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Hey everybody, I'm Hugh Brownstone for Three Blind Men and an Elephant and it is my great pleasure and privilege to be joined by CEO of Sigma, Kazuto Yamaki. Thanks so much for making the time. Good to see you again.
Thank you very much for having me.
Truly my pleasure and privilege. We're going to do something a little bit different today. Those of you who know the channel have heard this many times before, but for those of you who don't or haven't, I often say yes, it's about the gear, but no, it's not about the gear at all. It's about the people. And so, of course, we'll talk about the gear. But what's more interesting to me becomes the people embodied by this gentleman. So, this is a conversation. Because you know, I'm going to start here. Oh, you guys have been on an incredible tear. The 7200 Sports, the 5005.6, incredible. The 51.2 two where you're using linear actuators. The 28 to 45 1.8 full frame. These are all full frame. The 200 F2, the 135 1.4, the 300 to 600 which is a beast. But you provide versatility and image quality performance that can't be touched by anybody else. And now you got the ISO Cinei lenses that you've announced and you did the BF. And as you know, we were so impressed with the BF that my partner Ed and I did a custom grip for it and we just think it's a work of art.
Oh, thank you very much. It was a wonderful grip. Yes. Yes.
Thank you. It seems that there has been a steady progression. You're doing things that the big guns can't or won't. You know that.
How do you feel about that? How does that fit into your plan?
Well, I'm truly proud of what our employees did, our engineers and our staff did in the past. I'm just a part of the Sigma. I'm not doing everything what the Sigma have been doing. So, I appreciate what our employees have done for the company and for our customers.
And now, just to finish off the gear, you introduced the 351.4, the Mark I and I have that sucker attached to my SL3 just out of frame and I'm going to shoot the crap out of that for the next couple of weeks. But I can tell you already just looking at it locally and taking test shots. I think this is a new benchmark and I say this as someone who owns an Apposum SL. The question becomes how did they get here? So we're going to talk about origin stories, right? We're going to talk about yours, your dad's. We're going to talk about your successes and what Claudia and I in our street photography workshops call noble failures. Things that someone from the outside could see exactly what you were trying to do and somehow it didn't quite gel. But the reason why it's a noble failure is because it prepares you for the next iteration.
Finally, we'll talk about new landscape competition.
Mhm. Mhm. Software correction, AI, blue ocean, all that kind of stuff.
So, let's begin with the origin story like it's a comic book of Sigma Corporation.
Yes. So, Sigma was founded in 1961 founded by my father when he was 27 years old. And in the beginning we were founded in the center of Tokyo. And at that time there were so many parts and unit suppliers, component suppliers for camera lenses in Tokyo. So we worked with such suppliers and my father built our own lenses together with the suppliers. And so from the beginning we've been making lenses for cameras and that's really my father's passion. And then, you know, the beginning of the company is always challenging but we could survive. And then in the '70s my father got the idea to become a camera manufacturer, not just staying as a lens manufacturer. So we started making our own cameras.
Was it the SD that was your first camera around 2002 or were there predecessor cameras to that?
Oh, that's the SD9. It's our first digital camera but even in the time of film we had a film Sigma camera which was called Mark 1. I think it was 1976, that time frame.
I want to go back to your dad's origin story to just before he founded Sigma. You and I talked about this. You shared this with me a year ago. So, it's the early 1960s. You said there were lots of different suppliers, but he was working for a company before Sigma in the same space. Was it binoculars? What was that?
I don't know exactly what the company was doing at that time, but it was a small optics company. I was told the company probably provided some optical components to others but also they assembled the binoculars and he learned how to assemble the binoculars including the alignment of the prism. It was not so easy to align the prism perfectly. So, he could earn quite good money although he was a very young engineer at the time. So he enjoyed the business a lot and then he actually learned how to build the binoculars when he was still a college student and then he decided to work for the small optics company after he graduated school.
It's an aside but was college back then something that you had to pay for or that the government supported?
My father's family was quite poor. So I think he had to work by himself to earn money for the education. The education fee is not so high in Japan.
The family was poor. So, he had to do a lot of part-time jobs to earn money.
I can relate to that. You also told me last year that at some point that company folded.
