Kyocera AVX Brand Guidelines: From a 1922 Radio Maker to Kyocera’s Capacitor Arm

A ceramic-capacitor unit that took over its parent.

Kyocera AVX is the electronic-components business that the Kyoto group Kyocera owns in the United States. A Kyocera announcement dated 1 October 2021 says that AVX Corporation changed its corporate name that day to KYOCERA AVX Components Corporation and began to use “KYOCERA AVX” as its business brand. The same announcement gives the company’s address as Fountain Inn, South Carolina, its founding year as 1972, and its business as the manufacture and sale of electronic components, including connectors, capacitors and sensors.

The lineage is older than the name. English Wikipedia and a company history published by FundingUniverse both trace it to 1922 and the founding of the Radiola Wireless Corporation, an early maker of radios, which became Aerovox Wireless and then the Aerovox Corporation. AVX was formed in 1972 as an Aerovox subsidiary to make ceramic capacitors, and in June 1973 it became the parent company after Aerovox’s other assets were sold, both sources say.

Also in 1973, Marshall D. Butler became chairman and chief executive. FundingUniverse says Butler, who had co-founded the semiconductor-materials supplier Alloys Unlimited in 1957, chose to concentrate the company on multilayer ceramic capacitors, the small stacked parts that sit alongside integrated circuits, sold two other operations and began a five-year programme that raised production capacity many times over. AVX also set up a European operation in those years. In April 1979, the same history says, it formed a subsidiary with Japanese partners to enter Japan, after Kyocera’s chief executive, Kazuo Inamori, agreed to end a licensing arrangement that had kept AVX out of the Japanese market.

From partner to parent.

The tie with Kyocera became ownership. In the late 1980s, FundingUniverse says, Butler proposed that AVX make some Kyocera parts in Europe, where AVX was already well established; Inamori offered instead to buy the company, and Kyocera completed its stock purchase in January 1990. English Wikipedia gives the date as 18 January 1990. Butler retired as chief executive in 1993 and was succeeded by Benedict P. Rosen, who had been with AVX since 1972. In 1995 Kyocera sold about a quarter of AVX in a public offering and kept the majority, and Kyocera helped AVX move into connectors, the same history says.

For years after that, AVX traded on the New York Stock Exchange while majority-owned by Kyocera. It was later taken private: English Wikipedia now lists it as a privately held Kyocera subsidiary, and Kyocera’s 2021 announcement calls it a consolidated subsidiary.

Its factories are spread across three continents. The 2021 announcement counted six manufacturing sites in the United States, 13 in Europe and 12 in Asia. English Wikipedia, citing company pages and certification documents, places tantalum-capacitor work at Biddeford, Maine, thin-film parts at Jacksonville, Florida and Myrtle Beach, and a plant at Ilopango, El Salvador, opened in 1977, that makes tantalum, niobium and multilayer ceramic capacitors. In the Czech Republic, AVX began working with the Czechoslovak firm Tesla at Lanškroun in 1990; that plant makes tantalum capacitors, and further plants stand at Uherské Hradiště and Bzenec. Multilayer ceramic capacitors, including parts qualified for space, are made at Coleraine in Northern Ireland, and sensors are developed at Werne and Klingenberg in Germany. English Wikipedia, citing the company, adds a ceramic and tantalum capacitor plant at Nakhon Ratchasima, Thailand, opened in November 2022.

Design and documentation.

Passive components are hard to photograph and harder to brand. A multilayer ceramic capacitor in the smallest sizes is a speck that sits like a grain of sand on a fingertip, and a scatter of chips on a fingertip is one way to show that scale. Resistors, inductors, filters and fuses look little different from one maker to the next, so the presentation leans on the company’s name, its colours and the way it pictures the work behind the part.

The pictures repeat across the trade. Reels of tape-and-reel parts, ready for pick-and-place machines, stand for volume. Through-hole resistors with their coloured bands, cut-away capacitors that open up the layers or the wound film inside, and close-ups of ceramic sheets being stacked stand for the craft. Automated inspection lines, with cameras checking each part, stand for consistency, and pictures of factories and laboratories often stand in for the end products the parts go into.

Trade shows are where these brands meet engineers in person. electronica in Munich and CEATEC in Japan are among the fairs where component makers take large stands, and some use them for showpieces that have little to do with a datasheet: Murata, for one, says it demonstrated its bicycle-riding Murata Boy robot at CEATEC JAPAN 2005.

Many of these companies began with a material rather than a product: ferrite, titanium oxide, barium titanate, tantalum or film. Several have changed hands or merged, so names, marks and owners do not always line up. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and where it says its parts are made, and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Three letters kept beside a parent’s name.

The company’s centre of gravity has moved within South Carolina. In December 2009, English Wikipedia says, AVX announced that it would move its corporate offices from Myrtle Beach to the Greenville area, with no change planned to manufacturing in Myrtle Beach and Conway; the 2021 announcement gives Fountain Inn, in the same part of the state, as its address. In 2009 it also decided to close several smaller factories, including its plant at Paignton in England, the same source says.

Its Myrtle Beach site has a legal history. From 2007, neighbouring property owners sued over trichloroethylene, a degreasing solvent used at the plant until the 1980s and later found in groundwater nearby, English Wikipedia says, citing The Sun News of Myrtle Beach. In May 2011 a federal judge ruled that AVX had caused the pollution in one neighbour’s case, according to the same account. In August 2013 a state jury found for a Myrtle Beach developer whose condominium project had stalled, and AVX appealed, the Associated Press reported in Insurance Journal. In October 2014 AVX agreed to settle a class action with the owners of 42 properties, subject to the owners’ approval, English Wikipedia says, again citing The Sun News. In 2018 AVX closed a plant at Olean, New York, a site on the federal Superfund list since the early 1980s, according to the Olean Times Herald as cited by English Wikipedia.

The identity has changed by addition rather than replacement: the 2021 name keeps the three letters AVX beside Kyocera’s own, and the announcement presents the change as part of uniting sales organisations in the United States and Europe, with Japan, China and other Asian countries to follow from April 2022 or later.

For a design guide, Kyocera AVX shows how an acquired name can survive inside a parent brand for three decades and then be joined to it. Compare Kyocera, its parent, and KEMET, another American capacitor maker. For this guide we use an oxblood, a ceramic grey and a kiln white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kyocera AVX’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.