Technology Microcosm

Fujikura's FPC business now holds one of the world's largest market shares and is capable of mass-producing over 100 million pieces per month. However, its beginnings were marked by a series of hardships.

FPC is a printed wiring board that forms a circuit made of copper foil based on flexible polyimide film and polyester film, and is widely used as an internal wiring board for small electronic devices such as mobile phones, cameras, and VTRs, or notebook PCs due to its lightness, thinness, and freedom of shape, and as a high-density wiring board such as HDDs due to its high flexibility. Among almost all small electronic devices on the market today, you can definitely find FPCs. Currently, Fujikura's FPC business is about 100 billion yen in terms of sales. Nearly 20,000 people are involved, and the Sakura Development Center is in charge of new market development and technology development, with Tohoku Fujikura in Japan, PCTT in Thailand overseas, and Fujikura Electronics Shanghai in China as specialized factories. For the global market, we are developing a dynamic business in which sales, development, and manufacturing work in a trinity.

Fujikura now boasts one of the world's top share in the FPC business, but the project's beginnings were full of hardships. The FPC business was born out of Fujikura's efforts to change the course of a major trend by entering the electronics industry. Prior to the project's launch, the company searched for new business in the electronic components field. After a year and a half of searching, the company arrived at FPC. The new FPC was at the gateway to a future business of advanced composite components, and was a key component for the wiring of general electronic equipment. The FPC project was launched in 1979. It started with only five people. Since FPC was a field far removed from Fujikura's proprietary technology, the company was perplexed at first. In addition, customer were all places that the company had never been directly involved with, so the challenge of "starting from scratch" was always a constant challenge. The sales team was constantly turned away, while the R&D team was constantly receiving complaints about prototypes, and the days of futility continued. For more than 10 years since the project was launched, the FPC business has been in the red for a long time and has been forced to endure hardship.