NISSHA - Company History

The company began in 1929 as Nigyokudo, a small Kyoto shop founded by the first-generation Suzuki. Kyoto at the time had a steady appetite for books and plates reproducing Nishijin textiles and the art of its temples and shrines, and Nigyokudo aimed at exactly that narrow market. The founding line — anyone can set type and print; we will do the high-grade printing nobody else will touch — was a deliberate refusal of the commodity trade. Letterpress publishing was easy to enter and therefore fought on price; photoengraving depended on skilled hands, and a latecomer could charge for it precisely because so few could do it.

Wartime consolidation gave the business its corporate shape. A Kyoto photoengraving trade association set up Nihon Shashin Insatsu in 1942, and in December 1946 that company and Nigyokudo merged into Nihon Shashin Insatsu Co., Ltd., with Suzuki Naoe leading the combination — the beginning of family control that would run for most of the company’s history. Through the high-growth decades it stayed what it had been: a mid-sized Kyoto printer known for the quality of its art books, winning commissions such as the Mainichi Shimbun’s National Treasures (1962) and Shogakukan’s Japanese Art in Full Colour (1966).

Two ordinary-looking sales calls decided the next fifty years. The company began supplying Mainichi Shimbun in 1950 and Matsushita Electric in 1952. The Matsushita account started as plain commercial printing, but having a manufacturer as a customer put an idea within reach: that printing was not only a way to make pages, but a way to decorate the surface of an industrial product.

Listing came first — Osaka Second Section in October 1961, Tokyo Second Section in 1969, both First Sections in 1979 — but the capital structure stayed closely held, with the second-generation president Suzuki Shozo the largest shareholder at 12.17% as of December 1968. What changed the business was the wood-grain transfer foil developed in 1967. Through the Matsushita relationship it won work decorating television cabinets, and a technique for putting wood grain and metallic finishes on moulded plastic — printing married to injection moulding — turned out to be exactly what appliance makers needed to differentiate their products. In December 1967 the company bought 18,000 square metres in Yachiyo, Chiba, for a Kanto plant; the Kyoto-and-Yachiyo pair would carry the shift from paper to film.

The second transplant followed the same logic. In 1985 the company developed a resistive transparent touch sensor — transparent electrodes printed onto film — which went into appliance control panels, industrial equipment and, later, mobile phones and game consoles. A Nagoya office (1987) brought it closer to central Japan’s carmakers, and a Malaysian plant (1993) paired decorated film with moulding for volume production abroad. In twenty years a commercial printer had become a supplier of surfaces and interfaces to the appliance, automotive and mobile industries.

Furukawa Hiroshi, the third president and the only one from outside the founding family, ran this expansion from 1992 to 2007 as a bridge between Suzuki Shozo and the founder’s great-grandson. In December 2006 the company committed capital to industrial materials as a third pillar beyond decorated film and touch sensors. Seventy-seven years after its founding, art printing survived inside the group but no longer earned its keep.

In June 2007 Suzuki Junya, the fourth-generation family president, took over — a Keio commerce graduate who had spent his early career at Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank before joining in 1998. Smartphones were then just beginning to scale in North America, Europe and Asia, and the company aimed its film touch-sensor know-how squarely at that demand. Revenue passed ¥100 billion for the first time in the year to March 2008.

In April 2013 it made the largest capital commitment in its history: $258.9M (¥27bn) across the Himeji and Kaga plants in fiscal 2014, all of it for smartphone touch sensors. For two years it looked right — the device segment earned ¥13.5 billion of segment operating profit in the year to March 2015 — and then the market matured. New sensor architectures took share, prices fell, and concentration in one customer left nowhere to hide. Device segment operating profit went from ¥14.6 billion in the year to March 2016 to roughly zero the following year, and the group posted an operating loss of ¥3.9 billion and a net loss of ¥7.4 billion — its first serious loss. Diversification had always meant spreading one technology across many uses; the 2013 investment had bound market, customer and technology into a single bet.

The answer was to rebuild the portfolio by purchase. The fifth medium-term plan (from April 2015) set an explicit target of 35% of sales from new products and businesses, and the acquisitions came fast: a Belgian metallized-paper maker for food packaging in 2015 (about $123.9M (¥15bn)), the American medical-device manufacturer Graphic Controls in September 2016 (about $129.5M (¥14bn)), and the German touch-sensor firm Schuster the same month. The commercial printing business — the founding trade — was hived off into a subsidiary in 2015 and sold its Tokyo-area operations to Kyodo Printing in 2018. In October 2017 the company dropped the name it had carried since 1946 and became NISSHA. Sales reached a record ¥207.4 billion in 2018, but goodwill from the acquisitions had begun to accumulate on the balance sheet.

The reckoning arrived in 2019. Smartphone touch-sensor exports fell 18%, utilisation at Himeji and Kaga collapsed, and NISSHA wrote down ¥15.8 billion — ¥10.6 billion in devices, ¥5.2 billion in industrial materials — for an operating loss of ¥16.3 billion. In February 2020 it offered voluntary retirement to about 250 employees, and in 2019 it sold the Yachiyo site bought in 1967, booking a ¥4.9 billion gain. Closing the plant that had produced decorated film and touch sensors for half a century was the clearest possible statement about which businesses were now the future.

That future was medical. Starting from Graphic Controls, NISSHA bought its way into catheter contract manufacturing in Europe, pharmaceutical CDMO work in Japan (Sonneboad Pharmaceutical, later Shiga Pharmaceutical in 2025), and precision medical machining in the United States — Sequel and RSS in 2021, Isometric (about $68.6M (¥10bn)) and Cathtek in 2024, with a Vietnamese acquisition announced for 2026. Medical technology reached ¥45.6 billion of sales in 2024 and ¥47.1 billion in 2025, drawing level with the device business. Suzuki Junya has set the target at half of group sales from medical.

Growth by acquisition brought its own arithmetic. As European and American interest rates rose in 2022 and 2023, higher discount rates forced write-downs of the goodwill those purchases had created: the 2023 year closed with an operating loss of ¥3.8 billion. NISSHA has replaced a volatile consumer-electronics market with a steadier medical one, but has taken on, in exchange, a balance sheet whose value depends on how well each acquisition is integrated.