14 Facts About Funai

Funai is the main supplier of electronics to Walmart and Sam's Club stores in the US, with production output in excess of 2 million flat-panel televisions during the summertime per year for Black Friday sale.

Funai was founded by Tetsuro Funai, the son of a sewing machine manufacturer.

The Funai company was formed, Tetsuro Funai became CEO for 47 years and a US dollar billionaire, and the first actual products produced were the transistor radios.

In 1980, Funai launched a sales and manufacturing subsidiary in Germany.

Funai developed the Compact Video Cassette format in the same year, a joint development with Technicolor, trying to compete with VHS and Betamax.

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Funai introduced an arcade laserdisc video game, Interstellar, at Tokyo's Amusement Machine Show in September 1983.

Funai began to see rising sales of the VHS format, so in 1984, Funai released its first VHS video cassette player for the worldwide market, while ordering all transport chassis mechanisms from Shintom for quick and efficient production.

In 1992, Funai canceled its contract from Shintom, due to the rising cost of VCR chassis mechanism and the expensive Japanese labor, and decided to build its own lower-cost chassis mechanism instead overseas.

Funai developed a new, permanent strategy in 1993 by opening two new state-of-the-art factories in China, which transferred all VHS VCRs production out from Japan.

Today, Funai is one of the world's largest producers of DVD players, and is one of the major suppliers of electronics to Wal-Mart on Black Friday.

In 2008, CEO and founder Tetsuro Funai retired and stepped down from CEO to become chairman.

In 2013, Funai acquired the option to buy the rest of Philips' consumer electronics operations and a license to globally market Philips branded consumer electronics.

Funai has made inkjet hardware for Lexmark International, Inc since 1997.

Funai continued to manufacture VHS tape recorders into the early part of the 21st century, mostly under the Emerson, Magnavox, and Sanyo brands in China and North America.