2018_4q_omron_e

29/45 Technology Mgmt: A Core Tenet Since OMRON’s Founding Days

This concept is not new for OMRON. Instead, it dates back to the earliest days of our business. On this slide we show highlights from the OMRON timeline, dating back to the 1930’s. Kazuma Tateishi, our founder, established the forerunner of OMRON, Tateisi Electric Manufacturing in 1933. In the 1950s, factory automation began to emerge in Japan. Founder Tateishi launched relays and sensors for this new market, laying the foundation for our business today. From the late 50’s, realizing that automation opportunities were not limited to just factories, Tateishi started to develop other non-factory use automation products, such as the unmanned train station equipment, automated cash dispensers and automated traffic signal highlighted in the lower right-hand box. All of these products are now a normal part of our everyday lives, but at the time, all of these were new products that existing only in the imagination. Tateishi envisioned a Near Future Design that included these products, and based on this, he built the Central R&D Laboratory in 1960. The total investment for the Central R&D Laboratory was 4x the company’s capital at the time. In today’s terms, this would be the equivalent to a massive ￥250 billion. Once built, he set about hiring engineers in order to bring his dreams to fruition. In practical terms, the three businesses highlighted only started to contribute positively to overall profitability from 1973, 13 years after the building of the Central R&D Laboratory. This epitomizes technology-oriented management at OMRON.