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Nidec: The Motor that Spins the World
I. Introduction & Episode Roadmap
Picture this: a prefabricated shed in Kyoto, 1973. Inside, a 27-year-old engineer named Shigenobu Nagamori huddles with three colleagues, sketching miniature motors while rain taps on a corrugated roof. The odds are stacked. Japan’s business world runs on pedigree: elite schools, deep ties to keiretsu industrial groups, and decades of slow, careful ladder-climbing.
Nagamori doesn’t have that. What he has is a conviction so outsized it sounds ridiculous when he says it out loud. He sets targets that make people laugh: first ¥1 billion in sales, then ¥10 billion, then ¥100 billion, then ¥1 trillion, and ultimately ¥10 trillion.
“The history of our passion for motors, and of overcoming difficulties together to turn our dreams into reality, is the history which has become the foundation of Nidec today.” It’s a line Nagamori would repeat for decades, and it captures the company’s self-mythology: hardship as fuel, motors as destiny.
Today, Nagamori is a Japanese billionaire businessman and the chairman and CEO of Nidec, the world’s largest manufacturer of micromotors for hard disks and optical drives. But even that undersells the scale. With 346 group companies worldwide, Nidec has become less a single manufacturer and more a sprawling motor empire. And the motto—“Do it now, do it without fail, do it until completed”—isn’t a slogan. It’s operating doctrine. It’s the mindset behind the company’s technological pivots, its global expansion, and its dealmaking streak: over seventy acquisitions, many of them turnarounds.
The Nidec story moves in distinct acts. First comes the scrappy founding: Nagamori’s decision to go to America and cold-call customers because Japan’s electronics giants wouldn’t even take a meeting with a young upstart. Then comes the hard disk drive revolution, where Nidec catches an early wave and rides spindle motors all the way to an 85% global market share. After that, the M&A era: Nagamori turns buying struggling businesses into a repeatable system—part Danaher-style playbook, part sheer force of will, all motors. And then the latest, biggest bet: electric vehicles. Nidec wants its E-Axle traction motors to power the automotive transition the way its spindle motors powered the digital one.
All of it ladders up to Nagamori’s most audacious goal yet: Nidec aims to reach consolidated net sales of 10 trillion yen by fiscal 2030—roughly $66 billion. That’s not incremental growth. That’s a reinvention at scale. Either it’s fantasy, or it’s the kind of plan that only makes sense when you realize this is the same founder who kept setting “impossible” targets, and then hitting them.
But there’s a complication. In late 2025, Nidec was engulfed in an accounting scandal that sent its shares down more than 22% in a single day, the worst drop on record. The Tokyo Stock Exchange designated Nidec a “security on special alert” starting October 30, 2025. For investors, employees, and the industry watching from the outside, the question isn’t just whether this is a stumble. It’s whether it reveals something deeper: governance cracks in a company that, for half a century, has been shaped in the image of one man.
This is a story about audacious goal-setting, relentless M&A, founder-led intensity, and the perilous art of succession. Let’s dive in.
II. The Founding Story: A Shed, Four Engineers, and Infinite Ambition (1973-1979)
The Spark
Shigenobu Nagamori grew up in a farming family in Kyoto. Not the Kyoto of temples and ceremony—the other Kyoto, the one defined by rice paddies, hard work, and practical horizons. He studied electrical engineering at the Polytechnic University near Tokyo, then bounced through a couple of engineering firms. By 1973, he’d landed at a precision machinery maker called Yamashina Seiki.
And then the moment that snapped the arc of his career into place: his boss shut down the miniature motor project Nagamori was leading.
For plenty of engineers, that would’ve been a normal corporate frustration—file it away, move on, keep your head down. But Nagamori had been fixated on precision motors since high school, and he didn’t see this as a setback. He saw it as a signal. He quit.
That summer, he started his own company in Kyoto. It was July 23, 1973. The name was Nippon Densan Corporation—what the world would come to know as Nidec. He had 20 million yen in capital, basically his life savings, and a “facility” that amounted to a small building behind his house. Three engineers from his former employer came with him. Four people total.
On paper, it was barely a company. In reality, it was Nagamori doing the thing he’d do for the next half-century: choosing the hard path if it meant controlling his own destiny.
Nothing went according to plan.
The American Gambit
The first problem was brutally simple: nobody in Japan would buy from them.
Nagamori tried to sell to the major electronics manufacturers, and hit a wall. In a 1999 Business Week interview, he said the big companies didn’t even get to the product. “All they wanted to know was how old I was and how many staff I employed.” He didn’t have keiretsu ties. He didn’t have a long corporate lineage. And in 1970s Japan, that meant you didn’t get a shot—unless you were willing to accept subcontract work and stay in your lane.
Nagamori refused. He didn’t build Nidec to play second fiddle.
So he did something that, for a tiny Japanese startup at the time, bordered on absurd: he went to the United States alone and started cold-calling companies out of the Yellow Pages.
