Seiko Group

Kintaro Hattori opened his shop in Tokyo in 1881 and, Donzé writes, became one of the leading watch importers of the 1880s before he set up the Seikosha factory in 1892, making wall clocks and, from 1895, pocket watches.^2, 9, 10

The house kept selling and making apart. The shop became K. Hattori & Co., Ltd. in 1917, and when Seikosha’s watch division was spun off in 1937 as Daini Seikosha, Seiko Instruments describes the new company as the wristwatch manufacturer for K. Hattori & Co.^2, 3

A second watch factory grew from the war: Daiwa Kogyo, set up in 1942 as a cooperating company of Daini, and Daini’s Suwa plant became Suwa Seikosha in 1959, as told on the Suwa page. The clock factory was split off as Seikosha Co. in 1970, and the Ginza retail business had become Wako in 1947.^2, 4

It was never one company. Donzé notes that the Seiko group was made of three sub-groups of independent firms, so that the share of watches in its turnover cannot be measured; Japanese Wikipedia names the three as the Hattori company, Seiko Instruments and Seiko Epson, sister firms rather than subsidiaries, run as a Hattori family business.^9, 11

K. Hattori sold the watches; Daini Seikosha in Tokyo and Suwa Seikosha in Nagano made them, each with its own lines. Both made Grand Seiko and both entered the Swiss observatory competitions under their own names.^2, 3, 12

Each factory built its own suppliers. Donzé records that Daini’s machine-tool division became Seiko Seiki in 1964, which turned in the 1970s to customers outside the group, more than half its turnover from 1976, and Epson records that Suwa Seikosha set up Shinshu Seiki in 1961 to supply watch parts.^4, 9

Abroad, the group went through Hong Kong. Donzé writes that in the 1960s Hattori shipped finished watches and used Hong Kong only to sell them; Seiko records Hattori (H.K.) Ltd. from 1968, and Donzé lists three production subsidiaries there, Precision Engineering (1968), Asian Precision (1974) and Epson Engineering (1976).^1, 3, 13

Donzé argues that Hattori chose in the interwar years to mass-produce good mechanical watches and kept to that after 1945, and that its plants ran an integrated mass-production system in the 1960s that needed no assembly abroad until electronic watches came.^13, 14

In 1968, Donzé records, Daini and Suwa received a three-year grant of 334 million yen from the Ministry of International Trade and Industry to build automated assembly lines for more than 100,000 watches a month; Suwa developed new models and tested them in small series before passing their mass production to subsidiaries.¹⁴

The scale followed. From the Seiko Museum’s statistics Donzé gives the group’s output as 14.0 million watches in 1970, 35.9 million in 1980 and 125.4 million in 1990, of which 118.6 million were quartz; the quartz story is told in The electric and quartz revolution.¹⁴

Quartz pulled the group into electronics. Donzé writes that Suwa’s chip work became a semiconductor division, the origin of Epson’s move beyond watches, but that the group still bought about half of its electronic parts from Hitachi, NEC, Toshiba and other firms outside it through the 1970s.¹⁴

The parent was renamed Hattori Seiko in 1983 and Seiko Corporation in 1997. In 2001 it moved the watch business into Seiko Watch Corporation and became a holding company, renamed Seiko Holdings in 2007 and Seiko Group Corporation in 2022.^1, 2

Daini’s line came back under the parent: Seiko Instruments became a wholly owned subsidiary of Seiko Holdings in 2009. Its Morioka Seiko Instruments, a watch factory set up in 1970, houses Grand Seiko Studio Shizukuishi, opened there in 2020.^2, 3

Suwa’s line went its own way. Suwa Seikosha and Epson merged as Seiko Epson in 1985; Japanese Wikipedia says it was listed in 2003 and that the Seiko group held 3.46 per cent of it in 2022, with members of the Hattori family among its major shareholders.^4, 11

Epson still makes watches: its Shinshu Watch Studio makes Spring Drive and other high-end watches, Grand Seiko’s among them, and it made Orient a wholly owned subsidiary in 2009. Within Seiko Group Corporation, Seiko Watch Corporation plans, develops and makes the Seiko and Grand Seiko watches.^{4, 5, 6, 15, 16}