Precision instruments manufacturer Horiba International Corp. in coming weeks will complete an expansion to a new facility in Irvine that will serve as the headquarters for its Americas operations, with several business units that have long been in Orange County coming together under one roof.
Horiba International, or HIC, is a holding company that operates through Horiba Instruments Inc. in the U.S. and through its Horiba Canada Inc. and Horiba Instruments Brasil Ltda. subsidiaries.
It is ultimately part of Kyoto, Japan-based Horiba Ltd., a conglomerate that includes a group of 38 companies in more than 20 countries and employs about 5,800 workers.
Horiba makes measurement and analytics technology for use in the automotive, computer, environmental and medical fields, among others.
Its products range from vehicle test systems and chemical solutions monitors to water-quality and blood glucose analyzers.
The parent company, which trades on the Tokyo Exchange, has a market capitalization of about $1.5 billion. It had consolidated sales of $1.4 billion and $91 million in net income last year.
“Our 2014 aim is about $1.5 billion in consolidated sales,” Dan Horiba said at a recent meeting at the new facility. He’s assistant to HIC President Jai Hakhu and the grandson of the company’s founder. His father, Atsushi Horiba, serves as chairman and chief executive of Horiba Ltd.
Masao Horiba, who founded the company in 1945, continues to serve as supreme counsel.
The Irvine-based Americas division is estimated to account for about 23% of the company’s overall sales this year, with about $339 million, said Richard Marting, HIC’s chief financial officer.
It has about 800 employees, including about 120 in OC.
The new facility it purchased near the Irvine Spectrum, where the company expects renovation work to wrap up in coming weeks, is about 78,600 square feet and will house the process and environmental unit, the medical group, and part of the scientific group. Each of the three units previously had separate offices in the area.
The automotive division will keep its manufacturing and primary operations in Michigan, and the semiconductors unit will remain with its research and development team in Santa Clara, Marting said.
Most of the work at the new Irvine facility will be for sales and marketing, and some manufacturing for the scientific group, he added.
Horiba manufactures its “core technology” for its analyzers in Japan, “but they have a lot of components. There’s a lot of customization for the end users’ needs,” Marting said.
The OC facility will handle any needed “localization” of manufacturing, added Horiba, who previously spent several years working in the automotive division.
Horiba Ltd. began as Horiba Radio Laboratory in post-war Japan when Masao Horiba was a nuclear physics student at Kyoto University. The company grew primarily through sales of its pH meters and later became Horiba Ltd. It brought its auto emissions system to American automakers in the 1960s, and with Ford Motor Co. as its first customer, gained a foothold in the U.S. market.
It entered a joint venture with Dearborn, Mich.-based Olson Laboratories Inc. in 1970 and set up an office in Irvine, “because many employees were recruited from high-technology industries in the area,” the company said. Horiba Ltd. later acquired Olson’s stake in the company.
Acquisitions have helped Horiba expand its business globally, Marting said. It’s made other purchases over the years, including French units ABX SAS, a maker of blood-cell counter technology, in 1996, and Jobin Yvon SAS, an optical equipment company, in 1997.
“We’re always looking at acquisition opportunities,” Marting said, adding that in February Horiba bought certain assets of Photon Technology International Inc., a fluorescence spectroscopy specialist based in New Jersey.
“Potential deals don’t always materialize, but we’re looking at several of them right now. We also have some room for [workforce] expansion here. We’ve got space in the office. … On day one when we move in, there will be desks that don’t have bodies. So we can still grow out this building.”