Picture it. A young engineer with limited English, no brand, no relationships, and a suitcase of prototypes he’d been building late into the night. No “Japan Inc.” coordination. No government support. Just hustle.
And it worked.
In 1974, IBM ordered $1 million worth of disk drive motors. Then came contracts with Digital Equipment and other major U.S. corporations. For a four-person operation in a shed, that kind of order wasn’t just revenue—it was legitimacy. It meant there was a real market forming around precision motors, and Nidec could be in the middle of it.
The 3M deal captured the pattern. Nagamori showed up with prototypes. The Americans didn’t ask his age. They evaluated the motors. The first order was 1,000 units—a test. After they performed, 3M said it would multiply the volume tenfold within a year.
Nagamori had found the kind of customer he’d been looking for: one that cared more about performance than pedigree.
The Omron Rescue
Then came the next problem: success.
Orders were coming in, but the Katsura factory couldn’t keep up. Nagamori needed a larger facility immediately. And back in Japan, that meant borrowing money.
No bank would touch him.
This was 1970s Japan—banks were built to lend to established names with relationships, track records, and collateral. A young founder running a tiny company didn’t fit the model.
The breakthrough came from one person: Kazuma Tateishi, the founder of Tateishi Electric Manufacturing Company—now Omron. Tateishi provided the credit guarantees that made it possible for Nidec to build its first real factory. It was an early example of how Nidec survived: not by waiting for the system to bless them, but by finding the few people willing to bet on speed and ambition.
Nagamori learned fast. Since credit was scarce, he used early profits to buy real estate that could serve as collateral. And as employees started eyeing safer jobs at large companies, he tried a retention strategy that was almost unheard of in Japan at the time: stock options. Instead of selling stability, he sold upside.
In 1975, Nidec established a factory in Kameoka City, Kyoto. In 1976, it set up a U.S. subsidiary: Nidec America Corp. In barely three years, the company went from a shed behind a house to a manufacturer with overseas operations.
The trajectory was set. The only question now was what market would be big enough to match Nagamori’s ambition.
III. The HDD Revolution: Building an 85% Market Share (1979-2000)
The Strategic Pivot to Spindle Motors
By the end of the 1970s, Nidec had proven it could win customers. Now it needed a market big enough to justify Nagamori’s ambitions.
In 1979, it found one. Nidec entered the hard disk drive business and became the first company in the world to successfully commercialize a direct-drive spindle motor for HDDs using a brushless DC design. The timing was almost absurdly early. Personal computers were still a niche. The Apple II was fresh, the IBM PC hadn’t arrived yet, and hard drives were expensive hardware mostly associated with big, institutional machines.
But Nagamori made a simple, gutsy bet: computing was going personal, storage would have to come along for the ride, and the spindle motor would be the heartbeat inside every drive. Control that heartbeat and you don’t just sell a component—you become embedded in the growth of the entire industry.
The brushless design mattered because hard drives were unforgiving. Traditional motors used carbon brushes, and brushes meant friction, heat, electrical noise, and wear. Even worse, brushes could introduce contamination—exactly what HDD makers couldn’t tolerate. Rotational fluctuation could cause tracking errors. Dust, oil, or any foreign material could ruin a drive. The tolerances were almost surreal: the clearance between the moving head and the spinning disk was typically less than three millionths of an inch.
Brushless DC motors removed the brushes entirely, relying on electronic commutation instead. Cleaner, quieter, more durable, and more precise. Nidec wasn’t improving an old product. It was giving the hard drive industry a motor that could actually scale with its own ambitions.
The Manufacturing Gamble
Then came the second bet: not just on technology, but on timing.
Nidec didn’t wait for demand to show up neatly in purchase orders. It built capacity first—factories in multiple locations, ramping fast, often on the CEO’s decision alone.
One Nidec executive later described the feeling inside the company at the time: “At the time, we were building new HDD motor factories in various locations at a rapid pace, based on the sole decision of our CEO. When we started building most of these factories many of us employees were worried about the future of the company as we had not yet received enough orders to motivate such large-scale investments, but by the time the factories were up and running we were seeing an avalanche of orders.”
That’s Nagamori’s style in one snapshot: go early, go hard, and make the market meet you where you’re going. In a category growing as fast as PCs and disk drives, the constraint wasn’t ideas—it was output. If you could guarantee supply at scale, customers would design around you. If you hesitated, someone else would win the socket.
As the PC industry surged through the 1980s and 1990s, Nidec’s factories ran hot. More cautious competitors kept trying to catch up—building plants after the demand was obvious—but by then Nidec was already inside the major supply chains.
The IPO and Global Expansion
In 1988, Nidec went public, listing on the Second Section of the Osaka Securities Exchange and on the Kyoto Stock Exchange. It had already built out manufacturing subsidiaries, including plants in Tottori and Okayama. Annual sales in 1988 topped ¥25 billion—meaning Nagamori’s early targets of ¥1 billion and ¥10 billion weren’t just met; they were history.
