Reminds me of Yamaha, pianos and motorcycles sharing name and logo.
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Nokia was originally a rubber company, meaning at one point you could find the same logo on cellphones, car tires and rubber boots.
(If you're wondering how you get from rubber to phones, they had rubber-coated cables and wired telephone switches along the way.)
Level 3, the biggest Internet backbone transit provide, was spun off from the Peter Kiewit construction firm, and had as its original asset a coal mine in Wyoming.
The US Telco Sprint was spun off from the Southern Pacific railroad - train lines are convenient places to lay fibre trunks
SPRINT == Southern Pacific Railroad Internal NeTwork.
It would have been interesting to see what happened if it hadn't spun off, suddenly you'd have a huge Fortune 500 telecom where its side business was running a railroad.
Would that have kept them afloat as an operation? I've spent the last few decades here watching as their red-and-grey engines disappeared in a sea of yellow.
Didn't the telco part come from a merger with one of the baby bells that emerged when bell was broke up?
No, they were an independent telco before the 1984 breakup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_Bell_Operating_Compan...
Nintendo was playing cards.
They also briefly experiemented with taxis, rice and love hotels before they focused on toys and games.
In that case, they used to be the same company, and one was spun off. In the Mitsubishi case, there were at least 2 or 3 separate companies that were never really related
Husqvarna can be either a motorsports marquee or mowers and chainsaws. Each descends from a gun company, hence the barrel-and-sights logo.
Piaggio is both aerospace and motorbikes - each having descended from a common corporate ancestor.
Philips can be two different brands of smartbulbs. They spun off the original as Hue, and then developed another line more recently.
I'm sure there are American examples too, if you look at century+ old conglomerates like GE or Boeing. NBC (formerly of GE) is about to be its own example, when CNBC and MSNBC get spun off.
>Husqvarna can be either a motorsports marquee or mowers and chainsaws.
Those are all motors at least, similar to Honda making a bunch of things with motors.
Yes, but still splintered into a bunch of different conglomerates.
KTM has the motorcycle brand, but it's going through it's own restructuring/bankruptcy at the moment.
> I'm sure there are American examples too
Hemingway shot himself with a gun he bought at ... Abercrombie & Fitch
I simply love how it’s three tuning forks - I had a Toyota Celica GT-S with the Dual cam motor that spun to 8,200 redline and the sound it made was amazing and I’ve always had a feeling Yamaha’s motor division still values their music heritage when they can. That engine sang…
I beleive that Yamaha Motor Co was spun out of Yamaha Corp. So they share the same logo because they were once one company.
This is not too unheard of even in the West.
Rolls Royce Motor Cars is owned by BMW but they just bought use of the name.
The old Rolls Royce Motors who used to make the cars was sold to VW (but not the name).
Rolls Royce Holdings Plc., the defence and aerospace firm, actually own the name but don't make cars.
Clear as mud.
Remember TV Guide? About 20 years back, Macrovision spun off the print magazine but kept the name, logo, and digital-media assets; these changed hands a few more times and are currently a subsidiary of Fandom. Meanwhile the print magazine is currently published by a separate entity, TV Guide Magazine LLC, which licenses the name and logo from the Fandom digital-media company.
With the motorcycles having tuning forks in the logo, despite having nothing to do with motor vehicles.
Motorcycle forks look rather similar, though.
Apparently both products need high quality steel (for piano wires and engines), and that's how the company diversified (I can't remember which one started first).
Toyota was a maker of cotton looming machines before cars, and Nokia was a pulp mill and rubber manufacturer...
They briefly had a living room and kitchen furnishings company, too – YAMAHA Livingtec – but the heritage was clear there: they expanded from wooden piano housings to other wooden furnishings.
What are the American equivalents? Microsoft and IBM to some extent? GE?
And tennis rackets