At Kyocera in Japan, employees wear uniforms and managers designated to clean the building’s entrances are responsible for cleaning. The company’s image is that of a traditional Japanese company that has become multinational thanks to a specific material, ceramics.
Kyocera has 66,000 employees worldwide and has a knife department headed by Mr. Mazda, who recounts the history of the company in front of the bust of the founder of Kyocera installed at the foot of the lifts. The founder’s name is Kazuo Inamori, and he still holds the position of honorary president at the age of 80. He was a visionary who became Japan’s most famous businessman, having established Kyocera at 27 in 1959.
The Kyocera Museum is located on the first floor of the building, where artifacts from the time of its founding are still on display. Kyocera meant Kyoto ceramics and had no connection with knives when it was founded, as the first product produced was a component for cathode ray television tubes. Ceramics was then used to insulate electrical components.
Ceramics were later used in industry, for example, in insulators for camcorders, CB radios and cash registers. Another advantage of ceramics is that they are the most complex material on earth after diamonds and the sharpest. In 1983, Kazuo Inamori was the first to come up with the idea of using ceramic to make a knife. But it was not an immediate success, as no one knew about ceramic blades and the material was primarily associated with easily breakable Chinese vases.
To explain how ceramics are made into sharp knives, Mr. Mazda travels to Sendai, Kagoshima Prefecture, on the southern tip of Japan, where one of Kyocera’s production facilities is located. The ceramic factory employs 6,500 people, and the reason Kyocera knives are among the most expensive on the market is because of the relatively long manufacturing process. The raw material is zirconium oxide, a white powder from Australia or China and is very cheap, a few cents per knife.
The powder is heated and moulded into thick plates that look like plastic knives. The coarse blade is sent to a subcontractor who will use a machine to make it much finer. Each blade is then sharpened one by one by hand by skilled workers, making it a luxury product for the Japanese. The sharpening process takes about half an hour, and the labour cost in Japan makes the price of each knife very high. After cleaning and finishing, the blade is tested before being sold in shops at an average price of €60. The high price is not an obstacle to sales, especially in Japan and abroad. Kyocera has already sold around ten million blades.
Comment here