So he moved the goalposts again. The next target: ¥100 billion in sales by the company’s 20-year anniversary in 1993.
The important shift wasn’t the number. It was the reaction. People didn’t laugh anymore.
Nidec’s capital markets journey kept tracking that same arc of escalation. In 1998, it was promoted to the First Section of the Osaka Securities Exchange and listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In 2001, it listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
That NYSE listing—later delisted in 2016—wasn’t just about raising money. It was a statement: Nidec wasn’t content to be a Japanese supplier riding a global trend. It wanted to be a global company with global customers, global operations, and global credibility.
Fluid Dynamic Bearings: The $330 Million Bet
By the late 1990s, hard drives were getting denser, faster, and more demanding. And once again, the industry hit a transition point—this time in bearings.
Ball bearings were giving way to fluid dynamic bearings. Instead of metal balls, fluid bearings used a thin layer of lubricant to separate rotating and nonrotating parts. The benefits were exactly what the next generation of drives required: higher-speed rotation, lower power use, less friction, less noise, and better resistance to shocks.
Nidec didn’t dabble. It went all-in. After four years of development and a $330 million R&D investment, Nidec introduced a hard drive motor with fluid dynamic bearings in 2002.
That’s a company-making kind of bet. And it fit Nagamori’s worldview: in motors, you don’t survive by reacting to technology shifts. You survive by leading them—because if you fall behind on a platform change, you don’t lose a quarter. You lose the market.
By this point, Nidec supplied motors to the world’s three major HDD makers: Seagate, Western Digital, and Toshiba. And it claimed an 85% global market share, with Minebea Mitsumi as the next-largest competitor.
That level of dominance becomes a flywheel. Customers standardize, volumes rise, costs drop, R&D accelerates, products improve, and switching gets harder. And quietly, inside countless computers around the world, Nidec’s spindle motors did the same thing, over and over: spin.
IV. The M&A Machine: Castle Walls and Serial Acquisitions (1989-Present)
The Acquisition Philosophy
Nidec is known for making active use of mergers and acquisitions as a core management strategy. But saying Nidec “uses M&A” is like saying a Formula 1 team “uses engines.” Acquisitions aren’t a side hustle. They’re how the company expands its reach, rewires its portfolio, and keeps compounding.
Nidec’s own framing is blunt: it targets “all that spins and moves.” And it treats M&A as a way of buying time—then using that time to build technology, manufacturing capability, and sales channels faster than organic growth would allow.
Because organic growth is slow. Building a new capability from scratch can take years: hire the engineers, develop the product, qualify the factories, earn customer trust, and finally reach scale. Or you acquire a company that already has the people, the know-how, the equipment, and the customers—and you can be competitive in a new market in a fraction of the time.
To explain how he thinks about this, Nagamori uses a metaphor that’s as Japanese as it is practical: castle walls. European castle walls use mortar. Japanese castle walls were built to survive earthquakes. They rely on massive rocks for strength, with smaller stones filling the gaps to lock everything into place.
In Nagamori’s version, the “large rocks” are acquisitions that create whole new business platforms—big moves that immediately open markets and capabilities Nidec didn’t have. A classic example was the acquisition of Emerson Electric’s motor business in 2010, now known as Nidec Motor. With its network of R&D sites, factories, and sales offices across places like the U.S., Mexico, China, and the U.K., Nidec suddenly had a much broader base—especially in the U.S.—plus experienced talent and industrial-motor technology that strengthened the group’s lineup. It wasn’t just growth. It was infrastructure for future growth.
Then come the smaller stones: niche technologies, geographic footholds, specialized customers, product gaps. These deals don’t look dramatic on their own. But they make the wall tighter, taller, and harder to crack.
The Turnaround Artist
The other pillar of Nidec’s dealmaking is more contrarian: it has a history of buying struggling businesses and making them profitable again. In 2003, it acquired Sankyo Seiki Mfg. (now Nidec Sankyo), and Nagamori personally led the turnaround on site.
His logic was simple, and it flipped typical M&A caution on its head. In a 2002 interview with the Nikkei Weekly, he argued that nontechnical problems are easier to fix than technical ones. “The biggest problem at a struggling company is not the ability of management and employees, but their morale,” he said.
Most acquirers avoid distressed targets because the mess can be hard to measure. Nagamori leaned into the mess—if the technology was strong. Low morale, sloppy operations, weak cost discipline, a complacent culture: in his view, those were fixable. But you can’t manufacture world-class technology out of thin air.
One line captures the mindset he tried to install everywhere: “We change the mindset of staff at acquired firms so they come to believe that posting red ink is a sin.” The pattern repeated: replace leadership where needed, reset expectations, tighten operations, and push the organization back into the black.
