Citizen Watch - Company History

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Financial history 1965–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1918
Founder Yamazaki Kamekichi
Founding location 東京都新宿区高田馬場
Core business at founding Manufacture of pocket-watch cases
Listed 1949
President Oji Yoshitaka President since 2025 (age 62, as of 2026)
Current priority Branding · Higher value added Growing the three high-end brands in North America and Europe
Founding
The line of Citizen Watch runs back to Shokosha, which Yamazaki Kamekichi, head of a Ginza jewellery house, started at Hongo Fujimaecho in 1906. It began with the manufacture of pocket-watch cases, and in 1918 the works moved to Tsunohazu and went into the making of the watch mechanism itself. The target was the domestically made watch of Seikosha, then at international standard; Swiss machine tools were brought in and technicians were trained. But matching it on technique did not make Citizen sell as Seiko did, and with neither the volume nor the cost to match it the company was forced to sell cheap. Yamazaki Kamekichi poured in his own fortune, reached the end of the road, and the house of Yamazaki Shoten was dragged into the collapse and lost with it. The works, pledged as collateral and shut down, was restarted in May 1930 with capital of ¥200,000, and it was there that the name was changed to Citizen for the first time. In December 1938 the name was changed again, to Dai Nippon Tokei, as the company turned to war work; it was changed back in 1948, and the company listed in May 1949.
The Decision
The company has always settled how much to make before settling what to make. Yamada Eiichi, who became president in March 1946 with the two thousand wartime workers down to about five hundred, passed over the proposals for sewing machines and farm tools and chose to go back to wristwatches alone, because most of the workers who remained were watchmakers and he judged that a plant scaled back to its wartime size could start again. Through the 1970s its position as the late entrant hardened — three years behind the Seiko that commercialised quartz in 1969 — and in 1976 it took the step of selling not the finished watch but only the driving part of the wristwatch, the movement, to other makers. It went for volume knowing that the buyers would turn into competitors in the same market, and in 1979 committed to expansion investment for volume production at home. A position taken by volume works only in a market where component prices fall, and the electronic devices the company widened into on the same reasoning in the 2000s were liquidated after two rounds of impairment in the price competition with Korean and Taiwanese rivals.
Today
Watches, a little under six-tenths of revenue, produce seven-tenths of the profit. For the year to March 2026 consolidated revenue was $2.2B (¥347bn), operating profit $190.9M (¥30bn) and net profit $196.6M (¥31bn). Watches accounted for $1.2B (¥197bn) of revenue and $158.1M (¥25bn) of segment profit, machine tools for $545M (¥86bn) and $48.7M (¥8bn), and devices for $400.9M (¥63bn) and $23.4M (¥4bn). The company that in March 2007 declared selection and concentration in electronic devices and withdrew from camera parts for mobile phones and from small LCD panels finished liquidating that diversification by way of a net loss of $275.8M (¥26bn) in the year to March 2009 and the impairment of the year to March 2013. Watch revenue has grown for three straight years from $1.1B (¥150bn) in the year to March 2023, with BULOVA and Frederique Constant the main drivers of the increase in North America and Europe. Margins run 12.7 per cent in watches, 9.0 per cent in machine tools and 5.9 per cent in devices, and the change of president in June 2025 amounted to picking Oji Yoshitaka, the man who had run the most profitable of the three.
Competition
The rival it passed on output in FY1986 had been three years ahead of it in quartz. Seiko put out the world’s first quartz wristwatch in 1969 and opened its patents, spreading them into an industry standard. Citizen, entering three years later, did not chase it head-on in finished watches; it developed a tuning-fork quartz oscillator in 1976 and turned instead to the outside supply of movements, choosing to draw level on the cost of volume production. Ten-dollar wristwatches assembled in Hong Kong and elsewhere spread through Europe and America, and in FY1986 it took the world’s largest share of output. But the low-price band it had held by volume was eaten into by the smartwatch in the 2010s. In the year to March 2020 it booked an extraordinary loss of $230.4M (¥25bn) on a review of goodwill and inventory in the watch business and sank to a net loss of $156.4M (¥17bn). Having its volume-held low-price band eaten into by the smartwatch is the reason it goes on holding, rather than liquidating, a machine-tool business of $545M (¥86bn) that moves on a cycle of its own, separate from watches.

