Shokosha Watch Research Institute (1918–1930) · Dai Nippon Tokei (1938–1948)
Revenue · FYE Mar 2026
$2.2B (¥347bn)
Net profit · FYE Mar 2026
$196.6M (¥31bn)
Citizen Watch: long-term performance & turning pointsSales (revenue) and profit-margin ratio
Sales (¥ bn)Net margin (%)
1918A founder ruined, a company reborn, and a watchmaker turned to war work
1906Yamazaki Kamekichi founds Shokosha and makes pocket-watch cases
1918Shokosha Watch Research Institute established; movement-making begins
1930Restarted in May with ¥200,000 capital; renamed Citizen
1932Star Shokai merged; case manufacture brought in-house
1933The Model 10, Japan’s first wristwatch of its kind, is launched
1934Yodobashi plant enlarged
1936Wristwatch exports to China and the south begin; Kiseki Seisakusho merged
1938Arms works added at Tanashi; renamed Dai Nippon Tokei in December
1940The Model 5 wristwatch completed
1941Nitto Seiki merged; machine-tool production starts
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. 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. 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. 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, 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. 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. 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. 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, took up the assembly of Swiss watches, and undertook the rescued company in joint management with a Shizuoka watch dealer named Suzuki; in 1932 it absorbed Star Shokai and brought case-making in-house. 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. 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). Employees numbered six or seven hundred and monthly wristwatch output reached ten thousand pieces; 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; 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, 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. 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.
1946Back to watches after the war, and world leadership won by selling movements
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY1965 · unconsolidated
Revenue$34M
Net income$3M
Net margin7.7%
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FY1985 · unconsolidated
Revenue$619M
Net income$25M
Net margin4%
1945Wristwatch sales resume in November at 2,000 a month
1946Yamada Eiichi becomes president; the company returns to watches
1948The name is restored to Citizen Watch
1949Listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in May
1952Calendar watch completed
1959Miyota Precision established
1964Production of office equipment begins
1970Joint venture Shinsei Industrial set up in Hong Kong
1975Citizen Watch Company of America established
1976Decision to sell watch movements to other manufacturers
1979Citizen Watch Europe GmbH established; capacity expanded at home
1986First in the world in wristwatch output, ahead of Seiko
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. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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, 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: not to sell finished watches but to sell only the wristwatch movement — the driving part — to other watch manufacturers, as an outside supplier. 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 (Haruta Hiroshi, Nikkei Business, 24 Aug 1998). 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. 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 (Haruta Hiroshi, Nikkei Business, 24 Aug 1998).
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; Shinsei Industrial in Hong Kong in 1970 and Citizen Watches (Hong Kong) (星辰表香港) in 1976; Citizen Watch Europe in Germany in 1979 — 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.
2007“Selection and concentration”: exit from phone camera parts and small LCD panels
2007Renamed Citizen Holdings; holding-company structure adopted in April
2008Shares of Bulova Corporation acquired in January
2008Miyano acquired by tender offer in October
2009Net loss of ¥25.8bn on withdrawal from three device businesses
2012Tokura Toshio becomes president; Prothor Holding (La Joux-Perret) acquired
2013Net loss of ¥8.9bn on impairment in electronic devices
For twenty years Citizen tried to turn watchmaking precision into a second pillar in electronic components, reaching FY2006 revenue of $2.9B (¥336bn) before the structure gave way. Two rounds of impairment — $382.8M (¥36bn) in FY2009 and $263.3M (¥26bn) in FY2013 — settled the question in the accounts, and the capital that came back went to machine tools and to Swiss mechanical watchmaking.
A second pillar in electronic devices, built and then broken
From the 1990s into the 2000s Citizen threw the precision-machining technique it had gained in watches into the field of electronic components. Camera modules for mobile phones, small liquid-crystal panels, LCD backlights, floppy-disk drive mechanisms, substrates for hard-disk drives — it handled broadly the range of parts that made up the base of the Japanese electronics industry of the day. In October 2005 it made five companies wholly owned subsidiaries through share exchange — Citizen Electronics, Miyota, Cimeo Precision, Sayama Precision Industry and Kawaguchiko Precision — putting a diversified structure in place through group integration. In April 2007 it moved to a holding-company structure as Citizen Holdings, formally completing a structure that held several businesses at once: watches, machine tools and electronic devices. Under the diversification policy Citizen was adding business foundations for the era to come.