Sankyo Seiki was a textbook case. In the 1990s it expanded into precision motors, optical components, and factory automation equipment, growing into a global company with sales exceeding ¥100 billion. But after 2000, performance deteriorated, and it posted losses for two consecutive fiscal years. Nidec had long been interested in its technology, and in October 2003 it acquired a 50% stake through a third-party allocation of new shares. Nagamori then drove a thorough 3Q6S program and cost cuts—improving attendance, reducing expenses, and strengthening purchasing power. By fiscal 2006, when the company changed its name to Nidec Sankyo Corporation, it recorded its highest-ever sales and returned to profitability.
Key Acquisitions Timeline
Over time, the pace and ambition of the deals kept rising.
In 1989, Nidec bought Shinano Tokki Co., Ltd. from Teac Corporation, acquiring one of the major global manufacturers of spindle motors for hard disk drives, including a factory in Nagano. It wasn’t just expansion—it helped consolidate Nidec’s growing dominance in HDD motors.
On October 1, 2010, Nidec completed the acquisition of Emerson Electric’s Motors & Controls business, turning the acquired operations into Nidec subsidiaries. This became a major platform in North American industrial and appliance motors.
Then, on January 31, 2017, Nidec acquired Leroy-Somer and Control Techniques from Emerson—businesses spanning motors, drives, and electric power generation. The deal broadened Nidec’s offering into variable speed drives and generators, expanded its global footprint, and brought in a workforce of around 9,500 employees across 42 countries, folded into Nidec’s Appliance, Commercial and Industrial Motor business unit.
By this point, Nidec wasn’t buying occasional bolt-ons. It was building a portfolio by design. It had acquired dozens of companies over time, including several from private equity owners. One of its biggest was in 2018, when it acquired Whirlpool’s Embraco compressor business for $1.1 billion.
In 2023, Nidec added a new wrinkle to its M&A story with Takisawa Machine Tool Co., Ltd. In July 2023, Nidec proposed to acquire and take Takisawa private—without seeking approval from Takisawa’s management—through a public tender offer. The transaction became the first proposed unsolicited takeover to apply Japan’s “Guidelines for Corporate Takeovers.” In the end, Nidec successfully completed the acquisition.
The M&A Success Formula
As the deal count grew, Nidec moved from founder-led instinct to a more repeatable system. In 2006, it established a Corporate Strategy Office to professionalize its acquisition process—still a rarity among Japanese companies at the time.
The playbook centered on three things. First, price discipline: overpaying can turn even a “good” target into a bad outcome. Second, rigorous post-merger integration, because buying a company is the easy part; making it function inside your operating system is the work. Third, synergy that’s treated as execution, not aspiration—clear targets, clear owners, and follow-through.
The effect of all this is hard to miss. Nidec started as a specialist—tiny motors, then HDD spindle motors. The M&A machine turned it into something else entirely: a diversified motor conglomerate with a footprint stretching from smartphones to industrial systems, from automation to automotive components. The same company that once lived and died by one product line now had multiple engines of growth—and the confidence to keep buying the next one.
V. Inflection Point #1: The HDD Decline & The Five Big Waves (2010-2019)
The Existential Threat
Every great company eventually runs into a terrifying question: what happens when the thing that made you great stops growing?
For Nidec, that question hit in the 2010s. Solid-state drives were taking over PCs, and the hard disk drive market—the market Nidec had come to dominate—started shrinking underneath it.
By Nidec’s own data, global HDD unit sales fell by roughly 43% from 2010 to 2018, dropping from about 650 million units to about 375 million. And the company expected the decline to continue.
More alarming wasn’t just the direction, but the slope. Nidec warned in a financial presentation that PC hard drive shipments would drop sharply, and it was preparing for HDD motor sales to fall by roughly half year-over-year in 2019.
PC drives were the epicenter. Nidec said shipments of PC HDDs slid from 289 million in 2013 to 124 million in 2018—and then were expected to plunge again in 2019, down to 65 million units, a drop of about 48% in a single year.
If you’re Nidec, that’s not a headwind. That’s the ground disappearing.
Because SSDs don’t just reduce demand. They erase it. No spinning platters means no spindle motors. No mechanical guts means the very product Nidec had spent decades perfecting simply isn’t needed.
The Strategic Response: Five Big Waves
Nagamori’s answer wasn’t to defend the old fortress. It was to find the next ocean.
For years, Nidec had been talking internally about “large waves”—big, structural shifts that would reshape motor demand. In the 2010s, that framework hardened into five themes the company believed would define the next era.
First: the electrification of automobiles. EVs need traction motors, but they also need motors everywhere—steering, braking systems, pumps, cooling.
Second: the rapid expansion of robotics. Factory automation, warehouse systems, logistics robots—each one packed with motors.
Third: energy efficiency in appliances. As regulations tightened globally, the installed base of older motors would have to be replaced with more efficient designs.
