Takata-Petri

Takata Corporation

Quality First
Native name	タカタ株式会社
Type	Public KK
Traded as	:
Industry	Automotive industry
Founded	Shiga Prefecture (1933; 84 years ago (1933))
Founder	Takezo Takada
Headquarters	Roppongi, Minato-ku, Tokyo, 106-8488, Japan
Area served	Worldwide
Key people	Shigehisa Takada (Chairman and CEO)
Products	Airbag systems Child-restraint systems Electronics Interior trims Seat belts Steering wheels
Revenue	¥ 718.003 billion (2016)
Operating income	¥ 42.133 billion (2016)
Profit	¥ -13.075 billion (2016)
Number of employees	50,530 (as of March 31, 2016)
Website	Official website
Footnotes / references

Takata Corporation (タカタ株式会社, Takata Kabushiki Gaisha) is an automotive parts company based in Japan. The company has production facilities on four continents, with its European headquarters located in Germany, where it also has nine production facilities. In 2013, a series of deaths and injuries associated with defective Takata airbag inflators had led Takata to initially recall 3.6 million cars equipped with such airbags. Further fatalities caused by the airbags have led the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to order an ongoing, nationwide recall of more than 42 million cars, the largest automotive recall in U.S. history. In June 2017, Takata filed for bankruptcy.

Takata was founded in 1933 in Shiga Prefecture, Japan, by Takezo Takada and started to produce lifelines for parachutes, and other textiles. In the early 1950s, the company started to research seat belts. Later they incorporated as "Takata". In the 1960s, Takata started to sell seat-belts and built the world's first crash test plant for testing seat-belts under real world conditions.

In the 1970s, Takata developed child restraint systems. In the 1980s, the company changed its name to "Takata Corporation" and expanded to Korea, the United States, and later to Ireland, to sell seat-belts. In the 1990s, Takata expanded internationally.

In 2000, Takata Corporation acquired German competitor Petri AG, forming the European subsidiary Takata-Petri, renamed Takata AG in early 2012. Takata AG makes steering wheels and plastic parts, not only for the automotive industry.

In May 1995, a recall in the U.S. affecting 8,428,402 predominantly Japanese built vehicles made from 1986 to 1991 with seat belts manufactured by the Takata Corporation of Japan, was begun. It was called at the time the "second largest recall in the 30-year history of the Department of Transportation (DOT)". The recall was prompted by an investigation (PE94-052) carried out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) on Takata-equipped Honda vehicles, after many of their owners complained of seat belt buckles either failing to latch, latching and releasing automatically, or releasing in accidents. It revealed that potentially faulty Takata seat belts were not limited only to Honda vehicles, but to other Japanese imports as well.