard executives say this is a camera that makes full use of electronics, so we thought more young people would come…. The original target had been salaried men in their late twenties and early thirties, with education and income. Those who actually pressed into the shops were a different group from the one aimed at.

For the first two months buyers were chiefly men in their fifties and sixties. They had used cameras in the heyday of the single-lens reflex five to ten years earlier and were dissatisfied with focusing as their eyesight declined with age. Their incomes were high and an outlay of a hundred and some tens of thousands of yen gave them no trouble. Once this group — which Minolta called the forgotten market — began to move, shops ran out of stock from the moment of launch. Production had begun the previous December and 10,000 units, four times the normal figure for a single-lens reflex, had been put into shops, but it was not enough; from April the line, running at 30,000 units a month, was raised to a 40,000 system by giving up holidays and working nights. Even so, as at the end of June, a wait of two to three weeks from ordering in the shop was still the rule.

Minolta's share of the domestic single-lens reflex market, which had been in single figures, rose after the launch to between 20 and 25 per cent. The company expected to sell about 500,000 units in a year including exports, at an average retail price of $629 (¥150,000) with a standard lens and flash, for turnover of $314.4M (¥75bn). Recurring profit in the year to March 1986 was up by nearly seventy per cent on the previous year at $72.4M (¥12bn), the highest to that date, and net profit reached $65.3M (¥11bn). In 1989, with heavy advertising added, the company took the leading share back from Canon and its domestic share stood at about 30 per cent. President Tajima Hideo told an interviewer in 1990 that if we can create demand through technical innovation there is plenty of room to grow, and said that the proportion of single-lens reflex cameras with automatic focusing had passed 90 per cent in Japan. The founder, Tajima Kazuo, died in November 1985, having seen this success.

Defeat in the patent suit, and the success that delayed the turn

Two costs came attached to the success of the α-7000. One was the exchange rate. The sharp rise in the yen that began in the autumn of the year of the launch widened the gap between domestic and foreign prices, and product shipped abroad flowed back into Japan cheaply. With competing models from other makers on top of that, domestic prices broke, and Minolta suffered heavy falls in profit in the years to March 1987 and March 1988 in succession. An export ratio of about 80 per cent, with half of camera sales going to the United States, amplified the effect of the exchange rate directly. The other cost was patents. In 1987 Honeywell of the United States sued Minolta for infringing its autofocus patents. Honeywell had declared it would sue almost every maker of single-lens reflex cameras, but the one it went for first was Minolta, then holding the leading share in the United States.

On 7 February 1992 a jury at the federal district court in New Jersey returned a verdict ordering payment of $96.35m. On 3 March a settlement was reached on the judge's advice, the sum being $127.5m, or about $130.3M (¥17bn). Minolta's legal fees alone had come to $33.9M (¥4bn). President Tajima Hideo explained the reason for settling by saying we thought about it in businesslike terms, as gain or loss, citing the chance of winning on appeal at no more than 35 per cent, and the fact that an injunction on sales within the United States would become a question of trust for the whole business, copiers included. He also said that our contention that we have not infringed Honeywell's patents is unchanged even now. The settlement was booked as an extraordinary loss of $138.9M (¥18bn), and together with losses in the main business the consolidated net loss for the 1991 financial year reached $285M (¥36bn).

Whether the loss would have been avoided but for the suit is another matter. In the year to March 1991 the product mix was cameras at $657.2M (¥88bn) (39.8 per cent) against copiers at $576.2M (¥78bn) (34.9 per cent), and earnings in both were thinning. Although single-lens reflex cameras had been overtaken by compacts in Japanese production value in 1988, Minolta was still directing about 60 per cent of its camera investment to single-lens reflex models. A 1992 article in Nikkei Business explained the reason by saying that this experience of success was too intense, and the turn to compact cameras was delayed. The copier's domestic share by units stayed at about 5 per cent, and sales of laser beam printers, $155.4M (¥21bn) in the year to March 1991, were forecast at $169.7M (¥22bn) for the following year, up 3 per cent — a plateau. The patent suit piled further losses on earnings that were already thinning.

Curtain on a merger — what remained and what disappeared

In April 1993 President Tajima Hideo, of the founding family, withdrew to the chairmanship, and Kanaya Tsukasa (金谷宰), who had been president of the American sales subsidiary, became president over the heads of nine senior directors. In his first year Kanaya moved 500 people out of the camera business into the copier division and the sales subsidiaries. Among them were engineers of the first rank who had developed the α-7000. In July 1994 the printer and copier businesses were merged and the word Camera was dropped from the company name, which became simply Minolta. The 6,200 employees of 1993 fell by 25 per cent in five years to 4,600, through voluntary redundancy programmes and the suspension of graduate recruitment. In the year to March 1998 the company recorded turnover of $2.3B (¥301bn) and recurring profit of $98.6M (¥13bn), both the highest in its history to that date.

Even so the financial injury remained. A share price that had been above ¥600 in the early spring of 2001 fell to ¥123 on 17 December, and the market capitalisation of a company with consolidated turnover on the scale of $4.1B (¥500bn) came to less than $329.2M (¥40bn). In the half-year to September that year, valuation losses on inventories and other items produced a consolidated recurring loss of $99.6M (¥12bn), and with valuation losses on shareholdings and the amortisation of goodwill at the American sales company added, the net loss came to $186.8M (¥23bn), exhausting the surplus and leaving a carried-forward loss of $176.9M (¥22bn). Rating and Investment Information went ahead with its second downgrade of the year. Interest-bearing debt at the end of September was a little under $2.1B (¥250bn), of which a little under $1.5B (¥184bn) was short-term borrowing. A company exporting 80 per cent of its output was losing ground under a weak yen, while Canon and Ricoh were expecting record profits. Ota Yoshikatsu, later president, looked back on this period by saying we do have regrets about having let the debt grow and grow, with development running ahead.

In April 2002 President Ota Yoshikatsu introduced an internal company system dividing the firm into in-house companies, and enforced profit management by division. More than 500 people took up the early retirement scheme. The consolidated net loss for the preceding year had been $273.8M (¥34bn) and interest-bearing debt $1.9B (¥240bn). The camera business the company had been founded on was expected to be loss-making as a whole, but Ota rejected the possibility of selling it, saying that it was bound up with our core technologies and cannot easily be let go. In August the following year, 2003, Minolta merged with Konica through a share exchange, and Konica Minolta Holdings was formed. What disappeared was the company name, the listed stock, and the place of the camera that had carried the company's name for seventy-five years. What remained were copiers and colour laser printers — Konica being strong in high-speed digital machines, Minolta in colour ones. The integrated optical production begun in order to break a dependence on imported goods survived inside office equipment even after it had lost the camera as its outlet.