Performance, however, levelled off after a peak in FY2006 of revenue $2.9B (¥336bn) and operating profit $262.3M (¥31bn), and in FY2007 net profit fell sharply, by more than sixty per cent, to $60.3M (¥7bn). The organisation alone grew complicated while the earnings structure weakened, and the reality surfaced at the level of management that the technical advantage in the electronic-device business had been lost to the rise of Korean and Taiwanese manufacturers. While the watch business of Citizen Watch itself moved along soundly, the electronic-device business taken on through diversification was heading towards a structural deficit — and this distortion in the business portfolio as a whole came to the surface as a management problem in FY2007.
“Selection and concentration”, and a ¥25.8bn net loss after Lehman
In March 2007 Citizen set out “selection and concentration” for the electronic-device business in its medium-term management plan, and decided to withdraw from camera components for mobile phones and from small liquid-crystal panels. Behind it lay a change in industrial structure: fierce price competition with Korean and Taiwanese makers had stripped Japanese electronic components of their profitability. In January 2008 it acquired the shares of Bulova Corporation of the United States, carrying out in parallel a strategic shift to reinforce its North American watch brands. This was a judgement that advanced two things at once — the concentration of resources on the watch business and the withdrawal from electronic devices. It falls in a painful period in which the company was facing new management problems and asking again what its businesses ought to be, and it carries a particularly symbolic meaning even within a long reshaping of the business structure.
But FY2009, which coincided with the Lehman shock, recorded an extraordinary loss of $382.8M (¥36bn) on withdrawal from three unprofitable electronic-device businesses and sank to a net loss of $275.8M (¥26bn) — among the largest in the company’s history. It was the beginning of the liquidation of the diversification years. In FY2013 the company again recorded an extraordinary loss of $263.3M (¥26bn) and a net loss of $91.2M (¥9bn) on impairment in the electronic-device business, and the electronic-device business built up in the 2000s saw its revenue shrink by forty per cent in five years across the two impairments of 2009 and 2013. That Citizen had failed to build a second pillar in electronic devices was a fact confirmed on the face of the accounts, after a liquidation that ran for more than a decade.
Capital redirected to machine tools and Swiss mechanical watches
As the diversified businesses were wound down, the sorting of what to keep from what to grow went forward. In October 2008 the company acquired Miyano through a tender offer — now Citizen Machinery — and announced a policy of strengthening the machine-tool business. In April 2012 it acquired Prothor Holding S.A. (Manufacture La Joux-Perret) of Switzerland, gaining the capacity to make high-grade mechanical movements in-house, and in July 2016 acquired the Swiss luxury mechanical watch brand Frederique Constant. A company that had grown on outside supply of low-price movements now held a maker of Swiss luxury mechanical watches of its own: the business model had come to have two layers.
In October 2016 Citizen dissolved the holding-company structure, merging Citizen Watch and Citizen Business Expert and changing the trade name back to Citizen Watch. The return to an operating company nine years after the move to a holding company showed that the era of electronic-device diversification had ended. A policy of concentrating capital on two businesses — watches and machine tools — was formally confirmed in organisational structure as well. Citizen had finished its reckoning with the diversification years of the 2000s and entered a stage of rebuilding a business portfolio centred on the watch business.
2016The return to watches, and the handover to Oji Yoshitaka
Revenue (¥ bn, bars) · net margin (%, line)
Source: securities reports
FY2016 · consolidated
Revenue$3.2B
Net income$121M
Net margin3.8%
→
FY2025 · consolidated
Revenue$2.1B
Net income$159M
Net margin7.5%
2016Frederique Constant Holding SA acquired in July
2016Holding company dissolved; the name returns to Citizen Watch
2019Sato Toshihiko becomes president in April
2020Net loss of ¥16.7bn after impairment in the watch business
2021Pandemic year: operating loss ¥9.6bn, net loss ¥25.2bn
2022V-shaped recovery: operating profit ¥22.3bn, net profit ¥22.1bn
2024Revenue ¥312.8bn, operating profit ¥25.1bn
2025Watch segment revenue ¥177.1bn, a third straight year of growth
2025Oji Yoshitaka becomes president in June
The decade after the holding company was dissolved put the watch business back at the centre — through the smartwatch shock and the impairment it forced, through a pandemic year with revenue of $1.9B (¥207bn) and a net loss of $229.6M (¥25bn), and out again to $2.1B (¥317bn) in FY2025 on the strength of brands bought years earlier. The presidency passed in June 2025 to the executive who had been running watches.
