Company overview
Sanyo North American Corporation ("Sanyo NA") is a Delaware corporation that served as the North American regional headquarters and US sales arm of Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. It was established March 22, 1961, and is headquartered at 2055 Sanyo Avenue, San Diego, California. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of Sanyo Electric (Moriguchi, Osaka, Japan; founded 1947 by Toshio Iue). Panasonic Corporation acquired a majority of Sanyo Electric via a December 2009 tender offer, and Sanyo NA became an indirect, wholly owned Panasonic subsidiary on April 1, 2011. Public filings show paid-in capital of ~$402M and FY2009 net sales of ~$479M; employee figures available online are dated and should be treated as rough.
Products / operations
Sanyo NA sold and distributed Sanyo Electric products in the US and coordinated a network of roughly 20 North American affiliates. The parent's lines spanned consumer electronics (TVs, audio, DVD players, digital cameras, mobile phones), home appliances (refrigerators, freezers, microwaves, air conditioners), and industrial/energy products: rechargeable batteries (NiCd/NiMH, including Eneloop, and lithium-ion), solar photovoltaics (HIT cells, with panel assembly via Sanyo Solar of Oregon in Salem), capacitors, and semiconductors. The mobile-phone business went to Kyocera (2008) and the semiconductor operation to ON Semiconductor (2010); Panasonic later licensed the Sanyo brand to Funai for North American TVs (2014). This is an operating company, not an NPE or shell licensor.
Patent-litigation posture
Sanyo NA appears in our database once, as a defendant, with zero plaintiff cases. That defendant-only profile is consistent with an operating subsidiary being sued rather than a patent assertion entity. The sole tracked matter sits in the Eastern District of Texas, Tyler Division — a historically plaintiff-friendly venue.
Notable case
MediaTek, Inc. v. Sanyo Electric Co., Ltd. et al. (E.D. Tex., Tyler Div., filed Aug. 31, 2005) was MediaTek's mirror suit against Sanyo Electric and Sanyo NA, filed while Sanyo was asserting patents against MediaTek and its customer ASUSTek in California. The dispute concerned optical-disc/audio-decoding technology. The parties settled, dismissing the cases with prejudice and cross-licensing the asserted patents. Sanyo entities also appear in later lithium-ion battery and capacitor antitrust/investigation matters; those are not reflected in our tracked case data.