And your father was asked to create a new company. Can we talk about that a little bit?
That's true. So after he graduated university he started working for the small optics company. Because it was so small, although he was just in his mid-20s, he was one of the employees but he worked as one of the corporate executives. And one day that company went bankrupt. Actually, this is what I heard from my parents, but the company owner disappeared one day with company money.
Now this is getting juicy. You didn't tell me this last year. Okay.
And then as one of the corporate executives, my father had to close down the office. Then the suppliers of that company, which was quite small but still had several suppliers, the owners of several suppliers contacted my father and asked for some jobs, asked to continue the business. And then he decided to start Sigma.
Do you know if he did that for multiple reasons or was it strictly financial? I got the sense when we spoke last year that it was also some kind of feeling that there was an obligation to keep people employed.
Exactly. I graduated university in 1991.
No, actually I went to business school in Japan and also I graduated graduate school in Tokyo in 1993. It's not an MBA but I learned business.
I'll just point out this is another thing that AI got wrong. Okay.
Okay. So, right after I joined Sigma we had a financial problem actually, a serious financial problem. And both I and my father were really concerned if Sigma might go bankrupt.
And one day we were driving, I was driving with my father on the way back from the office to home. He was so exhausted and he confessed that he had no plan to become an entrepreneur or become the business owner. He just wanted to help people when he founded the company and that sense of responsibility or obligation led him to that point. So it was, I think, mid-'90s. So it's already over 30 years. So he confessed to me that he did not continue the business just for money or something. He just did it for his sense of responsibility, social responsibility.
This is really interesting guys and you'll see me come back to this. You've seen me come back to this with another privately held family-run business with which you are partners and of course I'm talking about Leica. And I think that's a real common ground or a common denominator why I'm so appreciative of what you've managed to do not only in terms of the products which are exceptional at this point,
But what you think about and how you work with your people. Again, Claudia and I saw this when we visited the global HQ. We saw what kind of environment you had created. Really quite exceptional. I want to come back because you nicely moved into your origin story as CEO. I hope you won't mind that I will bring up another thing that we talked about last year. We were just standing talking. It was the first time we'd met each other and I asked you did you actually want to go into the family business?
My father always told me to take over his business even when I was a small kid. He always patted my shoulder that you need to take over. He told me that you need to take over my business.
That's a heavy weight on that shoulder.
Yes. At that time I think I was maybe age six or seven. Wow. And I still remember that at that time Sigma had about 100 employees. So he patted on my shoulder that on your shoulder the life of 100 people is on your shoulder. He told me and he also told me that you have to consider about the families of the employees. So considering that each employee has a family of four people then about 1,200 people's life is on my shoulder. He told me.
When all you wanted to do was watch anime cartoons on TV.
So it was big pressure. So I actually did not believe I could be CEO of the company because my father was a kind of charismatic person. He was tall, he is very smart, and he has a man of vision. So I had no idea how I could be like him and that's why I wanted to escape from that.
Well, 7 years old I think you were allowed some slack.
Actually I had such a feeling until maybe 17, 18 years old. So it was a big pressure for me and I didn't want to take over the business. But at that point I realized that I sensed that there was nobody who could take over my father's vision or philosophy and bring it to the company. So I was determined to work hard to take over my part of business.
And how old were you at that point?
Okay. I'm going to go back to a year before that. Because last year I asked you, well, what did you want to do? Do you remember what you told me you wanted to be when you grew up?
When I was a small kid, I don't remember what I told you, but when I was like six, seven years old boy, I wanted to be the owner of a fruit shop.
Okay, this is a new story. Our stories changed. Owner of a fruit shop because I really like fruit like melon, banana, watermelon, things like that.
Yeah, we have fruit every morning. Blueberries, raspberries. Muesli. Fantastic.
And then after that I became obsessed with sports especially I like baseball.
Yeah. So I wanted to be a baseball player.
Yes. What I didn't ask you last time what position did you want to play?
Shortstop. I really enjoy playing baseball but soon after that I could understand I cannot be a professional baseball player.
Not very many people can. All right let's continue. So now by the time you're 17 or 18, your father has successfully transmitted to you this sense of duty.
