NEC Corporation (日本電気株式会社, Nippon Denki Kabushiki-gaisha) is a Japanese multinational information technology and electronics corporation, headquartered in Minato, Tokyo.
The company was known as the Nippon Electric Company, Limited, before rebranding in 1983 as NEC. It provides IT and network solutions, including cloud computing, artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of things (IoT) platform, and telecommunications equipment and software, to business enterprises, communications services providers and to government agencies, and has also been the biggest Personal Computer vendor in Japan since the 1980s, when it launched the PC-8000 series.
In 1987, NEC licensed technology from Hudson Soft, a video game manufacturer, to create a video game console called the PC Engine (later released in 1989 as the TurboGrafx-16 in the North American market). While the PC Engine achieved a considerable following, it has been said that NEC held a much stronger influence on the video game industry through its role as a leading semiconductor manufacturer than through any of its direct video game products.
NEC was the world's fourth-largest PC manufacturer by 1990. Its semiconductors business unit was the world's largest semiconductor company by annual revenue from 1985 to 1992, the second largest in 1995, one of the top three in 2000, and one of the top 10 in 2006. NEC spun off its semiconductor business to Renesas Electronics and Elpida Memory. Once Japan's major electronics company, NEC has largely withdrawn from manufacturing since the beginning of the 21st century.
NEC was #463 on the 2017 Fortune 500 list. NEC is a member of the Sumitomo Group.
