Hoya Corporation is a Japanese company manufacturing optical products such as photomasks, photomask blanks and Hard disk drive platters, contact lenses and eyeglass lenses using wavefront technology for the health-care market, medical photonics, lasers, photographic filters, and software. Hoya Corporation is one of the Forbes Global 2000 Leading Companies and Industry Week 1000 Company. Hoya acquired the camera company Pentax in 2007, for the price of US$1 billion, about 10% more than Pentax was valued at the time. In June 2010 the grandson of the corporation's founder Yutaka Yamanaka proposed changes to the Board of Directors to prevent what he called such "mistakes" from happening again. On October 1, 2011, Hoya sold its Pentax camera business to Ricoh.
History of Hoya-Pentax merger
Hoya discussed a merger with Pentax into Hoya Pentax HD Corporation during 2007. Hoya's primary goal was to strengthen its medical-related business by taking advantage of Pentax's technologies and expertise in the field of endoscopes, intraocular lenses, surgical loupes, biocompatible ceramics, etc. It was speculated that Pentax's camera business could be sold off after the merger. The merger was initially intended to be completed by October 1, 2007. However, Pentax management decided to not pursue the originally planned share swap, and other options for a merger were discussed. On May 25, the Pentax board of directors accepted Hoya's offer for a merger. On August 6, 2007, Hoya completed a friendly takeover bid for Pentax and acquired 90.59% of the company. On October 29, 2007, Hoya and Pentax announced that Pentax, as the company ceasing to exist, will merge with and into Hoya on March 31, 2008. The acquired Pentax surveying instrument business and camera business were sold to Taiwan Instrument Co., Ltd. in 2009 and Ricoh Co., Ltd. in 2011, respectively.
ReadSpeaker
On July 13, 2017, it was announced that the HOYA had acquired ReadSpeaker. ReadSpeaker was founded in 1999 and headquartered in Huis ter Heide, Utrecht in the Netherlands at the time of the acquisition. ReadSpeaker is a text-to-speech technology that allows users to highlight words that are being spoken, and users can save the speech in an MP3 format. It has been used to transform websites to speech. The International Herald Tribune employed the tool to turn into podcasts the stories it publishes online. In a paper for the 2016 International Conference on Software Process Improvement, José Ortega and his coauthors said, ReadSpeaker "works 100% online, is a good reference but is commercial and costs".
In 2008, the glass disk subsidiary in Thailand was involved in a labour dispute. After the involvement of some customers, the dismissed workers were reinstated, and both management and union accepted to participate in harmonious communication.