The smartwatch era, and impairment in the watch business
Around the time Sato Toshihiko (佐藤敏彦) became president in April 2019, the watch industry was meeting a structural change brought by the spread of the smartwatch. Smartwatches, the Apple Watch foremost among them, began to eat into the low-price mechanical and quartz watch market, and became a factor pressing structurally on the mass-market wristwatch field that was Citizen’s core. From the level of FY2019 — revenue $3.0B (¥322bn) and operating profit $205.5M (¥22bn) — the company slowed to revenue $2.6B (¥279bn) and operating profit $57.1M (¥6bn) in FY2020. The spread of the smartwatch was a change in the external environment that shook the structure of the whole watch industry at its foundations.
In FY2020 Citizen recorded an extraordinary loss of $230.4M (¥25bn) on a review of goodwill and inventory in the watch business, and a net loss of $156.4M (¥17bn). In the stage before the pandemic it had already absorbed a structural impairment, and the cost clearing needed to adapt to the smartwatch era had been carried out ahead of time. Writing down the book value of the watch business, which had been the core, was for Citizen a structural adjustment of the same order of meaning as the outside supply of movements in 1976. It was a response made while the market value of the very category of the watch was being redefined.
The pandemic’s record loss, and the sharp rebound a year later
In FY2021 the pandemic struck every business directly, and the company recorded revenue of $1.9B (¥207bn), an operating loss of $87.4M (¥10bn) and a net loss of $229.6M (¥25bn) — among the largest deficits since listing. The watch business in particular showed a segment loss of $74.7M (¥8bn), taking the full force of store closures worldwide and the disappearance of travel demand. The machine-tool and device businesses also struggled as demand fell back, and Citizen was driven into a position where every one of its businesses lost profitability at once. It was because of the impairment taken in FY2020 that the net loss of FY2021 was to some degree absorbed in accounting terms.
In FY2022, however, the company recovered sharply, bringing performance back to revenue of $2.1B (¥281bn) and operating profit of $169.7M (¥22bn). The centre of the recovery was the machine-tool business, which caught Chinese capital investment in electric vehicles and precision machining to reach segment revenue of $616.6M (¥81bn) and profit of $95.9M (¥13bn), above the pre-pandemic level. The watch business came back to $997.9M (¥131bn) and $78.4M (¥10bn), rising from the light financial constitution that the impairments of around 2020 had produced. This sharp recovery bore out the rightness of Citizen’s judgement in taking impairment early in FY2020, and financial lightness can be credited with the flexibility it gave in the recovery.
BULOVA and the luxury brands driving North America and Europe
FY2024 held at a high level with revenue of $2.1B (¥313bn) and operating profit of $165.7M (¥25bn), and FY2025 with revenue of $2.1B (¥317bn) and operating profit of $137.7M (¥21bn). By segment, the watch business has grown for three consecutive years — $1.1B (¥150bn) in FY2023, $1.1B (¥166bn) in FY2024 and $1.2B (¥177bn) in FY2025. The drivers are North America and Europe, where three brands — Attesa, BULOVA and Frederique Constant — went on lifting sales through the main distribution networks and the company’s own e-commerce. The run of acquisitions — Bulova in 2008, La Joux-Perret in 2012 and Frederique Constant in 2016 — has entered the stage, a decade on, of bearing fruit as earnings.
Taking this recovery in the watch business, Sato Toshihiko stepped down as president in June 2025 and Oji Yoshitaka (大治良高), who had been responsible for the watch business, took office as the new president. Sato explained the change as coming at the start of the Medium-Term Management Plan 2027, in order to drive more strongly the growth strategy of the watch business that is the core of the group’s growth. It is an appointment that marks the entry into a phase of reconvergence — liquidating the electronic-device diversification of the 2000s and placing capital and management talent intensively on the watch business. Ten years on from the dissolution of the holding company, a management structure centred on the watch business has been put in place in name as well as in fact.
The turning points, read in full: what was at stake, what was chosen and what the revenue did around it. The Japanese edition is the edition of record and carries the sourced dossier behind each decision — background, options weighed, outcome — linked under every decision.