Fourth: a logistics revolution driven by e-commerce, pushing investment into automated warehouses and delivery systems.
And fifth: the explosion of digital data, accelerated by 5G—driving demand for the infrastructure that stores and moves information.
In other words: if the PC hard drive era was ending, Nidec intended to be early—again—to whatever came next.
Data Centers: The Silver Lining
There was one twist: the same forces crushing consumer hard drives were also making the world’s appetite for storage even bigger.
Data centers still needed huge amounts of capacity, and HDDs continued to win where cost per terabyte mattered most. SSDs were faster, but for bulk storage, hard drives stayed dramatically cheaper. As data creation soared—streaming video, cloud backups, archives, ever-growing datasets—data centers could mix SSDs for speed with HDDs for scale. In that world, unit shipments of hard drives for data centers were projected to rise a bit.
It didn’t make the decline go away. But it did put a floor under the business. And with Nidec’s dominant share, it meant the company would capture most of whatever demand remained—buying time for the pivot to the next wave.
VI. Inflection Point #2: The EV Pivot & E-Axle Bet (2019-Present)
The Grand Vision
Nagamori has stated publicly that his goal is for Nidec to hit ÂĄ10 trillion (about $91 billion) in revenue by 2030, largely by building motors for electric vehicles.
Even by Nidec standards, this is a moonshot. In fiscal 2024, Nidec generated about ¥2.35 trillion in revenue. To get from there to ¥10 trillion in roughly six years isn’t “grow faster.” It’s “become a different company.”
The prize, if Nidec can pull it off, is enormous. EV adoption is expected to broaden dramatically by 2030, with estimates ranging from 300 million to 600 million EVs on the road globally. Nidec’s internal north star is even more specific: a 40–45% global share of EV traction motors by 2030, anchored by one product in particular.
Because if you can own the traction motor system—the part that actually turns electricity into motion—you’re not just a supplier. You’re foundational. The “Intel Inside” of the EV era: invisible to drivers, indispensable to the companies building the cars.
E-Axle: The Core Product
Nidec’s big EV bet is called E-Axle: an integrated traction motor system that combines a motor, an inverter, and a reducer into a single unit. Installed in a vehicle and connected to the drive shaft, it generates the torque that moves the car. In other words, this one module is the heart of an EV powertrain.
That integration is the point. Instead of asking automakers to source and stitch together separate components, Nidec offers a packaged system. In a market where speed is life—and where automakers are racing to get EV models designed, validated, and into production—an integrated solution can shorten development and simplify manufacturing.
The industry noticed. In 2019, Nidec’s E-Axle won the Nikkei Newspaper Award, the top prize in the Nikkei Excellent Products and Services Awards. And Nidec positioned itself as the first company in the world to mass-produce this kind of integrated traction motor system.
Production scaled quickly, though it was still early compared to the ambition. Nidec produced 300,000 units by March 2021, and reached a cumulative 700,000 units by April 2023. Impressive momentum—but a reminder that getting to “global standard” means ramping from hundreds of thousands to millions.
Super-Vertical Integration
Here’s the catch: an E-Axle isn’t just three parts bolted together.
Nidec says the system requires the development and assembly of as many as 400 complex components, then optimizing them to perform as a single integrated unit. And this is where Nidec leans into a familiar playbook. The group claims it can handle the entire process in-house, from development to production. Not only the key components, but even the production and testing equipment used to make them. Nidec calls this “super-vertical integration.”
It’s an echo of the HDD era. Back then, dominance came from pairing engineering precision with manufacturing control at scale. Here, the logic is similar: if you own more of the stack, you can move faster, tune quality, and drive costs down in ways that are hard to copy.
And the product requirements are unforgiving. E-Axles must deliver high output and efficiency while staying compact, light, reliable, and versatile across different vehicle types. Nidec puts special emphasis on “compact and light,” because weight and size directly affect electricity efficiency. The company argues it’s been training for this for decades—honing “super-small and super-thin” manufacturing in IT and precision motors, then applying that know-how to traction motor systems.
The China Strategy
Nidec has said it sold more than 370,000 electric axle drives since launching production in April 2019. And it’s laid out aggressive plans to ramp: selling 3.6 million units, with planned production capacity of seven million units for the fiscal year 2025—what it has described as a critical turning point for demand.
That ramp runs straight through China, for obvious reasons. China is the world’s largest EV market, and Nidec has been building manufacturing capacity there to serve local automakers. It has also publicly tied its E-Axles to Chinese customers, including GAC New Energy. GAC’s new electric brand Aion S, unveiled at Auto Guangzhou 2018, was positioned as the first line of cars to adopt Nidec’s fully integrated traction motor system.
But this is not the HDD business.
EV traction motors are a battlefield filled with giants—established automotive suppliers and newer specialists, all spending heavily on R&D and capacity. The competitive set includes Bosch, ZF Friedrichshafen, BorgWarner, Hyundai Mobis, and of course Nidec. Unlike spindle motors, where Nidec marched to near-monopoly, the EV market is crowded, well-capitalized, and strategically important to every major player.
