Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi, Ltd., highly diversified Japanese manufacturing corporation that comprises more than 1,000 subsidiaries, including 335 overseas corporations. Headquarters are in Tokyo.

Hitachi’s story begins in 1910 with its founder, Odaira Namihei, operating an electrical repair shop at a copper mine northeast of Tokyo. While repairing machinery for the mine, Odaira began to experiment with his own designs, and that same year he manufactured the first domestically produced 5-horsepower (3.7-kilowatt) electric motor. Odaira established his own company in 1912 and coined the company’s name by superimposing two kanji (Chinese-derived Japanese) characters, hi meaning “sun” and tachi meaning “rise,” and enclosing them in a circle to form the now familiar Hitachi logo.

In its early years Hitachi concentrated on the manufacture of heavy electrical equipment and industrial machinery. In addition to motors, generators, pumps, electrical cables, and transformers, Hitachi produced Japan’s first large-scale direct-current locomotives (1924). In the 1930s Hitachi benefited from a strategic infusion of government funds, which allowed the company to diversify into metallurgy and communications equipment.

Following World War II, Hitachi was central to the reconstruction of Japan’s industrial base, particularly in the generation of power. Hitachi manufactured mining equipment, built trains to transport coal to power plants, and built electrical-generation equipment. With the recovery of the Japanese economy in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Hitachi began to shift its focus from industrial machinery to consumer goods, such as home appliances, air conditioners, and transistor radios. In 1959 Hitachi established its first presence in the United States with Hitachi America, Ltd. After licensing technology from RCA Corporation, Hitachi developed and mass-produced all-transistor colour televisions beginning in 1969.

Hitachi developed its first transistor-based computer in 1959. Throughout the next three decades, in a series of projects sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry, Hitachi teamed with other Japanese companies to develop and manufacture semiconductor chips, microprocessors, computers, and supercomputers. In 1974 Hitachi manufactured the first in a series of general-purpose mainframe computers and in 1982 announced development of its first supercomputer. However, Hitachi gained notoriety when its senior executives were caught in an FBI “sting” operation in 1982 in Santa Clara, Calif., U.S., and were arrested for attempting to buy IBM technology secrets. All the Hitachi executives pleaded guilty and were fined in 1983. Meanwhile, IBM settled its civil lawsuit against Hitachi out of court. In addition to winning substantial monetary damages, IBM won the right to inspect Hitachi’s new products for five years for any design infringements.

In the late 1980s Hitachi continued to focus on the lucrative chip market, entering into an arrangement with Texas Instruments Incorporated to design and produce high-performance microprocessors and computer memory chips (16-megabit DRAM). It also purchased National Advanced Systems from National Semiconductor, renaming it Hitachi Data Systems, with the intent to sell Hitachi products, such as memory chips, disk drives, and other components, in the United States.

From its inception, Hitachi placed a strong emphasis on research and development. By 1993 Hitachi was operating 38 research laboratories and was one of the leading recipients of U.S. patents granted since 1963. Hitachi’s presence became ubiquitous in everything from computer-aided control systems for high-speed trains and nuclear reactors to fibre-optic data-transmission equipment to personal fax machines and digital cameras.

A worldwide economic slowdown at the end of the 20th century particularly affected Japanese technology companies. Following multibillion-dollar losses by Hitachi and the Mitsubishi Electric Corporation in 2002, the companies announced that they would consolidate their nonmemory semiconductor businesses; the new company, Renesas Technology Corp., would surpass Motorola, Inc., as the largest manufacturer in the microcontroller market. Also in 2002, Hitachi reached an agreement with IBM on a new joint hard disk drive (HDD) company, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, to operate in San Jose, Calif. Hitachi initially owned 70 percent of the company but took full control in 2005, following structured payments over the intervening three years of about $2 billion for IBM’s HDD patents and associated manufacturing facilities in San Jose. In 2003 Hitachi began development of a new HDD facility in Shenzhen, China, which started operating in 2006. Since then the company has shifted most of its HDD production to China.