Sharp takes its name from a mechanical pencil invented in 1915
The electronics giant behind Aquos televisions and one of the first camera phones is named after a pencil. In 1915 Tokuji Hayakawa, a Tokyo metalworker, invented the Ever-Ready Sharp, one of the first mechanical pencils sold internationally. When the 1923 earthquake destroyed that business, he moved to Osaka and started building radios instead.
Hayakawa's first invention, in 1912, was a snap buckle. The pencil made his fortune, and after the Great Kantō earthquake wiped it out he rebuilt in Osaka, designing some of Japan's earliest radio sets, which went on sale in 1925. The firm operated as Hayakawa Metal Works and later Hayakawa Electric, making the first television sets produced in Japan in 1953. Only in 1970 did it formally adopt the name of that pencil, becoming Sharp Corporation.
Calculators show how fast electronics moved. Sharp spent years on its first transistor calculator despite having no computing experience, and in 1964 it went on sale for 535,000 yen. A version built with integrated circuits followed in 1966 at 350,000 yen, and by 1969 a pocketable model cost under 100,000. The first calculator with a liquid-crystal display arrived in 1973. In the same era Sharp also put the first turntable into a microwave oven, and it later licensed Nintendo designs to build televisions with games consoles inside.
Screens became both its triumph and its trap. Sharp introduced the first wall-mountable television in 1992, sold the first commercial camera phone in 2000, and poured money into giant LCD plants at Kameyama and Sakai, launching the Aquos range that kicked off mass-market flat televisions. Then the 2008 financial crisis, a strong yen and a collapse in Japanese TV demand after the digital switchover hammered the business. In its centenary year, 2012, Sharp reported its worst loss ever, 376 billion yen.
Rescue came from Taiwan. After years of wrangling, Foxconn agreed in 2016 to buy a two-thirds stake, paying 3.5 billion dollars. Within about a year Sharp posted its first operating profit in three years, and in 2019 it won back the right to put its own name on televisions sold in the United States.
Source: Sharp Corporation
