Yokohama, 1899.

Daiichi Sankyo’s name is a join of two older company names. English Wikipedia says Daiichi Sankyo Company, Limited was established in 2005 through the merger of Sankyo Company, Limited and Daiichi Pharmaceutical Company, Limited, two Japanese companies that had each been trading for close to a century. Japanese Wikipedia places the head office in Nihonbashi-Honcho, Chuo, Tokyo, the same district where both predecessors had been based.

The Sankyo half began in Yokohama. Japanese Wikipedia says Sankyo Shoten was set up as a partnership on 1 March 1899 on the premises of a Yokohama silk business run by Matasaku Shiobara. Its early trade came through a licence from the chemist Jokichi Takamine, who had developed a method of extracting the digestive enzyme diastase in the United States; Sankyo imported and sold it in Japan as Taka-Diastase. The name records the people behind it. Japanese Wikipedia says “Sankyo”, written with the characters for “three” and “together”, came from the three co-investors: Shiobara; Shotaro Nishimura, a former colleague of Shiobara’s who had handled the talks with Takamine; and Genjiro Fukui, Shiobara’s brother-in-law.

The partnership changed form several times. Japanese Wikipedia says it re-registered as Sankyo Shoten on Benten-dori in Yokohama in 1901, opened a works at Hakozaki in Tokyo in 1905, became Sankyo Yakuhin Goshi in 1907 and Sankyo Goshi in 1908, the year it opened a plant at Shinagawa. In 1913 it was reorganised as Sankyo Co., Ltd., with Takamine as president and Shiobara as senior managing director; English Wikipedia says Takamine held the presidency from March 1913 until July 1922.

Sankyo also traded well beyond medicine in its early decades. Japanese Wikipedia says that in 1908, on Takamine’s advice, the company imported the Ford Model T, acting as a dealer in Japan before giving up the import rights. It also imported Harley-Davidson motorcycles and, when import prices rose, began developing a domestic machine, completing the “Rikuo” motorcycle in 1933. In 1990, English Wikipedia says, Sankyo bought the Munich company Luitpold-Werk, which in 2019 renamed itself after its American Regent brand.

Daiichi, then a holding company.

The other half began sixteen years later. Japanese Wikipedia says the forerunner of Daiichi Pharmaceutical, Arsemin Shokai, was founded by Katsuzaemon Keimatsu on 1 October 1915, and that it became Daiichi Seiyaku, Daiichi Pharmaceutical, in 1918. The company was later headquartered in Nihonbashi. Japanese Wikipedia records that its slogan, “いのち、ふくらまそう。”, roughly “let life swell”, was set for the company’s seventieth anniversary, and that from about July 1995 its television advertisements closed with a sound logo showing a baby at the centre of the screen and a woman’s voice saying “Daiichi Seiyaku desu”.

Sankyo kept its own line of words. Japanese Wikipedia says the company adopted an English-language slogan on 1 March 2001, its founding anniversary, and that for many years it placed founding-anniversary advertisements in newspapers on that date, while Daiichi did the same each 1 October.

The two companies announced their combination in early 2005. PharmaTimes reported on 25 February 2005 that Sankyo had confirmed industry speculation that it would combine with Daiichi Pharmaceutical. The plan, the magazine said, was to integrate the businesses in October 2005, when a stock transfer would make Daiichi and Sankyo wholly owned subsidiaries of a new joint holding company, and then to integrate their prescription businesses by April 2007, considering the status of the over-the-counter and non-pharmaceutical businesses along the way. The merged company, PharmaTimes said, would be known as Daiichi Sankyo.

Shareholders gave their approval that summer. PharmaTimes reported on 30 June 2005 that Sankyo’s shareholders had backed the plan, adding that documents posted on Sankyo’s website said only that the proposal had been approved. Japanese Wikipedia dates the creation of the holding company to 28 September 2005, three days before Daiichi’s ninetieth founding anniversary, and says that in April 2007 the holding company absorbed Sankyo and Daiichi Pharmaceutical and became an operating company, ending both of the older names as companies.

Partners, holdings and slogans.

Corporate identity where the end user rarely looks

Component makers and drug companies share an odd identity problem: the people who use their work most often never see the parent name. A brake module, a sensor or a seat frame arrives inside somebody else’s car, and a medicine reaches a patient under a product name, in packaging shaped by regulators as much as by designers. The corporate mark has to work instead for engineers, buyers, investors, recruits and the towns that host the factories.

That audience shapes the names. Mergers in both sectors often produce a blended word built from the two predecessors, or a coined term with Latin or Greek roots chosen because it carries no prior meaning in any market and can be registered worldwide. Other houses keep a founder’s surname or an old place name long after the business has outgrown it.

The visible identity tends to live in plant and laboratory signage, on gatehouses, lorry livery, safety notices and campus wayfinding. Those settings favour plain wordmarks, a single corporate colour and lettering that stays legible from a distance and in a photocopied procedure sheet. Restraint here is a working requirement rather than a style choice.

One slogan for every market.

Once the companies were joined, the work was to make one name travel. Japanese Wikipedia says the over-the-counter businesses of both predecessors were placed in a new company, Daiichi Sankyo Healthcare, which began trading in April 2006. On 13 April 2006 the group acquired Zepharma, the over-the-counter business that Astellas had formed from the Yamanouchi and Fujisawa consumer lines, and in April 2007 Zepharma was merged into Daiichi Sankyo Healthcare. English Wikipedia says the American subsidiary, Daiichi Sankyo, Inc., began operating in 2006 and is based in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, while Daiichi Sankyo Europe GmbH is headquartered in Munich.

A single slogan followed. In a release dated 23 March 2012, the company announced a new global corporate slogan for the Daiichi Sankyo Group, to be rolled out from 1 April 2012 through corporate advertisements and corporate websites: “Passion for Innovation. Compassion for Patients.” The company said the slogan would improve recognition of the Daiichi Sankyo brand around the world and support its goal of becoming what it called a “Global Pharma Innovator”. Japanese Wikipedia says the slogan replaced earlier wording and was unified worldwide from that date, with the Japanese version “イノベーションに情熱を。ひとに思いやりを。” used at home.

Japanese Wikipedia also says the company is part of the Dai-Ichi Kangyo group of companies, known as the Sankinkai, the same circle to which Sankyo had belonged.

Both founding dates still appear in the company’s story. Japanese Wikipedia notes that Daiichi Pharmaceutical marked its ninetieth anniversary on 1 October 2005, just after the holding company was formed, and the Sankyo partnership that began on 1 March 1899 gives the group a founding year in the nineteenth century, even though the Daiichi Sankyo name dates from 2005.

For a design guide, Daiichi Sankyo shows how a merger can keep both of its parents in plain view by simply placing their names together, then give the result one slogan for every market. Compare Astellas, formed the same year from two Osaka companies under an invented name, and Novartis, which took a new name when Ciba-Geigy and Sandoz combined. For this guide we use clear blue, deep blue and ink with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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