Koito Manufacturing Co., Ltd.

I'll research this company before writing the profile.

Koito Manufacturing Co., Ltd. (株式会社小糸製作所), commonly "Koito," is a Japanese automotive lighting supplier headquartered at the Sumitomo Fudosan Osaki Twin Building, 5-1-18 Kitashinagawa, Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo. It was founded in 1915 and incorporated in 1936. Koito is publicly listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange Prime Market (ticker 7276; OTC: KOTMF). Toyota Motor Corporation is its largest shareholder and an affiliated company — filings during 2024–2025 put Toyota's stake in the 18–21% range, and Toyota accounted for roughly 14% of consolidated sales in FY2024. For the year ended March 31, 2026, Koito reported consolidated net sales of ¥947.6 billion and 21,507 consolidated employees (4,247 non-consolidated).

Products and operations. Koito's mainstay is automotive lighting: LED and discharge headlamps, halogen headlamps, fog lamps, rear combination and high-mount stop lamps, signal lamps, and related bulb and lamp fittings. Adjacent lines include ADAS-related sensor systems (LiDAR), aircraft parts, railway vehicle parts and control equipment (including railcar seats), road traffic signals and traffic-control systems, and road/tunnel/facility lighting. Manufacturing is organized across regional segments — Japan, China, Asia, North America, and Europe — and the company supplies most global automakers.

Patent-litigation posture. Koito is an operating company, not an NPE. In the tracked data it appears only as a plaintiff/petitioner (1 case, 0 as defendant), and that appearance is defensive: IT filed inter partes review petitions at the PTAB rather than suing anyone. Koito (with co-petitioner Stanley Electric Co., Ltd.) filed IPR2015-00574 and IPR2015-00575 on January 15, 2015 against Innovative Display Technologies LLC, an Acacia Research Corporation subsidiary characterized in third-party filings as a patent assertion entity. The challenged patents (U.S. 6,508,563 and 6,886,956, "Light Emitting Panel Assemblies for Use in Automotive Applications") were being asserted against Koito and Stanley customers — Toyota, Honda, Nissan, GM, Hyundai, Mercedes-Benz and others — in the Eastern District of Texas and District of Delaware.

Context. Both IPRs were terminated before institution in July 2015, following a patent license agreement between Koito/Stanley and Acacia's IDT and Delaware Display Group units (disclosed in Acacia's July 2015 Form 8-K). Notably, the patents at issue covered light-emitting panel/backlight assemblies — light-guide technology used in displays and automotive lights — rather than Koito's core headlamp technology, indicating a customer-defense dynamic.