Furukawa Electric
Co-founder 1935Background
Furukawa Electric and the wider Furukawa industrial group helped establish the company that became Fujitsu.
Role at Fujitsu Limited
Fujitsu possesses a historic, strategic founding story, rooted in the state-sponsored modernization of Japan's telecommunications infrastructure prior to World War II, driven by a consequential international partnership. The company's foundational origins trace back to 1923, following the devastation of the Great Kanto Earthquake, which destroyed Tokyo's fragile telecommunications network. The Japanese government realized an urgent need to rebuild and modernize the national telephone system. To accomplish this task, the Japanese government heavily relied on the Furukawa Electric Company (a copper mining and wire manufacturer). However, Furukawa lacked the advanced technology required to build modern automatic telephone switching equipment. In a strategic maneuver in 1923, Furukawa entered into a lucrative joint venture with the German industrial titan, Siemens. This partnership created Fuji Electric (the 'Fu' from Furukawa and 'Ji' representing the German pronunciation of Siemens). In 1935, realizing that the specialized manufacturing of complex telephone equipment required its own dedicated organization, Fuji Electric spun off a new subsidiary. They named it Fuji Tsushinki Seizo (Fuji Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturing) which was later shortened to Fujitsu. This new entity was dedicated to building the foundational architecture of Japan's modern communication grid. Driven by insatiable demand from the Japanese Ministry of Communications, Fujitsu scaled its engineering capabilities, laying the complex technological foundation that eventually allowed it to pivot from simple telephone switches into the globally dominant supercomputers that defined its 20th-century legacy.