Timeline

1918–1945A founder ruined, a company reborn, and a watchmaker turned to war work

  1. 1906Yamazaki Kamekichi founds Shokosha and makes pocket-watch cases
  2. 1918Shokosha Watch Research Institute established; movement-making begins
  3. 1930Restarted in May with ¥200,000 capital; renamed Citizen
  4. 1932Star Shokai merged; case manufacture brought in-house
  5. 1933The Model 10, Japan’s first wristwatch of its kind, is launched
  6. 1934Yodobashi plant enlarged
  7. 1936Wristwatch exports to China and the south begin; Kiseki Seisakusho merged
  8. 1938Arms works added at Tanashi; renamed Dai Nippon Tokei in December
  9. 1940The Model 5 wristwatch completed
  10. 1941Nitto Seiki merged; machine-tool production starts

1946–1989Back to watches after the war, and world leadership won by selling movements

  1. 1945Wristwatch sales resume in November at 2,000 a month
  2. 1946Yamada Eiichi becomes president; the company returns to watches
  3. 1948The name is restored to Citizen Watch
  4. 1949Listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in May
  5. 1952Calendar watch completed
  6. 1959Miyota Precision established
  7. 1964Production of office equipment begins
  8. 1970Joint venture Shinsei Industrial set up in Hong Kong
  9. 1975Citizen Watch Company of America established
  10. 1976Decision to sell watch movements to other manufacturers
  11. 1979Citizen Watch Europe GmbH established; capacity expanded at home
  12. 1986First in the world in wristwatch output, ahead of Seiko

1990–2015The electronic-device diversification, and its liquidation in stages

  1. 2005Five group companies, including Citizen Electronics and Miyota, made wholly owned
  2. 2006Peak year: revenue ¥335.9bn, operating profit ¥30.5bn
  3. 2007“Selection and concentration”: exit from phone camera parts and small LCD panels
  4. 2007Renamed Citizen Holdings; holding-company structure adopted in April
  5. 2008Shares of Bulova Corporation acquired in January
  6. 2008Miyano acquired by tender offer in October
  7. 2009Net loss of ¥25.8bn on withdrawal from three device businesses
  8. 2012Tokura Toshio becomes president; Prothor Holding (La Joux-Perret) acquired
  9. 2013Net loss of ¥8.9bn on impairment in electronic devices

2016–2025The return to watches, and the handover to Oji Yoshitaka

  1. 2016Frederique Constant Holding SA acquired in July
  2. 2016Holding company dissolved; the name returns to Citizen Watch
  3. 2019Sato Toshihiko becomes president in April
  4. 2020Net loss of ¥16.7bn after impairment in the watch business
  5. 2021Pandemic year: operating loss ¥9.6bn, net loss ¥25.2bn
  6. 2022V-shaped recovery: operating profit ¥22.3bn, net profit ¥22.1bn
  7. 2024Revenue ¥312.8bn, operating profit ¥25.1bn
  8. 2025Watch segment revenue ¥177.1bn, a third straight year of growth
  9. 2025Oji Yoshitaka becomes president in June

Founding Story

1918–1945A founder ruined, a company reborn, and a watchmaker turned to war work

Citizen’s line runs back to Shokosha, the workshop a Ginza jeweller opened in 1906 and moved to Tsunohazu in 1918 in order to make watch movements themselves — a venture that matched Seikosha on craft, ruined its founder on price, and was refounded in 1930 under the name Citizen. Within a decade the company that had at last learned to build wristwatches was ordered to build fuses instead, and what it kept making against the Army’s wishes would decide what it could be after the war.

Yamazaki Kamekichi’s fortune, and the failure of a domestic watch

Citizen Watch traces its origin to the watch business started by Yamazaki Kamekichi (山崎亀吉), who ran the Ginza jewellery house Yamazaki Shoten[1]. In 1906 Yamazaki founded Shokosha (尚工舎) at Hongo Fujimaecho and began making pocket-watch cases; by way of Kamitotsuka he moved the works to Tsunohazu in 1918 and stepped into the manufacture of the watch mechanism itself[2]. What he set as his target was the domestically made watch of Seikosha, which had already reached international standard; he brought in Swiss machine tools and raised the quality by training first-rate technicians at the Shokosha watchmaking school[3]. Amid the enthusiasm for buying Japanese, the name Citizen rose for a time when the Prince Regent — later the Showa Emperor — took to using one[4], as president Yamada Eiichi (山田栄一) recalled in later years.

