Japan is a big producer of automobiles, in addition to Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Suzuki, Mazda and other well-known brands, in the field of parts and components are also very strong. According to the "2022 Global Auto Parts Brand Value Top 20" list released by Brand Finance, There are 5 brands in Japan on the list, accounting for 34.07% of the value, ranking first.
Among them, the top ten occupy four seats. Denso, Sumitomo Electric, Toyota Loom, and Aisin ranked first, fourth, sixth, and seventh, respectively, with brand values of $4.235 billion, $2.429 billion, $2.216 billion, and $2.117 billion, respectively. Ito ($500 million) made the list for the first time, ranking nineteenth.
Today we will focus on Sumitomo Electric Industries. Headquartered in Osaka, Japan, it has 416 companies in about 40 countries and employs 287,000 people. Mainly engaged in wire and cable business, the business scope includes automotive, information and communications, electronics, environmental energy, industrial raw materials and other five major areas, its optical fiber and cable products production and sales have been ranked among the world's best for many years.
Sumitomo's origins began with copper smelting. More than 400 years ago, a gentleman named "White Water" came from the Ming Dynasty of China and passed on the techniques of smelting copper to Su I ri Rie and Sumitomo Kojiro Masatomo. The product quality and yield rate have been greatly improved, and rich profits have been obtained, laying a solid foundation for sumitomo's future development. In honor of Mr. Shirasu, the presidents of various sumitomo group listed companies now have a sorority called "Whitewater Club".
Back in 1897, when Japan, all high-end products, including cables, could only rely on imports. In this context, the Sumitomo Shin Copper Factory (the predecessor of Sumitomo Electric Industry Co., Ltd.) was born. Starting from the manufacture of copper wire and silicon copper wire, it gradually extended to power cables and communication cables, and successfully manufactured Japan's first domestic high-voltage underground transmission line cable (11000V).
At the end of the 1930s, the company changed its name to Sumitomo Electric Industries Co., Ltd. and expanded its business scope beyond wires to include rubber products and sintered products. At the same time, they continued to use copper wire as raw materials to manufacture hard alloy tools, special wires, fiber optic cables and other products, and delivered the earliest domestic TV broadcast antenna to NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation).
In the early 1960s, Sumitomo Electric delivered automotive wiring harness products for the first time and officially entered the automotive parts field. In simple terms, the wiring harness is like a car's "blood vessel" for signal transmission, which can be divided into power lines (responsible for carrying the power of the drive fulfillment element) and signal lines (responsible for transmitting sensor input instructions) according to function. With the improvement of the level of vehicle electrification, the number of functions and sensors will increase rapidly, and the wiring harness will become longer and longer, and the importance is self-evident.
Sumitomo Electric has been in the Chinese market for 45 years since it set up an office in Hong Kong in 1977. At present, there are more than 90 affiliated companies with more than 40,000 employees, investing in Changchun, Tianjin, Chongqing, Wuhan, Suzhou, Wuxi and other cities. In addition to Toyota, Honda, etc., its brand supporting customers also include FAW, Changan, Dongfeng, Volkswagen and so on.
In the 2021 Fortune Global 500 list, Sumitomo Electric ranked 442nd, with annual revenue of US$27.5317 billion, equivalent to about RMB175.5 billion. For the first half of the fiscal year ended September 30, 2021, net sales were 1,570,413 million yen (approximately 81.3 billion yuan) and net profit was 32.39 billion yen. Among them, the automobile business was 816.385 billion yen, accounting for more than half.
It is worth mentioning that Sumitomo Electric is also a manufacturer of 5G base station semiconductors, with a 70% share of the product worldwide. They use gallium nitride as a material that provides higher communication capacity and lower power consumption compared to silicon. Huawei was once the largest customer, accounting for 90%. However, due to the obstruction of the United States, the Japanese supplier had to seek European and American customers to reduce its exposure to Huawei.