The story
Founded by Genzō Shimazu I on Sep 1, 1917, in Kyoto.1
Founding and early years
The company was established by Genzo Shimadzu Sr. (島津 源蔵, Shimazu Genzō) in 1875. During the 1890s and 1900s, Shimadzu experienced rapid growth that occurred at the same time as higher education grew in Japan.
X-ray devices, the spectrum camera, the electron microscope, and the gas chromatograph were developed and commercialized in advance of other Japanese companies. Shimadzu became a corporation in 1917. The American arm of the company, Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, was founded in 1975.
Genzo Shimadzu Sr's son Genzo Shimadzu Jr was the second president of the company and also founded battery manufacturer GS (now GS Yuasa) in 1917.
Developments
The company also developed, in 2001, an ultra-high speed video camera, HyperVision HPV-1, which is capable of recording at 1,000,000 FPS, while in 2016 it released the HyperVision HPV-X2, a camera that achieves ultra-high-speed continuous recording at 10 million frames per second at Full Pixel Resolution. Other products developed by Shimadzu include head-mounted displays.
Koichi Tanaka won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for a new mass spectrometry method. Embarrassed by Tanaka's low rank at the company, Shimadzu immediately promoted him to research fellow, and named a laboratory after him.
The company had revenue of ¥264.048 billion yen ($2.8 billion USD) in FY 2012, with 10,395 employees as of March 31, 2013.
From Wikipedia’s article on Shimadzu, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4