So the question for this act of the story becomes: can Nidec recreate its HDD-era playbook—bet early, integrate deeply, manufacture at scale—and still emerge as the default supplier in a market where everyone sees the wave coming?
VII. Inflection Point #3: The Succession Crisis (2020-2024)
The Impossible Handoff
For fifty years, Nidec has effectively been Shigenobu Nagamori. He founded it, shaped its culture, set its goals, drove its dealmaking, and when an acquisition needed saving, he showed up in person to run the turnaround.
That kind of founder imprint is a superpower—right up until the moment you need to hand it off.
By the time Nidec was racing into EVs, Nagamori had already sidelined three successors. He’s a work-obsessed Japanese billionaire who joked he planned to live to 120, but the joke carried a subtext: as long as he was there, it was never fully anyone else’s company. And then he set his sights on a big-name outsider who, on paper, looked like the answer.
The Jun Seki Drama
In November 2019, Nagamori—then 75—invited Jun Seki to dinner at Ryokuyouso, an exclusive kaiseki restaurant Nagamori owns in Kyoto. The pitch was simple and seductive: join Nidec, take the chief operating officer role, build the EV motor business, and if it went well, the CEO seat would be his.
Seki was about as credible a candidate as Nagamori could find. He was Nissan’s vice chief operating officer, a longtime executive with three decades at the automaker, and a former contender for the top job. When he left Nissan to become president of Nidec, the move was striking—especially because he’d only recently taken on a new role at Nissan. Seki told Reuters it wasn’t about money. “I love Nissan and I feel bad about leaving the turnaround work unfinished, but I am 58 years old, and this is an offer I could not refuse. It’s probably my last chance to lead a company too,” he said. He even acknowledged he’d likely take a financial hit.
Nidec moved quickly. In 2020, Seki joined as a special advisor. That same year he became president and chief operating officer of Nidec and chairman of the board of Nidec India. In June 2021, he took the final step: he became CEO, with Nagamori remaining as chairman.
For a moment, it looked like the long, messy succession saga had finally found its landing.
Then it unraveled.
In 2022, reports surfaced that Seki was planning to leave amid a management overhaul led by Nagamori, underscoring how fragile the handoff really was. People familiar with the situation said Seki was being stripped of responsibilities and excluded from key internal communications. Nagamori, dissatisfied with the stock price and business performance, held an online press conference and made his posture unmistakable: “We need to make a very quick decision and deal with it. I know everything and will take the lead again.”
Seki, for his part, was candid about the frustration. “Honestly, it’s frustrating. I didn’t have the ability to repel the headwind,” he said.
On September 2, 2022, Seki stepped down as president and COO. Nidec said the move was “to take responsibility for the deterioration in business performance.” The next day, Vice Chairman Hiroshi Kobe—one of the founding members—was appointed as his successor.
And Nagamori delivered the line that landed like a door slamming shut: “It was an illusion to think that there would be a good successor outside the company.”
After four failed succession attempts, his conclusion wasn’t that control was hard to relinquish. It was that the mistake had been looking beyond Nidec’s own walls.
The Current Leadership
Nidec’s next succession attempt centered on Mitsuya Kishida.
Kishida was born February 7, 1960, in Kagawa Prefecture. He earned a bachelor’s degree in education from Kyoto University in March 1983, then joined Sony that April. Over the years he built a career across product planning and manufacturing leadership roles, including Vice President of Product Planning at Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB in 2001 and Executive General Manager of Production at Sony in 2011. He later became an executive officer at Sony in 2016, and in 2018 served as representative and president of Sony Mobile Communications Inc.
Nidec tapped Kishida—then an executive vice president and the executive general manager of its automotive motor and electronic control business unit—to become president and CEO effective April 1. The company said Nagamori would become executive chairman on that date, serving for up to four years while relinquishing his chairman and CEO roles. Incumbent President Hiroshi Kobe would become chairman, also serving for up to four years.
On paper, Kishida made sense: a seasoned operator from one of Japan’s most respected electronics companies, plus direct experience running Nidec’s automotive motor business at the exact moment the EV pivot mattered most.
But at Nidec, the resume has never been the hard part. The hard part is whether the company—and especially its founder—can truly allow a successor to lead. The track record, so far, says that’s still the open question.
VIII. The 2025 Accounting Crisis
The Scandal Unfolds
In September 2025, the governance questions that had hovered over Nidec for years suddenly turned into something far more concrete.
Nidec announced it was setting up a third-party committee to investigate improper accounting across its group companies. The trigger, the company said, was an issue tied to a roughly 200 million yen lump-sum discount recorded by Nidec Techno Motor (Zhejiang) Co., Ltd., a Chinese subsidiary, in late September 2024. The matter was flagged internally by Nidec Techno Motor Corporation and quickly raised a more unsettling concern: this wasn’t just about one discount, but about whether accounting practices across the group had been managed to hit the right numbers at the right time, including the timing of asset write-downs.