Key decision · 1946
The turn back from munitions: sewing machines rejected, wristwatches resumed (1946)
The business chosen by five hundred pairs of hands
The judgement of 1946 was not the work of looking for a new business but of counting again what was left to hand. Sewing machines, farm tools and radios were candidates raised at every machine works in the months after the surrender, and some companies did move that way and grew. That Citizen went back to watches came, one may say, from a concrete fact that stood before any view of the market: the particular skills of the five hundred people who remained. Yamada Eiichi’s reading — that watchmaking is a business that sells technique rather than materials — worked in the company’s favour precisely in a period when materials were scarce.
What made the judgement possible was the technique carried by those watches, a little under two thousand a month, that had gone on being made through the war. Without that thin line of production, kept up against the Army’s wishes, it seems unlikely the company could have restarted in November 1945 from that same two thousand a month. The names Yamada listed in 1963 — Toyo Tokei, Eikosha, Fuji Tokei, Takano Seimitsu — are all watch companies that disappeared after the war. What separated those that remained from those that vanished cannot be said in a word; in Citizen’s case, what decided where it would return was not a management conception but the work that five hundred pairs of hands remembered.
Selling the heart of the watch: the movement supply that made Citizen the largest maker in the world (1976)
What it got by giving up its own brand
Outside supply was a choice about where a watchmaker puts its take. Fight with the finished article and the price of your own brand becomes the revenue, but the quantity is capped by your own selling power. Sell only the driving part and the volume grows by the measure of the buyer’s brand and channels, while the name the consumer sees belongs to somebody else. Citizen took the latter, and by 1990 had moved to a composition in which seventy per cent of production was movements and finished goods under its own brand were under fifteen per cent. What the phrase “first in the world” pointed to was not the number of watches on the shelf but the number of driving parts in motion.
The price of that is left in the share by value. In domestic production in 1990 the company held 45.0 per cent by unit while stopping at 27.1 per cent by value, and the gap reflected exactly the difference in product mix against a rival heavily weighted to the high end. Haruta Hiroshi’s verdict in 1998 that it was a very good thing seen even in industrial history is a verdict on the process by which the watch became a thing of the mass public; what Citizen itself received in that process was volume and fast-turning cash settlement. The later moves into high-grade mechanical watchmaking — the acquisition of La Joux-Perret in 2012 and of Frederique Constant in 2016 — can be seen as the work of buying back the take it had given away at that earlier moment.
Selection and concentration in electronic devices: exit from mobile-phone camera parts and small LCD panels (2007)
The businesses cut and the businesses kept
What made the decision of 2007 difficult is that electronic devices were not a failed business but one that until shortly before had been of a scale comparable to watches. In FY2006 segment revenue was $1.1B (¥125bn) for watches against $955.5M (¥111bn) for electronic devices, and calling it a second pillar was no exaggeration. The judgement to withdraw was less a matter of cutting loss-making operations than of deciding, at the level of individual product lines, which of the businesses it had gathered in the belief that they would grow it would now let go. The three names — CMOS camera modules, small liquid-crystal panels, floppy-disk drives — also stand as a record of where the Japanese electronics industry of the day lost its competitiveness.
Whether the judgement was right is answered by the numbers that followed. The extraordinary loss of $382.8M (¥36bn) in FY2009 nullified in its first year the ten per cent operating margin the medium-term plan of 2007 had set out. On the other side, the watch business, where the resources cut away were directed, reached $1.2B (¥177bn) in FY2025, more than four times the $270.6M (¥41bn) of electronic devices. Even granting that the premise Maekawa Hideo (前川日出夫) stated in 1991 — that companies which do not succeed in their main business almost always fail when they diversify — was correct, what remains after this withdrawal is the fact that diversification by a company which had taken first place in the world in its main business could fail as well.
This English edition follows the Japanese one chapter by chapter. The Japanese edition remains the edition of record: it carries the source-by-source citations, the financial tables and the shareholder and executive records. 日本語版（詳細）— Citizen Watch full history in Japanese →
Citizen Watch Co., Ltd. — 有価証券報告書 (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history section and the segment disclosures for FY2006 and FY2019–FY2025.
Yamada Eiichi — 築き上げた人々 (The Men Who Built It), the chapter 新しい仕事はどこにでもある (“There is new work everywhere”), Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha, 1956.
企業の歴史 : 明治百年 (Corporate Histories: A Century of Meiji, Keizai Shunju-sha, 1968), the Citizen Watch entry.
Nikkei Business — 日経ビジネス (Nikkei BP): 24 Aug 1998, the interview with president Haruta Hiroshi on the movement-supply decision and world leadership in output.