Minolta Camera Co., Ltd.

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Minolta Camera Co., Ltd.

3-13, Azuchi-machi 2-chome
Chuo-ku, Osaka 541
Japan
(06) 271-2251
Fax: (06) 266-1010

Public Company
Incorporated: 1937 as Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko Kabushiki Kaisha
Employees: 6,680
Sales: ¥306 billion ($2.13 billion)
Stock Exchanges: Tokyo Osaka Nagoya Frankfurt Düsseldorf

Since Kazuo Tashima began using German technology to produce one camera a day in 1928, Minolta Camera Company has gone on to become one of Japan’s Big Five camera makers. Although Minolta initially did so by copying German technology, it then developed new products on its own, and marketed them successfully in Europe and the United States. As the market for camera equipment matured in Japan, Europe, and the United States, the firm diversified into a number of related areas. Minolta is a major producer of cameras, business equipment, radiometric instruments, and planetariums, with production facilities in Japan, the United States, Germany, Malaysia, and Brazil, and a worldwide marketing network.

Minolta began modestly in 1928 when 28-year-old Kazuo Tashima agreed to represent his father’s import-export company, Tashima Shoten, on a government-backed trade mission to Paris to promote Japanese silk. In Paris Tashima toured a factory that specialized in high-grade optics, and decided he could produce similar equipment in Japan profitably. Japanese businessmen, including Tashima’s father, opposed the idea of producing optical equipment domestically. Unable to start his new venture as a part of Tashima Shoten, Tashima borrowed money from his father’s chief clerk and went into business on his own.

Tashima opened shop on November 11, 1928, calling his venture Nichi-Doku Shashinki Shoten (Japan-German Camera Company). The name reflected the company’s reliance on German technology and expertise. Partners Willy Heilemann, an importer of German items in Kobe, and Billy Neumann, a German engineer with a background in optical instruments, brought state-of-the-art German technology to the new firm. By March 1929 the staff of about 30 was producing each day one bellows camera, called the Nifcalette—with imported lens and shutter. Within three months, production had grown to 100 cameras a month.

A year later the Great Depression hit Japan hard, bringing labor strife and strikes. Tashima later referred to his company as “a small boat which set sail right into the storm.” Nevertheless, Tashima promoted development of new camera models as the depression intensified, and introduced several models in 1930 and 1931.

A new model introduced in 1933 first carried the Minolta brand name, which Tashima created. The name sounds like the Japanese word, minoru-ta, which means ripening rice field. The term reminded Tashima of a proverb his mother frequently used, “The ripest ears of rice bow their heads lowest,” meaning that the more successful one becomes, the more humble one must be. The name, however, also has a Western meaning, as an abbreviation for Machinery and Instruments Optical by Tashima.

In 1934 the company began to sell the Minolta Vest, the product that made its reputation. Like other camera companies, Minolta used sheepskin to make a flexible camera bellows. When a shortage of imported sheepskin threatened production, the company developed the first rigid bellows of synthetic resin for the Minolta Vest. The innovation made the Vest easier to focus and less expensive. For the first time, a Minolta product was successful outside of Japan.

The Vest’s success made expansion possible. Tashima built new production facilities, including a factory devoted to lens production at Sakai. His emphasis on innovation led to the development of the first twin-lens reflex camera in Japan, the Minoltaflex, in 1937. That same year, Tashima reorganized and incorporated the company and renamed it Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko Kabushiki Kaisha (Chiyoda Optics and Fine Engineering Limited) to reflect its broader focus.

In September 1940 Japan joined Germany and Italy in the Tripartite Pact, which divided Asia and Africa into spheres of influence. Japan’s was to be Southeast Asia. As it became clear that war was ahead, Japanese military planners determined to develop precision optical equipment for range-finding, navigation, and bombing aids.

During World War II, when the U.S. military used electronics to track enemy ships and aircraft, the Japanese chose optics. Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko produced high-powered binoculars and other optical instruments with wartime uses. Demand was so high that it opened the Itami plant in 1942 solely to manufacture optical glass.

Japan ultimately was devastated by the war. One of the primary goals of the Allied occupation forces was the restoration of Japan’s economy. That helped Tashima, who was just as determined to put Minolta back on its feet. Employees dug through the company’s bombed-out factories to salvage parts. In 1946 the company produced Japan’s first postwar camera, the Semi III.

Since the Japanese camera industry’s major prewar competitors, the Germans, had been ruined during wartime bombing—while the Japanese developed their own optical industry—worldwide markets first opened to the Japanese in the postwar years. The Minolta Semi III was the first camera to be exported after the war, with a shipment of 170 cameras in 1947.

Also that year, Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko became the first company to produce coated lenses in Japan, and in 1948 it began to design and produce a camera to compete with the industry standard, the Leica 35 millimeter. Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko designed a new sand-cast body in which lenses could be changed, with a hinged back cover to make film loading easier. The new Minolta 35 included a faster f2.8 lens and more-dependable flash photography.

The company still had to contend with its poor image in overseas markets. Japan had copied German lens technology, and the made-in-Japan label still implied goods of inferior quality. Other Japanese camera firms changed that perception. Takeshi Mitarai of Canon—then known as Precision Optical—persuaded U.S. occupation forces to stock his cameras in military stores. U.S. servicemen stationed in the East took their cameras home, and Japanese-made cameras soon came to stand for high-quality lenses. That new reputation was reinforced industrywide when U.S. photographers assigned to the Korean War began to use Nikon cameras; they claimed that their Nikon lenses were superior to the Leicas they were accustomed to using. Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko began exporting to the United States in 1955. The company introduced another breakthrough, the achromatic double-coated lens, in 1956, giving the company entry into the European market.