An initial investigation led by the Audit and Supervisory Committee, with outside experts involved, suggested the problem might not be isolated. Nidec said documents indicated the possibility that “the company and its group companies could have engaged in improper accounting with the involvement or knowledge of its or their management.”
The market reaction was brutal and immediate. After the announcement of the investigation, Nidec shares suffered their biggest one-day drop on record, falling more than 22%.
And then the story widened. Nidec disclosed it had found additional suspected cases of improper bookkeeping, including some involving a Swiss subsidiary. It also said its car inverter business may have, for years, underreported customs duties on second-hand goods exported to China, and that the Swiss unit may have exported products without completing required paperwork.
The Fallout
On October 27, 2025, the Tokyo Stock Exchange placed Nidec under “special alert” status, citing significant weaknesses in internal management and financial controls. The stock fell again—down another 19%—and by late October Nidec had lost roughly a third of its market value since early September.
Nidec’s posture shifted from expansion to triage. Management suspended dividend payments and laid out corrective measures aimed at rebuilding trust with investors, regulators, and business partners. The company’s near-term agenda became compliance and governance reform, with a remediation timeline stretching into late 2026.
That reset showed up immediately in shareholder returns. Nidec suspended dividends, declaring no interim dividend for the first half of fiscal 2025, compared to 40.00 yen per share the year before. CEO Mitsuya Kishida framed the moment as more than a technical cleanup. “We will eliminate all the bad habits from the past, and we will be reborn as a new Nidec,” he said.
Structurally, the company moved to formalize the turnaround. In October 2025, Nidec created an internal corporate regeneration committee led by the president, with subcommittees focused on accounting, governance, human resources, and compliance. The plan it would submit to JPX emphasized organizational culture reform—explicitly prioritizing compliance over short-term goals.
For a company built on speed, intensity, and relentless execution, the crisis posed a different kind of test: whether Nidec could apply that same force to internal controls and governance, and whether its new leadership could prove it was truly in charge.
IX. Investment Analysis: Bull Case, Bear Case, and Key Metrics
The Bull Case
Strip away the drama, and the core bet on Nidec is straightforward: electrification is a once-in-a-century tailwind for anything that converts electricity into motion. As vehicles, appliances, and industrial systems swap combustion and hydraulics for electrons and software, the number of motors in the world doesn’t just grow. It multiplies. Nidec’s advantage is that it isn’t a single-product company anymore. It sells across categories, across geographies, and across end markets—so it doesn’t need every wager to hit for the overall thesis to work.
The second pillar is something Nidec has made into an operating capability, not a one-off talent: acquisitions. Over seventy deals, largely successful, is not luck. It suggests the company has learned how to find targets, integrate them, and extract real synergies. In a world where building a new motor platform organically can take years, the ability to buy capabilities and fold them into a common operating system can be a compounding advantage.
The EV timing could also break in Nidec’s favor. One consulting firm’s survey estimates around 30% of new vehicles sold globally will be EVs in 2025, rising to roughly 51% by 2030. Nidec has explicitly treated 2025 as a turning point and has aimed its development and manufacturing at products that ride that adoption curve.
And there’s one more stabilizer in the model: the legacy HDD business. It’s shrinking in unit terms, but it can still throw off meaningful profit because of Nidec’s dominant position and the stickiness of data center demand. Even as consumer PCs move to SSDs, hyperscale storage still cares about dollars per terabyte. If Nidec can keep that segment healthy, it can function as a cash engine that funds the EV buildout.
The Bear Case
The risk case starts with a human problem that has now become an institutional one: succession. Nidec has rotated through multiple would-be successors, and the accounting crisis raises an uncomfortable question about how well the organization governs itself without the founder’s constant presence. What happens when Nagamori—now in his early 80s—is no longer able to intervene?
That leads to the bigger, darker possibility: the 2025 crisis wasn’t a one-off. It may have exposed something structural. Suspected improper accounting spanning multiple regions and business lines points less to isolated bad judgment and more to a system that let bad habits persist—especially if performance pressure and internal culture rewarded hitting targets over getting the process right.
Then there’s competition. The EV traction motor market is not the old HDD world where Nidec marched toward near-monopoly. It’s crowded, strategic, and filled with heavyweight incumbents. One view of the industry lists the top players as Bosch, BorgWarner, ABB, Nidec, ZF, Delta, and Hitachi, together holding around 35% share. On top of that, vertically integrated OEMs like Tesla and BYD are formidable—not just as competitors, but as proof that automakers can choose to build these systems themselves.
Finally, the numbers. The ¥10 trillion 2030 target increasingly looks like a stretch. Hitting it would require roughly 25% annual compound growth over five years—hard to imagine without large acquisitions. But acquisitions are exactly the kind of move the company has effectively put on pause while it works through a governance crisis.
