Bloomberg Businessweek (North America)
Japan’s Hamamatsu makes gear that wins prizes—and investors’ applause
Stocks ▶ Hamamatsu’s sensors help solve the mysteries of the universe
When employees at Hamamatsu Photonics found out their highprecision light sensors had helped win this year’s Nobel Prize in physics, they did nothing to mark the occasion— after all, it was the fourth time the company’s products had contributed to Nobel-winning physics research. “The next day was the same as usual” after the prize was announced in October, says Akira Hiruma, president of Hamamatsu, which is in the Japanese city of the same name. “There was no special celebration.”
Hamamatsu shareholders, however, have plenty of reason to celebrate. The company has turned a profit every year since it listed shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1996, including a record 16.6 billion yen ($137 million) in the 12 months ended in September. Its operating profit forecast of 23.2 billion yen for this year “looks conservative and could yield some upside,” according to SMBC Nikko Securities. Hamamatsu’s stock has more than quadrupled since early 2009, giving the company a market value of 538 billion yen.
Hamamatsu’s route to Nobel success started three decades ago in an abandoned zinc mine about 200 miles west of Tokyo, where scientists set up an underground laboratory to research cosmic rays. In a set of experiments they called Kamiokande, a complex detector made with about 1,000 of Hamamatsu’s photon-detecting photomultiplier tubes was placed deep in the mountain and filled with thousands of tons of water. The instrument was the first to detect cosmic neutrinos, a particularly difficult particle to observe, and helped University of Tokyo scientist Masatoshi Koshiba win the Nobel Prize in physics in 2002.
The 2008 Nobel-winning project used the company’s sensors to investigate a part of subatomic physics called broken symmetry. The 2013 prize was given to François Englert and Peter Higgs after the world’s largest particle accelerator used Hamamatsu’s photomultipliers to confirm the existence of the Higgs boson, which gives mass to other particles. Hamamatsu made more than 11,000 improved sensors for 2015 Nobel winner Takaaki Kajita’s experiments. His research, which began in 1996, found that neutrinos oscillate and have mass.