SHIGENOBU NAGAMORI, FOUNDER OF NIDEC, THE world’s largest maker of miniature motors for electronic devices, is Japanese. But he confesses a fondness for the color green that cheap tiffany key rings do any Irishman proud.
The 65-year-old Nagamori, who is Nidec’s chairman, president and CEO, owns 1,300 ties in varying shades of that color. He also has myriad shirts, cuff links and handkerchiefs colored green. And he proudly passes out business cards bearing his company’s lime-embossed logo. He occasionally dons an olive baseball cap, like those worn by his assembly-line workers, and delights, in pointing visitors to the verdant color schemes of Nidec’s production facilities.
“Green is a symbol of growth,” tiffany on salesale animated, high-spirited executive said in a recent interview at his Tokyo office. “My birth year, according to Chinese astrology, coincides with one of the five key elements required for life and happiness, which in my case is earth, from which green things grow. It’s become synonymous with my company, since growth is our key strategy.”
Nagamori founded Nidec on a hot July afternoon in 1973 in his backyard in Kyoto, with the help of three friends -all, like him, engineers. Since then, he has built up his business by focusing on innovation and winning contraéis from major customers, such as 3M (ticker: MMM) and IBM (IBM), which needed tiny motors to develop a new generation of tiffany bangles sale recorders and disk drives, respectively. And Nagamori has bolstered his company by making more than 30 acquisitions that extended its reach into nearly every corner of the electronic-motors world.
In 1979, Nidec became the first company to successfully develop brushless, direct-current spindle motors for eight-inch hard-disk drives (HDDs). Sales of these ubiquitous DC motors now generate about 60% of the company’s profit.
“Many have said that had it not been for this product, computers couldn’t have become as small as they have,” Nagamori observes. “This makes us a full-fledged player in the global markets for computers and other products.”
Today, Nidec is Japan’s fifth-tiffany bracelets salesale electronics company, with annual sales topping $7 billion. Most of the revenue comes from small-to-mid-size motors, fan motors and pivot assemblies widely used for information-technology and digital-entertainment products, such as laptop computers and iPods, plus home appliances, automobiles, office equipment and industrial machinery.
xine