BIPROGY - Company History

In March 1958 the Univac division of America’s Sperry Corporation and the trading house Daiichi Bussan — later Mitsui & Co. — put up $194,444 (¥70m) of capital to create Nippon Remington Univac in Tokyo, the sole agent in Japan for Univac mainframes. Sperry took a direct stake of its own the following year. The company was therefore born with two parents, a manufacturer that owned the product and a trading house that owned the customers, and that parentage would define its capital structure and its room for manoeuvre for the next three decades.

The market it entered was already closed. IBM’s Japanese arm and the domestic makers marshalled by the Ministry of International Trade and Industry — Fujitsu, Hitachi, Mitsubishi, NEC, Toshiba, Oki — held more than 80% of it, and the Univac agency held between 3% and 5%. Unable to break the domestic camp’s grip on government and manufacturing accounts by technology, the company used the one asset it did have and went at the banks through Mitsui’s sales network. A contract for Mitsui Bank’s branch-online system in 1965 opened a long run of core banking installations at regional banks and credit associations, and fixed the company’s standing in the industry: the integrator that is strong in finance. It was renamed Nihon Univac in 1968 and went public in 1970.

The ceiling was structural. Sperry decided the performance, the price and the release timing of every machine, so there was little route by which a Japanese customer’s requirement could reach the product design. Univac’s proprietary operating system locked existing customers in — the cost of moving was high — but as IBM’s MVS became the market standard it also kept new ones out. Revenue drifted sideways into the late 1980s. When Sperry merged with Burroughs in 1986 to form Unisys, the Japanese side had no option but to follow the reorganization decided in America.

In April 1988 Nihon Univac absorbed Burroughs Japan and took the name Nihon Unisys, issuing at a merger ratio of 33 to 1 new shares equal to nearly a third of its total shares outstanding. It gained two lines of customers and a nationwide maintenance network. It did not gain the right to decide the product: the sole-agency contract that took effect in the same month still granted the same three things as before — import sales, maintenance, and use of the trademark.

Ownership stayed split, with the American parent on roughly 27% and Mitsui on roughly 20%, and the two did not want the same thing. The US side wanted profit maximized in Japan; Mitsui held the stock as an investment and wanted dividends and a rising price. Reconciling them slowed every decision, and the drag came at the worst moment: through the 1990s the American parent was losing the downsizing shift from mainframes to client-server, and its retreat passed straight into the Japanese portfolio.

Inside the company, thirty years of joint venture had produced two populations — engineers trained on the Sperry and Burroughs operating systems, deployed on bank and public-sector core systems, and a sales and administrative layer descended from the trading house, working its corporate network. The division of labour later became the cultural ground for a partner-led services business, but it also meant that almost nothing originated in-house beyond reselling American machines. The support and operations subsidiary UNIADEX, set up in 1997, was one of the few exceptions.

In March 2006 Unisys Corporation sold all 30,224,900 of its shares, ending forty-seven years of American control. The parent’s own crisis — a shrinking mainframe business and deteriorating finances — had removed its reason to hold on, and the Japanese company, which still had no machine of its own to sell, acquired for the first time the freedom to rebuild its structure. Mitsui bought into the gap and led for a while; Momii Katsuto, a former Mitsui executive who had become president in June 2005 with a stated target of “returning to a growth company earning 7%,” embodied the shift.

The rebuild ran by purchase and rearrangement rather than by product. Cambridge Technology Partners was acquired in 2006 to supply upstream consulting; the network integrator Netmarks was taken by tender offer in 2007; operations and maintenance were concentrated into UNIADEX and the regional development companies were folded in. In December 2010 Momii named the destination — a “service integrator” that would take the whole line from building a system to running it, so that earnings would stop swinging with customers’ investment cycles.

Saying it took far less time than earning it. The year ended March 2012 produced a consolidated net loss of $156.7M (¥13bn), as post-Lehman banks froze IT spending and several ten-billion-yen projects overran. In August 2012 Mitsui passed its 20,726,410 shares to Dai Nippon Printing, closing the joint-venture structure for good. Under two home-grown presidents — Kurokawa Shigeru from 2011 and Hiraoka Akiyoshi from 2016 — the mix finally turned: services came to about three-quarters of revenue, and operating margin rose from 5.7% in the year to March 2018 to 8.6% in the year to March 2022. In 2021 BankVision on Azure put a full banking system on public cloud for the first time in Japan.

On 1 April 2022 the company gave up the name it had carried for thirty-four years and became BIPROGY, a coinage from the initials of the seven colours of the rainbow — Blue, Indigo, Purple, Red, Orange, Green, Yellow — chosen to say that it intended to be an ecosystem in which many parties solve social problems together. Hiraoka gave two reasons. Trademark rights meant “UNISYS” could not be used freely abroad, so the American parent’s shadow still limited the company sixteen years after the capital tie was cut; and the image of an old-guard IT house was not helping win the newer work in decarbonisation, regional-bank digitalisation and retail commerce. The project had been run in secret from 2019 until the announcement in May 2021, by the head of marketing — Saito Noboru, who would later become president. The logo came off the Toyosu headquarters at the same time.

The same month brought Vision 2030 and its central idea, the “digital commons”: platforms built once and shared across companies as infrastructure, on the argument that the problems worth attacking cannot be solved by one firm. The multi-tenant businesses already existed — BankVision for regional banks, the DIGITAL’ATELIER commerce platform for retailers — so the rename and the vision were largely an act of gathering scattered products under a single strategy.

Saito took over as president and CEO in April 2024 with the most ambitious numbers in the company’s history: roughly $462M (¥70bn) of growth investment over three years and a market capitalisation of $6.6B (¥1tn), about double where it stood. The year to March 2025 came in at a 9.7% operating margin, at last above the 7% Momii had set as a target in 2005, with outsourcing the fastest-growing segment at $605.4M (¥91bn), up 18.3%. Then, in November 2025, came the largest acquisition it had ever made — about $270.6M (¥41bn) for the parent of Catalina Marketing Japan, wholly owned from January 2026 — bringing in AOUMI, a retail-media network reading purchases at some 13,000 stores. The reasoning was the one the company has used since 1965: contract work is hostage to the customer’s investment cycle, so buy the asset instead. Only this time the asset was data.