Porter's Five Forces Analysis
Threat of New Entrants: Moderate
Motor manufacturing demands capital, manufacturing skill, and technical depth—but it’s not impenetrable. Chinese competitors, in particular, have shown they can enter and scale quickly. Patents help at the margins, yet process know-how is hard to defend forever.
Bargaining Power of Suppliers: Low to Moderate
Nidec’s scale gives it leverage with many component vendors. The pressure point is materials, especially rare earth magnets for high-performance motors, where supply concentration in China creates geopolitical and pricing risk.
Bargaining Power of Buyers: Moderate to High
Large customers—automakers and HDD manufacturers—are sophisticated negotiators with real alternatives. The EV transition amplifies this dynamic: customers can dual-source, squeeze pricing, or invest in in-house designs.
Threat of Substitutes: Low in Core Markets
There’s no substitute for an electric motor in applications that require one. The real threat is internal: design shifts within motors and power electronics that could change who wins on performance and cost.
Competitive Rivalry: High
EV motors are a knife fight. Many competitors are chasing scale simultaneously, and pricing pressure is intense while the industry sorts out which architectures and suppliers become standards.
Hamilton Helmer's 7 Powers Framework
Scale Economies: Nidec has clear scale advantages in HDD motors, but automotive is more contested, with multiple players capable of investing and ramping. Volume helps, but it’s not a lock.
Network Effects: Not applicable to motor manufacturing.
Counter-Positioning: Nidec’s role as an independent supplier can be attractive to traditional automakers that don’t want to rely on EV-native rivals that are also competitors.
Switching Costs: Moderate. Motors are co-developed to meet customer specs, which creates friction in switching, but the product category can still behave like a commodity once standards settle.
Branding: Limited in B2B. Reputation matters to procurement teams, but consumers don’t buy cars based on motor brand names.
Cornered Resource: Nidec’s accumulated precision-manufacturing know-how is real, but much of it is embedded in people and processes rather than protected as an exclusive legal asset.
Process Power: This is the most plausible “power” in the Nidec story. Ultra-precision manufacturing capability, disciplined integration of acquired companies, and running complex global operations—these are learned advantages that competitors can’t copy overnight.
Key Performance Indicators
For investors tracking whether Nidec is actually pulling off the pivot, three KPIs matter most:
1. E-Axle Shipment Volume Growth
This is the cleanest read on the EV strategy. Track shipments over time, year-over-year growth, and whatever order backlog indicators the company provides to gauge adoption and momentum.
2. Operating Margin Trends by Segment
Nidec is managing a portfolio with very different economics. Watching margins by segment helps reveal whether EV traction is gaining scale and whether the mature businesses are still generating cash.
3. Governance and Compliance Progress
After the 2025 accounting crisis, governance is not a footnote—it’s central. Investors should watch for closure of the third-party investigation, concrete remediation of internal control weaknesses, and eventual removal from the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s special alert status as proof that trust is being rebuilt.
X. Conclusion
Shigenobu Nagamori built Nidec from a prefabricated shed in Kyoto into a global motor empire through relentless ambition, aggressive dealmaking, and an uncanny instinct for technological inflection points. In just 42 years from its founding, he had scaled Nidec into a company that reached one trillion yen in annual sales by fiscal 2014—an outcome that would’ve sounded delusional back when banks wouldn’t even return his calls.
Now Nidec is at a genuine hinge moment. The HDD motor business that made it famous is in structural decline. The EV pivot that’s supposed to define the next era is a knife fight against deep-pocketed, highly capable rivals. The accounting scandal has put governance and internal controls under a harsh spotlight. And the succession challenge—so long the shadow story behind the growth story—still doesn’t feel fully settled.
And yet, the uncomfortable truth for anyone trying to dismiss Nidec is that betting against Nagamori has historically been a losing trade. He was underestimated by Japanese lenders, written off by incumbents who didn’t take a young outsider seriously, and doubted when he claimed he could buy struggling companies and turn them around. Again and again, the company found a way to outrun skepticism.
The next five years will decide whether Nidec can turn its EV ambition into something as dominant as its HDD past, and whether it can do it while rebuilding trust in its governance and proving that leadership is truly transferable. For investors, it’s exposure to electrification tailwinds—paired with very real execution, governance, and concentration risks that can’t be hand-waved away.
“We view the present as our second foundation period and aim to become a global top-notch company that continues to grow beyond 100 years.”
That’s CEO Mitsuya Kishida’s framing of the moment. A “second foundation period” is a telling phrase. It implies that something fundamental has ended—maybe the HDD era, maybe old internal habits, maybe even the founder-centered way the company has operated for decades. The only certainty is that what comes next will determine whether Nidec remains the motor that spins the world, or becomes a case study in how hard reinvention really is.
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