Producer
Tsubaki Nakashima
Major maker of precision balls (bearing balls + pen-tip balls).
1
Inputs supplied
1
Goods downstream
0
Facilities
0
Stories
What they make
1 input Tsubaki Nakashima supplies
Click an input to see every good that depends on it, every country that produces it, and every other company in the supply chain.
Where it shows up
Goods downstream
Essential goods that depend on something Tsubaki Nakashima makes — pick one to see the full supply chain.
What else they do
Business segments
The company's full revenue map — where this supply-chain role fits within their broader business.
Precision balls & rollers (bearing components)
Ballscrews & linear-motion
Specialty precision balls
Intelligence
What's known
Sourced claims about this company's role in supply chains — chokepoints, concentration, incidents, dual-use connections.
Did you know
Tsubaki Nakashima is one of the world's largest makers of precision balls, and the same micro-spheres serve radically different industries: ball bearings (autos, machinery, wind turbines, aerospace), ballscrews (CNC machine tools, robots, EV steering and braking), and the writing tip of a ballpoint pen. The company that helps your pen write also makes the balls inside the bearings and motion systems of industrial and transport machinery — a single ultra-precision sphere competency that spans the trivial (a 50-cent pen) and the safety-critical (a jet-engine or wind-turbine bearing). [verify: Precision balls span bearings, ballscrews AND ballpoint-pen tips; all three uses confirmed independently]
IQS Directory ↗Concentration2017
Precision-ball making is a concentrated specialty that quietly underpins nearly all rotating machinery. Tsubaki Nakashima consolidated global capacity by buying NN Inc's Precision Bearing Components Group — steel balls, rollers and cages across 7 sites with 1,260 employees and ~$249M in 2016 sales — for $375M in 2017. High-grade precision balls and rollers (tight sphericity, aerospace/EV grades) come from a short list of mostly Japanese and European specialists, so a niche almost no one thinks about is a chokepoint behind bearings, gearboxes and ballscrews worldwide. [verify: $375M/7 sites/1260 emp/$249M-2016 confirmed verbatim]
SEC / NN Inc ↗