Companies in Kyoto

Pick up any smartphone and you are holding several thousand Murata components: the company makes more than half of the world's multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) — the tiny beige rectangles that store and release electrical energy on every circuit board — plus the filters, inductors, and sensors that make wireless communication work. Founded in 1944 in Kyoto, Murata turned a family ceramics business into the quiet giant of electronic components. The scale of its output is staggering: Murata produces over a trillion components a year. Its MLCCs are so central to electronics that the 2018 global MLCC shortage — triggered in part by Murata's capacity reallocation — briefly froze production lines at automakers and phone makers worldwide, an episode that showed how dependent the industry is on one supplier. Beyond capacitors, Murata leads in RF filters for 5G, Li-ion batteries for wearables, and MEMS sensors. Headquartered in Kyoto's Nagaoakakyo district with about 73,000 employees and annual revenue near ¥1.7 trillion, Murata competes with Samsung Electro-Mechanics and TDK, but its combination of materials science and manufacturing precision keeps it the default choice for flagship phones and automotive electronics. For procurement teams, the lesson of 2018 stands: Murata capacity planning is supply-chain strategy.

Nidec's founder Shigenobu Nagamori likes to say that motors are the future of everything — and he has built a company to prove it. In 1973, at age 28, Nagamori left his job to start a company making small precision motors, betting that brushless DC motor technology would dominate. Today Nidec is the world's largest motor manufacturer, producing more motors than any company in history — billions of units a year. The company's claim to fame was the hard disk drive spindle motor: Nidec captured the overwhelming majority of the global HDD motor market, a near-monopoly that funded expansion into automotive motors, home appliance motors, industrial motors, and robotics. Its motors now power electric power steering, EV traction motors, washing machines, air conditioners, and the fans inside data centers and laptops. With about 100,000 employees and annual revenue near ¥2.3 trillion (US$15 billion), Nidec has grown through an aggressive acquisition strategy — over 100 companies bought since the 1990s — and is now a leading supplier of EV traction motors, targeting the electric vehicle market as its next HDD-style dominance play. For buyers, Nidec's scale means motor costs no rival can match.

Kyocera's entire business can be traced to one material decision: in 1959, Kazuo Inamori founded the company in Kyoto to make ceramic insulators for television components — betting that technical ceramics, which resist heat, wear, and electricity in ways metals cannot, would become the quiet backbone of modern industry. The bet paid off beyond imagination. Today Kyocera's ceramics are inside smartphone camera modules, semiconductor packages, automotive sensors, and cutting tools that machine titanium at high speed. Its electronics components division makes the MLCCs, crystal devices, and connectors found in virtually every electronic product, while its document solutions business (printers and multifunction copiers) and solar energy division complete a remarkably diversified portfolio. Kyocera employs about 70,000 people and generates annual revenue near ¥2 trillion. It is also famous in business circles for the Inamori management philosophy — 'do the right thing as a human being' — and for an unusual corporate structure: the company famously has no borrowing, a balance-sheet discipline most industrial firms only dream of.

Omron's name comes from a street in Kyoto — the company took it in 1959 from 'Omon', an old name for the avenue near its headquarters, in the hope of sounding friendlier to Western customers. What the name hides is a precision-automation powerhouse: founder Kazuma Tateishi built his first product, an X-ray timer, in 1933, and Omron has been converting physical signals into electrical ones ever since. Today Omron is one of the world's largest makers of industrial sensors and control components — photoelectric, proximity, and pressure sensors plus PLCs and relays that sit inside factory automation lines worldwide. It is also the global leader in home blood-pressure monitors and a major supplier of automatic ticket gates and healthcare devices, with about 28,000 employees and annual sales near ¥800 billion. The company's unusual trait is its founding philosophy: Tateishi's 'machine that works for the benefit of people' principle pushed Omron into early development of social systems — from automated bank machines to traffic control — decades before 'Industry 4.0' became a buzzword.