Yet matching Seikosha on technique did not make Citizen sell alongside the Seiko trademark; with neither the volume nor the cost to match it, the company was pushed into selling cheap and into financial distress. Yamazaki poured millions of yen of his own fortune into Shokosha to hold it up, and finally reached the end of the road; the Ginza house of Yamazaki Shoten was dragged into the collapse and lost with it[5]. This was a man who had been adopted into the Yamazaki family at thirteen, had begun as a pedlar of jewellery, and had risen to be a great Ginza jeweller and vice-chairman of the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce and Industry — and who withdrew having paid a heavy price for the sake of a Japanese-made watch[6]. It is a failure that shows how hard the completing of a founding can be, and on that sacrifice the seed of Citizen Watch was sown.

The 1930 restart as Citizen, and the craft kept alive through the war

The Shokosha works, pledged as collateral to Yasuda Bank (later Fuji Bank) and shut down, was restarted in May 1930 as a new company with capital of ¥200,000, and it was here that the name of the Shokosha Watch Research Institute was first changed to Citizen[7]. Nakajima Yosaburo (中島与三郎), who acted as representative of the founding subscribers and became the first president, bought the entire plant of the Shokosha Watch Research Institute — established in 1918 — as his base[8], took up the assembly of Swiss watches, and undertook the rescued company in joint management with a Shizuoka watch dealer named Suzuki[9]; in 1932 it absorbed Star Shokai and brought case-making in-house[10]. On the technical side, gathering the people who had been there since Shokosha days made a full complement easy to assemble, and catching the turn from pocket watch to wristwatch, the company sent out Japan’s first wristwatches one after another — the Model 10 (十型) in 1933, the Model 8 (八型) in 1935 and the Model 5 (五型) in 1940[11]. In May 1934 the Yodobashi plant was enlarged, and in 1936 it began exporting wristwatches to China and the southern regions and merged Kiseki Seisakusho (貴石製作所)[12]. Employees numbered six or seven hundred and monthly wristwatch output reached ten thousand pieces[13]; small though it was, the company was laying the foundations of a watch business.

Then, as the war in China widened, Citizen was forced to convert into a munitions company while still carrying a watchmaker’s sign. In April 1938 it built a new arms works at the Tanashi plant and began making weapon parts[14]; in December of the same year it changed its name to Dai Nippon Tokei (大日本時計); in 1941 it merged Nitto Seiki and moved into machine-tool production[15], and many of the watchmakers who had been there since Shokosha days were turned to making fuses. Wristwatches fell into what amounted to a manufacturing ban, held down by shortages of hands and materials and by price controls. Even so, with every plant given over to munitions, the management never forgot that this was by origin a watch factory, and against the Army’s wishes kept up watch production in part of the works at a little under two thousand pieces a month[16]. That resistance had the effect of preserving the craft of watchmaking into the postwar years, and became the ground on which the return to being a watch company rested.

1946–1989Back to watches after the war, and world leadership won by selling movements

Citizen came out of the war with about five hundred workers, decided on the strength of what those hands already knew how to do that it would be a watchmaker again, took back its own name in 1948 and listed in 1949. From revenue of $33.6M (¥12bn) in the year to March 1965 to $619.2M (¥148bn) two decades later, it grew by selling not watches but the movements inside other people’s watches — and in FY1986 passed Seiko in unit output to stand first in the world.

“Leave it to the watchmakers”: the postwar return to watches and to the old name

The two thousand workers on the payroll at the end of the war had fallen to about five hundred after evacuation to Shinshu and demobilisation[17]. Yamada Eiichi, who became president in March 1946, cast about for the next business while securing work and food for those who remained; sewing machines, farm tools and radios were all put forward, but he judged that Citizen should go back to being a watchmaker’s watch company[18]. A survey of the skills of the workers still there showed that most of them were watchmakers, and he was convinced that a watch factory scaled back to what it had been before or during the war could certainly start again. As early as November of the year the war ended, it put wristwatches on sale at two thousand a month, and orders poured in from watch dealers across the country[19].

