Company history

Yonex began not with sport but with wood. In 1946 Minoru Yoneyama set up a woodworking shop in Koshiji, Niigata (now part of Nagaoka), turning out wooden fishing floats and similar goods. The post-war materials revolution then swept that trade away — synthetic resins replaced wood, and the family’s living shrank with it. Rather than defend a dying craft, in 1957 Yoneyama made a late entry into badminton rackets, and in June 1958 he incorporated Yoneyama Seisakusho in Koshiji to mass-produce wooden frames.

The young company did not sell under its own name. It began as an OEM contractor, exporting wooden rackets stamped with the brands of British and American distributors — a subcontractor at the far end of someone else’s market. That arrangement nearly destroyed it: when a principal client went bankrupt, Yonex came within reach of a chain collapse, and the shock forced a decision that would shape everything after — to stop making other companies’ goods and to sell under its own name.

From 1961 it built the pieces of an independent maker. It opened a Tokyo sales office and began own-brand selling, raised its first factory in Koshiji, spun the export desk into a trading arm, and in 1965 added shuttlecock production so that both the racket and the shuttle were made in-house. Renamed Yoneyama Racket in 1967 and adding a Saitama shuttlecock plant in 1968, it settled into a two-factory shape — rackets in Niigata, shuttles near Tokyo — that would carry it into the wider game.

In January 1969 Yonex added tennis rackets. The move was defensive as much as ambitious: cheap Taiwanese rackets were spreading through the market, and a badminton-only maker risked being undercut in its single line. Widening into tennis was the first expression of a rule the company would keep — diversify, but only inside racket sports, never outside them.

Then came the internationalising stroke. In 1974 the company filed the trademark “YONEX,” retiring the local, hard-to-pronounce “Yoneyama” for a short name a foreign market could read — and in 1982 it made that name its own, unifying brand and firm as Yonex Co., Ltd. Behind the name it built the reach: a West German sales subsidiary in 1981, then the United States in 1983, and the United Kingdom and a Taiwanese production company in 1987 — a direct sales-and-manufacturing network across Europe, the Americas and Asia assembled in barely six years. It also opened a third line, entering golf with new-material clubs in 1982.

In 1990 Yonex moved its head office to Bunkyo, Tokyo — its address to this day — and pulled the Tokyo factory and trading arm into itself, firming up a two-pole structure of a Tokyo head office over Niigata production. In February 1994, thirty-six years after a fishing-float shop had incorporated, Yonex listed on the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. A Niigata family trade had become a listed, globally branded racket-sports maker.

In 1997 the founder, Minoru Yoneyama, then seventy-two, handed the presidency to his younger brother Kosaku Yoneyama — the first of a run of family handovers. Kosaku (1997–2007) widened the post-listing base and the overseas network, but he inherited a costly side-venture: a golf course at Teradomari, opened in 1996 out of a development arm the founder had set up in 1989. When the asset bubble burst, golf demand fell away, the course never reached its planned use, and it was later written down. Alongside weak ski and golf sales and special losses on revaluing overseas subsidiaries, the year to March 2006 brought Yonex’s first net loss since listing — about $44.7M (¥5bn) in the red.

The presidency then passed within the family again, to the founder’s eldest son, Tsutomu Yoneyama (2007–2015), who steered the recovery after the Lehman shock. In 2015 Yonex broke the family line for the first time, handing the company to an outside professional, Soju Hayashida (2015–2022), who consolidated logistics and — from the year to March 2016 — spent aggressively on contracts with world-class players, letting their results carry the brand. It worked: revenue climbed and the operating margin recovered toward 7%.

That same engine then turned against it. When COVID-19 arrived in early 2020, tournaments were cancelled and play suspended; sales for the year to March 2021 fell about 17% and the operating margin sank to roughly 2%. A maker whose demand is triggered by international competition and the fortunes of its contracted players had that trigger pulled the wrong way — the plainest sign yet of how much a single-niche business rides on events beyond its control.

Arisa Yoneyama took over in June 2022, and the timing flattered her: as tournaments resumed, revenue rebounded hard, setting record highs four years running and reaching, by the year to March 2025, nearly 2.7 times the COVID-era trough. Yet the driver was the same lever that had cut the other way in the pandemic — the return of international competition, the 2024 Paris Olympics among it, and strong results from Yonex-contracted players in both badminton and tennis. On the same revenue structure, cancelled events had sunk sales and resumed events now lifted them.

The geography, though, stayed lopsided. In the year to March 2025 roughly nine-tenths of sales came from Asia and Japan, with the Americas near 5% and Europe smaller still. The North America and India push Arisa flagged on taking office has to build from that thin base, and correcting the East-Asian tilt is the standing test of her tenure.

Her answer on where to make the goods is the strategy’s sharpest choice. Under the banner of a “Global Growth Strategy,” Yonex is concentrating production at home rather than dispersing it abroad: in 2024 it opened a research-and-development centre beside its Nagaoka plant, gathering scattered R&D into one place, and it built a new tennis-racket factory in Nagaoka to lift capacity in its second sport. For sixty-eight years Yonex has kept its main production in its Niigata birthplace, and the plan continues that line — betting that quality made in one place, not spread across cheaper geographies, is what keeps the brand ahead. Whether a multi-year outlay on tennis capacity and research pays back in margin will be settled from the year to March 2026 on.