Panasonic Industry Brand Guidelines: Panasonic’s Device Company for Capacitors & Relays

An operating company formed on 1 April 2022.

Panasonic Industry is young as a company and old as a business. It was established on 1 April 2022, when the Panasonic Group switched to an operating-company system with Panasonic Holdings Corporation as the holding company and eight companies beneath it, Panasonic says; Panasonic Industry took charge of the group’s device business. Its stated mission is to “open the way to a better future” and to “contribute to an affluent society through a variety of device technologies.” The company counted about 44,000 employees worldwide as of the day it was established, a Panasonic press release of February 2023 says, and at that time its head office was in Kadoma, Osaka.

The group behind it goes back to 1918, when Kōnosuke Matsushita founded the business that was incorporated in 1935 as Matsushita Electric Industrial, English Wikipedia says. During the Second World War, the same article says, the company ran factories in Japan and elsewhere in Asia that made electrical components and appliances, wireless equipment and its first vacuum tubes, and in wartime it made military products for the Japanese state, including ships and aircraft. After the war the occupation authorities split the group into separate companies, which regrouped in the following years. The company renamed itself Panasonic Corporation on 1 October 2008 and took the name Panasonic Holdings in the 2022 reorganisation; the parent brand has its own Panasonic guide.

Matsushita also had a hand in a European components name. In 1989 it set up Siemens Matsushita Components with Siemens, the business later floated as EPCOS, and it kept a 12.5 per cent stake until it sold its holding in October 2006, according to English and German Wikipedia.

Capacitors, relays, materials and motion.

The company describes itself through a handful of product families. Panasonic’s own description names capacitors, compact servomotors, EV relays and electronic materials as areas where it offers what it calls “unique material and process technologies.” In a group interview reported by MONOist in June 2023, the company set out four core businesses, relays, capacitors, electronic materials and factory-automation solutions, and three focus areas: automotive systems, information and communications infrastructure, and labour-saving in factories. For EV relays, the same report said, the company was moving key parts in-house, aiming to raise the share made internally from about a fifth in fiscal 2022 to seven-tenths by 2024, and held patents on techniques such as sealing hydrogen gas inside the relay.

Capacitors are the passive heart of that list. The same MONOist report described an aluminium hybrid capacitor for cars, which combines a conductive polymer with an electrolyte, made at the Device Solutions division in Yamaguchi; with that plant near its limit, the company planned to add output in Malaysia, where it had mainly made surface-mount aluminium electrolytic capacitors, and to move other products from Malaysia back to Japan. The Passive Components Blog reported in November 2024 that Panasonic Industry Europe had extended its OS-CON range of aluminium polymer solid capacitors with the SXV, SXE and SVPG series, for surface-mount and radial-lead use.

The company has since moved its centre of gravity. On 1 February 2024 it opened “Innovation HUB TOKYO” on two floors of Toranomon Hills Station Tower in Minato, Tokyo, and transferred its main head-office functions there from Kadoma, bringing together development and sales teams that had been spread across Tokyo, Panasonic said. MONOist reported the move on 13 February 2024, noting that Panasonic Industry was the third Panasonic operating company to place its head office in Tokyo. The site includes laboratories for product evaluation, the company says.

How passive-component makers present themselves.

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.

A quality investigation in its second year.

The company’s early years included a quality investigation. On 12 January 2024 Panasonic Industry announced that its Electronic Materials division had found misconduct affecting 52 product numbers of moulding compounds, encapsulants and circuit-board materials, MONOist reported. Products had been made to formulations that differed from those registered for certification with UL Solutions without changing their product numbers, and data had been altered in registrations, with some cases going back to the 1980s. The plants named included Yokkaichi and Koriyama in Japan, Ayutthaya in Thailand, and sites in Guangzhou, Suzhou and Taiwan.

An external investigation committee delivered its report on 1 November 2024. According to MONOist, the report brought the total to 93 cases, 21 linked to certification and 72 linked to individual customer contracts, and reached beyond materials to other product lines, including film capacitors from the Matsue plant, industrial relays, chip-type multilayer thermistors from the Chitose plant and copper-clad laminates. Panasonic Industry announced measures to prevent a recurrence at the same time.

Today Panasonic Industry Co., Ltd. is one of the operating companies of Panasonic Holdings, with its head office at Toranomon in Tokyo. Its regional arms include Panasonic Industry Europe, which announced the OS-CON extension of 2024.

For a design guide, Panasonic Industry shows how a group’s component business can take its own company name while keeping the parent brand. Compare Panasonic, the parent brand, and EPCOS, the components name Matsushita once co-owned. For this guide we use an indigo, a steel grey and an amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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