Holding to quality first even through a boom born of shortage built the credit that came later; in 1948 the name was restored from Dai Nippon Tokei to the original Citizen Watch, and in May 1949 the company listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange[20]. That June it completed a centre-seconds model and in March 1952 a calendar watch, following them with a high-grade seventeen-jewel watch and a vibration-resistant watch, and secured its place as one of the principal watchmakers of the reconstruction years[21]. President Yamada twice toured watch production and markets abroad, coming away with the conviction that the watch industry is, after all, centred on people, and its foundation is spirit[22], and seeing much in Switzerland worth learning from. This postwar restart became the ground on which the later strategy of volume was built.

1976: selling the movement, the thing a watchmaker never sells

Through the 1970s the quartz oscillator grew lighter and smaller until the age of the quartz watch, with the oscillator built into the wristwatch, had arrived. In quartz, Seiko led with the world’s first commercial product in 1969, and Citizen stood in the position of the late entrant. Having developed the cylinder-type tuning-fork quartz oscillator for watches and other components in 1976 and so prepared its entry into quartz, Citizen embarked in that same year on a bold strategy[23]: not to sell finished watches but to sell only the wristwatch movement — the driving part — to other watch manufacturers, as an outside supplier[24]. The decision overturned the settled sense of the watch industry at its root and provoked fierce argument inside the company. It is recorded in the company history as the symbolic decision marking the turn in the structure of its business.

The judgement was contested internally. For a watchmaker the movement is the heart of the product, and selling it outside carried the fundamental problem that whoever bought it would compete with Citizen in the same market. Even so, in order to take the cost advantage of mass production, the company decided on outside supply, and in 1979 committed to expansion investment for volume production at home. The movements it made were exported to Hong Kong and elsewhere and spread through the markets of Europe and America as ten-dollar wristwatches assembled locally. Looking back years later, president Haruta Hiroshi (春田博) said: For a watchmaker it was like leaping off the stage at Kiyomizu, but it became one turning point, and it let us make our wristwatch, in effect, a worldwide standard[25]. Even across a long history, the judgement of that moment is looked back on as an important fork in the road, argued over for years afterwards.

FY1986: passing Seiko to lead the world in output

Outside supply of movements sent the scale of production leaping, and in FY1986 Citizen took the world’s largest share of wristwatch output[26]. It had passed Seiko, which had held the industry’s first place for many long years, not by technical development but by a strategy of volume — and the moment was recorded as a turning point in the history of the watch industry. In the same interview president Haruta put the essential meaning of the outside-supply strategy plainly: The scale of production grew, the price of the watch — once a precious object — came down sharply and it became a thing of the mass public, and in quality too it became something that would not stop, whatever the environment it was used in and however cheap the article[27].

This outside-supply strategy of the 1970s and 1980s brought about a change that turned Citizen from a byword for the Japanese wristwatch into a materials supplier to the world’s low-price watch industry. It set up overseas sales companies in quick succession — Citizen Watch Company of America in the United States in 1975[28]; Shinsei Industrial in Hong Kong in 1970[29] and Citizen Watches (Hong Kong) (星辰表香港) in 1976[30]; Citizen Watch Europe in Germany in 1979[31] — and completed a worldwide deployment on two fronts, movement exports and finished-watch sales. The standing of the Citizen brand was built by the accumulation of management judgements made as a volume manufacturer.

Read the full history in Japanese →

Notes

  1. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  2. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  3. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  4. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  5. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  6. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  7. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  8. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  9. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  10. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  11. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  12. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  13. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  14. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968↩
  15. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  16. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  17. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  18. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  19. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  20. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  21. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  22. The Men Who Built It, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956↩
  23. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  24. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  25. Nikkei Business, 24 August 1998↩
  26. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025↩
  27. Nikkei Business, 24 August 1998↩
  28. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  29. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  30. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩
  31. Citizen Watch, securities report for FYE March 2025, corporate history section↩

References & sources

  1. Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history section and the segment disclosures for FY2006 and FY2019–FY2025.
  2. Yamada Eiichi (The Men Who Built It), the chapter “There is new work everywhere”, Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956.
  3. Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha (1968), the Citizen Watch entry.
  4. Nikkei Business (Nikkei BP): 24 Aug 1998, the interview with president Haruta Hiroshi on the movement-supply decision and world leadership in output.

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Data API

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