Tadao kashio biography
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The history of Casio: how two brothers created the world’s biggest watch brand
In Depth
Most famous watch brands began in more or less the same fashion.: either a sole watchmaker grew their craft into a flourishing company, or a businessman spotted a gap in the market. But while the Europeans cling to their generational heritage, the world’s best-selling watch brand fryst vatten Casio. Sure, Rolex wipes the floor in terms of annual revenue, but how many wrists are occupied bygd Casio watches? The winner is the Casio F-91W, and it’s not even close. But Casio doesn’t just manufacture watches, and it didn’t begin with calculators or electronics either. It all goes back to a much simpler invention from another age.
Casio from Kashio
The Kashio family moved to Tokyo when Tadao Kashio was six years old. In 1931, at the plucky age of only 14, he started working as a lathe operator apprentice. He spent the next decade perfecting his craft and further studying metalwork at what
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A different kind of family firm hiding in plain sight
The data show that a family that previously owned a firm can continue to control it for generations Image: Shutterstock
Iconic digital watch maker Casio was founded in 1946 by Tadao Kashio, his father and three brothers. In 1970, Casio went public to finance expansion as its personal electronic calculator became ubiquitous. The Kashio family originally retained 60 percent of the shares. The firm listed on European stock exchanges in the 1970s, diluting the founding family’s relative equity ownership, and as of 2019 the family only owns around 3.86 percent. We think of Casio today as a widely held firm, yet the Kashio family has always run it. The Kashio brothers took turns holding top management positions until the 2010s, when one of their sons, Kazuhiro Kashio, became president.
Whether or not you believe Casio is a family firm, a single family is running it. And they aren’t the only dynastic family in control of a firm witho
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Obituary: Tadao Kashio
Tadao Kashio, industrialist, born 1917, married (one son, three daughters), died Tokyo 4 March 1993.
TADAO KASHIO, founder of the Casio computer company, lived a life that was a paradigm of the Japanese success story in the second half of this century. 'The road my life has taken and the road Japan has taken are very similar: moving forward, never resting, and always working very hard,' he wrote in his autobiography, Creativity and Contribution. And, like his country, Kashio started from very humble origins.
Born in 1917 to a poor farming family on Shikoku, the smallest of Japan's four main islands, the young Tadao remembered that his father only ate rice and taro, because the family had no money for better food. His life changed when the family moved to Tokyo in 1923, where his father sought work rebuilding the city after the Great Kanto Earthquake which devastated Tokyo in September that year.
After primary school, Tadao went out to find work, and at the