Shigenobu Nagamori

I have a soft spot for founders who pick a boring product and never let go of it. Shigenobu Nagamori, born in 1944 in Muko, Kyoto Prefecture, built Nidec out of tiny precision motors, the kind of component nobody outside a factory ever thinks about, and turned it into the world's largest maker of the micromotors spinning inside hard disks and optical drives. He grew it partly by buying companies other people had given up on and dragging them back to profitability, which tells you he trusts execution over strategy decks. The most human thing about him, to me, is the succession problem: he has handed the top job over more than once, and more than once stepped back in front of it. Lately he has put himself into running a university, shaping the next generation of engineers. I read that less as retirement than as one more thing he intends to fix personally.

Name (English)

Shigenobu Nagamori

Name (Japanese)

永守重信

Born

August 28, 1944 (age 81)

Zodiac / Chinese zodiac

Virgo / Monkey

Origin

Mukō-shi, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan

Occupation

businessperson

University

Polytechnic University

Motto

Private

• Wikipedia (Japanese)https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%B0%B8%E5%AE%88%E9%87%8D%E4%BF%A1

Tags

• Kyoto Prefecture
• businessperson

Last updated

2026-07-26

Facts are limited to publicly available information up to 2024; non-public or unconfirmed items are omitted. English text is machine-assisted (facts translated by Sonnet, "My Take" written by Opus 4.8). The Japanese page is the source of record.