Nichicon

Nichicon Corporation
	Nichicon Building in Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto
Native name	ニチコン株式会社
Type	Public KK
Traded as	TYO: 6996; OSE: 6996
Industry	Electronics
Founded	(August 1, 1950; 71 years ago)
Headquarters	Nakagyo-ku, Kyoto 604-0845, Japan
Key people	Ippei Takeda; (Chairman and CEO); Shigeo Yoshida; (President and COO)
Products	Capacitors; Hybrid integrated circuits; Thermistors;
Revenue	JPY 107.2 billion (FY 2014) (US$ 893.3 million) (FY 2014)
Net income	JPY 2.25 billion (FY 2014) (US$ 18.7 million) (FY 2014)
Number of employees	5,792 (consolidated, as of March 31, 2014)
Website	Official website
	Footnotes / references;

Nichicon Corporation (ニチコン株式会社, Nichikon Kabushiki-gaisha) is a manufacturer of capacitors of various types and applications and is one of the largest manufacturers of capacitors in the world, headquartered in Karasuma Oike, Nakagyō-ku, Kyoto, Japan. In 1950, it separated from the Nii Works Co., established itself as Kansai-Nii Works and finished its first factory by 1956. In 1961, it adopted the Nichicon name and have been using it, or a variant thereof, ever since.

In 2011 and 2012 Nichicon spun off several major factories into independent subsidiaries and established representative branches in foreign countries, thus realigning its corporate infrastructure.^[3]

Early 2000s capacitor issues[]

From 2001 to 2004, Nichicon produced defective capacitors (series HM and HN) that ended up being used by major computer manufacturers, including Dell, Hewlett-Packard, and Apple.^[4]^[5] No overall reason was ever proven for the production runs of defective capacitors, but some sources claimed that these capacitors were either overfilled with electrolyte,^[4] or were constructed using electrolyte fluid that was prone to pop and leak fluid, causing premature failure in any equipment using them. This issue was not related to the contemporaneous Taiwanese "Capacitor Plague".^[4]

In 2010 Dell settled a civil lawsuit for its shipment of at least 11.8 million computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that used faulty Nichicon components and were prone to major failure.^[6]^[7]