In 1958 Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko put its optical experience to a new use by building its first planetarium. The timing was propitious—the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik I, the first earth-orbiting artificial satellite, the year before, sparking new interest in space.

Also in 1958, Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko introduced its first single-lens reflex (SLR) camera. The SLR allowed a photographer to see exactly what was being shot through the camera lens by using an angled mirror that reflected the image to the viewer. Previous cameras—called rangefinder cameras— used two lenses, one to take the photo and one for the photographer to look through. When interchangeable lenses came into use in the early 1950s, the rangefinder posed problems: the photographer saw the same image no matter what lens was used, instead of seeing what the camera would actually photograph. The difference between the two images could be substantial. By the mid-1950s the major Japanese camera companies were developing the more convenient SLRs, and Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko introduced its version, the SR-2, in 1958. Its major competitor was Nikon’s SLR, also introduced in 1958, which was recognized as the best of the SLRs at the high end of the market.

Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko opened its first overseas subsidiary, Minolta Corporation, in New York City in 1959. The company chose to name the subsidiary Minolta because of the popularity of its Minolta brand name. Shortly thereafter, Chiyoda Kogaku Seiko changed its own name to Minolta Camera Company. In the 1960s the company continued improving its camera line. It introduced the Uniomat, with a programmed shutter, in 1960, which led to fully programmed autoexposure in the Hi-Matic. In 1962 John Glenn chose the Hi-Matic to take the first photos of earth from space. In 1966 Minolta introduced its longest-running camera line, the SR-T series, which was produced continuously until 1981. These cameras featured through-the-lens light metering, using a patented light compensator to improve exposure in backlit photos. These new products made Minolta more competitive in Europe, so Minolta opened a European subsidiary, Minolta Camera Handelsgesellschaft, in Hamburg in 1965.

More importantly Minolta diversified. In 1960 the company entered the office copying market—an area that would prove as successful as cameras—when it produced the Copy-master. In 1962 it expanded into the data-retrieval field with the Minolta 401S microfilm reader-printer; and in 1965 the company opened its Mikawa plant, which produced the Minoltafax 41, the first copier that could reduce document size.

Minolta continued to develop its links with the U.S. space program, developing the Minolta Space Meter, a state-of-the-art technology for measuring exposures, for the first manned orbit of the moon, in 1968. The meter was used on nine more Apollo missions, including the mission that landed a man on the moon in 1969.

Minolta developed digital watches, video recorders, and pocket calculators in the 1970s, although not all the company’s innovations were successful. In 1975 a Minolta-developed office copier that used a complex, high-resolution technology just as plain-paper copiers took over the industry. The company introduced a single-lens reflex camera using cartridge film in 1976, but despite a $2 million U.S. advertising campaign the product was unsuccessful.

Other camera developments were more successful. In 1977 Minolta produced one of the first “smart” cameras. Its XD Series cameras had the first system to override user aperture settings in poor lighting.

Minolta also advanced in other areas. Its MS-18 Planetarium, built in Tokyo, contained the first fully automated planetarium system, and its new photocopiers produced higher-quality images and included both enlarging and reducing capabilities. Those successes were particularly important because the camera market was saturated in Japan, Europe, and the United States.

Minolta responded by redefining itself. It adopted a new logo in 1981 to reflect its broader purpose, and redefined its mission as processing light and images in all types of environments.

In 1983 Tashima, who had run the company since he founded it, left active management. Tashima relinquished the presidency to his son, Hideo Tashima, and became chairman of the board, the position he held when he died in 1985.

In the 1980s Minolta made advances in office-automation products, including copiers and a new word processor, but new camera technology brought the company the most attention. In 1985 Minolta unveiled its Maxxum, a SLR 35-millimeter camera with an autofocusing system. The Maxxum became a successful competitor to the less-expensive non-SLR cameras, such as Canon’s Snappy and AE-1. A U.S. advertising campaign costing over $15 million and technological advances that made the Maxxum the European Camera of the Year for 1985 aided its success. The Maxxum challenged Canon’s preeminence in the 35-millimeter market, but it was not long before Minolta’s Japanese competitors struck back with autofocus cameras of their own. Canon improved on the Maxxum by building the focusing system into the lens itself instead of housing it in the camera body with a mechanical link to the lens, as Minolta had done. Canon’s advance made focusing faster, but its camera was more expensive than the Maxxum.

The camera wars were not over, but Minolta’s presence in areas like office automation equipment and planetariums promised to smooth out the ups and downs in the photographic market.

Principal Subsidiaries

Minolta Camera Sales Co., Ltd.; Minolta Business Equipment Trading Co., Ltd.; Tokyo Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Kanagawa Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Yamanashi Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Aichi Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Kyoto Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Osaka Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Kobe Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Ehime Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Fukuoka Minolta Business Equipment Co., Ltd.; Minolta Corporation (U.S.A.); Minolta Business Systems, Inc. (U.S.A.); Minolta Copier Corporation of New York (U.S.A.); Minolta Office Systems, Inc. (U.S.A.); Mohawk Marketing Corporation (U.S.A.); Minolta Business Equipment (Canada), Ltd.; Minolta Canada Inc.; Minolta G.m.b.H. (Germany); Minolta (UK) Limited; Minolta France S.A.; Minolta (Schweiz) AG (Switzerland); Minolta Business Equipment (Belgium) N.V.; Minolta Hong Kong Limited.