Business Spotlight: Olympus Part 1

Last year, Olympus shocked the camera world with an unexpected reveal — they would no longer be selling cameras. To many, this pivot away from its most famous product may have seemed an unusual move, but for Olympus it was actually a return to basics. The first Olympus products were not cameras but microscopes. Takeshi Yamashita founded the company in 1919 to create the first domestically manufactured microscopes in Japan. This company was named Takachiho Seisakusho after Mount Takachiho, the home of the celestial Shinto deities in Japanese mythology. By adopting such an exalted name, the company made its ambitions clear. The company released its first camera, the Semi-Olympus I, in 1936, and cameras led the company to global recognition. To capitalize on this, in 1949 the company officially became Olympus. Mount Olympus, like Mount Takachiho, is the home of gods. Olympus achieved rapid growth in the ’50s through ’80s and expanded into different fields, most notably creating the world’s first practical gastrocamera in 1950. This period also saw the birth of Olympus’s famous Pen series — thin, compact cameras that revolutionized the industry. (Jasmin Hayward) To be continued… This article was provided by The Japan Times Alpha.