Kubota & Yanmar endured - What happened to Mitsubiski, Iseki (Hinomoto)?

[fried1765]

One of the most ridiculous posts I've seen here...

Over here most of the small farmers that do it for a living use those little tractors that you call toys...

They use tractors from 25 up to 50HP on their farms, either dairy farms, vegetable farms, whatever.

The 25HP tractors are actually just the perfect size for greenhouses too.

Japanese farmers grow crops worth tens of billions of yen, with tractors much smaller than 25 HP.
In fact.....a 50+ HP tractor in Japan is somewhat rare.

 

[rScotty]

I remember when we first started seeing compact tractors in the US where I was a young mechanic in the mid 1970s. Most of them were imported from Japan - some rebranded as familiar US makes but others obviously new to the US market. What really struck me was how sophistcated that these imported tractors were. Whatever they were, these compacts were obviously the product of a mature industry that was way ahead of anything that we were building domestically.

It must have been quite a shock to the US tractor industry - an industry who were building belt drive lawn tractors with Briggs engines and bolted together frames..... to suddenly find themselves in competition with 4wd, tiny diesels with precision castings and built so marvelously well.

Obviously these tractors were the result of a lot of experience with small farms in the rest of the world.
rScotty

 

[airbiscuit]

Vintage Ads (1978 and 1977)

 

[airbiscuit]

This 1990 ad was prescient.

 

[buck12]

I owned a rebranded Mitsubishi Mahindra 2615 for over 12 years it was a tough reliable tractor.

 

[Rustyiron]

I believe it's got a whole lot to do with the fact that most of them were 4wd, a rarity among our domestic brands back then. They relied on lots of heavy castings to get the available horsepower to the ground.
Look at the big iron offered today, hardly a (new) 2wd in sight on today's working farms.

 

[fried1765]

I remember when we first started seeing compact tractors in the US where I was a young mechanic in the mid 1970s. Most of them were imported from Japan - some rebranded as familiar US makes but others obviously new to the US market. What really struck me was how sophistcated that these imported tractors were. Whatever they were, these compacts were obviously the product of a mature industry that was way ahead of anything that we were building domestically.

It must have been quite a shock to the US tractor industry - an industry who were building belt drive lawn tractors with Briggs engines and bolted together frames..... to suddenly find themselves in competition with 4wd, tiny diesels with precision castings and built so marvelously well.

Obviously these tractors were the result of a lot of experience with small farms in the rest of the world.
rScotty

That is the story in a nutshell!

 

[PsRumors]

Yanmar endured because they teamed with a company that endured, deere. They built some great tractors / engines for deere and deere maintained their status. Iseki and Mitsubishi teamed with names who either went out of business or jumped from manufacturer to manufacturer looking to cut costs.

 

[RickB]

Yanmar endured because they teamed with a company that endured, deere. They built some great tractors / engines for deere and deere maintained their status. Iseki and Mitsubishi teamed with names who either went out of business or jumped from manufacturer to manufacturer looking to cut costs.

But yet they both still exist. Iseki has 40 billion yen in revenue per year and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries forecasts 3700 billion yen of revenue in fiscal 2020. So this entire thread is much more about a narrow perception band than fading or disappearing industrial manufacturers.

 

[airbiscuit]

This thread is not meant to be about disappearing manufacturers, but about disappearing presence in the US CUT market of early brands.