Company history

In March 1949 Kihachiro Onitsuka — home from the war — set up Onitsuka Shokai in Kobe as a one-man wholesaler of rubber footwear, reincorporating it that September as Onitsuka Co. Its first work was mundane: distributing rubber shoes and bicycle tyres and tubes, partly as a designated agent for the Hyogo prefectural police. But Onitsuka held a conviction — that the raising of Japan’s postwar youth ran through sport — and by 1950 he had turned the firm into a specialist sports-shoe maker, beginning with basketball shoes. When wartime rubber controls were lifted in 1951 he moved into real manufacturing, with capital of $833 (¥300,000) and two employees.

From there he built a maker rather than a trader. Production came in-house at the Tiger Rubber works in 1953; Toyo Rayon’s designated-factory status let Asics develop nylon sports shoes from 1954; a Tokyo sales arm opened the east of the country in 1955. Quality rose fast — Onitsuka shoes were worn at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, and in 1957 the firm won the small-business agency chief’s prize as a model enterprise. In 1957–58 it folded making and selling back together under one roof and the Onitsuka Tiger name. Nine years from a two-man shop, it was a specialist shoe company.

Scale and standing followed. Onitsuka listed on the Kobe and Osaka exchanges in 1964 and reached the First Sections of Tokyo and Osaka by 1974 — a quick climb for a postwar start-up — and by the mid-1960s it held the top share of Japan’s sports-shoe market, built on many-model, small-lot production with integrated runs for the high-volume lines. In 1975 it opened its first European venture, later Asics Deutschland, beginning the overseas build-out that would define the decades ahead.

In July 1977 the company gave up its founder’s surname for a mission. It renamed itself ASICS — an acronym of the Latin Anima Sana In Corpore Sano, a sound mind in a sound body — and in the same move merged with two rivals, GTO and Jelenk, absorbing seven sewing plants and a U.S. arm. In one stroke it swapped a brand for a creed and used the three-way merger to add scale in making and selling.

Through the 1980s Asics assembled the parts of a technical, global maker. It built a new head office on Kobe’s Port Island in 1985 and, the same year, opened a Sports Engineering Institute to put shoe development on a scientific footing — embedding, at the level of organisation, the R&D edge it wanted over rivals. Then came the subsidiaries: Australia in 1986, France in 1990, the Netherlands and Italy in 1991, Britain in 1992, a Chinese production plant in 1994, and a European holding company to knit them together.

Founder Kihachiro Onitsuka handed the presidency to Seiji Mihara in 1992, opening a run of non-family presidents — Mihara, then Takahashi, then Wada. The network kept widening into Taiwan, Korea and eastern Europe, and in 2007 Asics pulled its trading affiliate, Asics Shoji, into consolidation, adding a merchant’s reach to a maker’s. The thread of these thirty years was reach: turning a Japanese shoe champion into a company present in every major market.

Motoi Oyama — who had joined Asics in 1986 after a career in trading houses — became president in 2008 and pushed two things at once: a genuinely global management structure, and diversification beyond the running shoe. In 2010 Asics bought Sweden’s Haglöfs, a maker of outdoor gear, to stand a second pillar beside athletic footwear.

To let global decisions run free of the domestic business, Asics separated the two in 2013: it carved the Japanese operation into Asics Japan and a sales company that absorbed six regional distributors, leaving a clean world-headquarters function above. It had set up Asics Japan for domestic marketing in 2012, and in 2014 it took full ownership of the trading company Asics Shoji by tender offer and share exchange. The machinery of a multinational was now in place — but so was a business, outdoor, that shared little with the running core.

From 2016 Asics moved to sell directly to runners, buying the U.S. maker of the Runkeeper app — later Asics Digital — and, in 2019, the race-registration business Race Roster. But the diversified structure caught up with it: in the year to December 2018, impairments on overseas subsidiaries pushed Asics to a net loss of $183.9M (¥20bn), its first in fifteen years. Yasuhito Hirota, who had come from the trading house Mitsubishi Corporation, took over as president and COO in 2018 to run the fix, and the pandemic dealt a second loss in 2020.

Hirota’s answer was to narrow the company to what it did best. He concentrated resources on running, cut cost, and in December 2023 sold Haglöfs outright, exiting the outdoors. The turnaround was steep: operating margin climbed from a 2.7% trough in 2018 to record after record, reaching an operating profit of $952.2M (¥143bn) on a 17.6% margin in the year to December 2025. Along the way Asics deepened its hold on running’s community — taking control of the marathon-events firm R-bies with Nippon TV in 2022 — while the heritage Onitsuka Tiger line, given its own product arm in 2009, matured into a high-margin fashion sneaker that widened the earnings base.

With foreign institutions holding more than half its shares and no stable core shareholder, Asics turned to returns. After buying back $330M (¥50bn) of its own stock in 2024, in February 2025 it moved to cancel 25 million shares — 3.29% of those issued — and buy back up to $133.6M (¥20bn) more, and it set up a general incorporated foundation, ASICS Foundation, to which it assigned about 0.98% of shares, dividends routed to youth and disability programmes and the voting rights left unused. Seventy-six years from a two-man Kobe workshop, Asics is building the base for its next decade around the shoe it never should have left.