About ELM

When I decided to open ELM, I was just 29 years old.  I had spent 4 years as a student and had worked for 6 years in Osaka as an engineer.  I was looking forward to going back to my hometown and living in a house with a garden, surrounded by the lush greenery of nature.  However, I was worried that the skills I had acquired in Osaka may not be best utilized in a non-urban area.  This is why I decided to create ELM. This would create a career for me as well as helping to create jobs for engineers and others in my home area of Kagoshima.

I named the company ELM with the help of my brother, who is a corporate adviser and co-founder.  This name neither limits, nor associates areas and industry types, and is easy to say.  EL stands for electronics, and M stand for “measurement”, “mechanism”, “machinery” and “mu” which means “dream” in Japanese. At that time, I had these dreams for our new company;

• Provide local engineers with a workplace that offered challenging jobs that can compete successfully against urban area companies.
• Never to subcontract our work.
• My most important dream was, “From Kagoshima to the World”.

Looking back, these dreams might sound naive, foolhardy and small-minded. But they were our dreams and challenges, especially for a manufacturing company in a non-urban area.

Because of ELM’s location, finding local companies to collaborate with us on projects were few to none. But this disadvantage inspired us to expand our in-house capabilities to cover all essential elements for development of electronic machinery and equipment.  This is extremely rare for small to mid-sized companies. Many companies in the urban areas can make their business thrive by focusing on one business genre only.  However, this does not work that way in the suburban areas.  This motivated us to create products in numerous fields, such as, agriculture, environment, energy, space, etc. Again, extremely rare for a company of 50 people.  This also made us rich in diversity and have the flexibility in the ever changing world and business environment.

The biggest problem we had, due to our small local area, was marketing and sales.  Because ELM specialized in development, we expanded our market through sales partners in Japan as well as Korea, Australia, New Zealand, USA and the EU, which lead us to grow globally.

The Japanese manufacturing industry, which used to lead the world, is now suffering. I think the reason is weakness as human beings.  Many times, when we become No.1, we tend to stop putting our energy into looking forward and moving forward and instead spend the energy on looking behind and defending that position.

ELM does not back away from a challenge.  When we hear other companies say, “that does not exist”, “there is no such technology” and “there is no such things”, it makes us work harder.  ELM’s motto is, “There is always a chance”.  These words are not used by companies that are no longer looking and moving forward. ELM will always embody the “dream”.

For anyone looking for a challenge, who loves manufacturing and does not want to be limited by national boundaries, technology, field, etc. Let’s work together. At ELM we give shapes to your ideas and can distribute them to the world. Let’s live such a dream together.

Takakazu Miyahara, CEO
ELM Inc.

ELM USA

ELM Europe

MiraewonELM Co., Ltd.

Color Kinetics Japan Inc.

EcoNursery Inc.

ARCHITAINMENT Inc.