is a Japanese company manufacturing optical products such as

photomasks A photomask (also simply called a mask) is an opaque plate with transparent areas that allow light to shine through in a defined pattern. Photomasks are commonly used in photolithography for the production of Integrated circuit, integrated circui ...

, photomask blanks and

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating hard disk drive platter, pla ...

platters, contact lenses and eyeglass lenses for the health-care market, medical photonics, lasers,

photographic filter In photography and cinematography, a filter is a camera accessory consisting of an optical filter that can be inserted into the optical path. The filter can be of a square or oblong shape and mounted in a holder accessory, or, more commonly, a ...

s, medical flexible endoscopy equipment, and software. Hoya Corporation is one of the

Forbes Global 2000 The ''Forbes'' Global 2000 is an annual ranking of the top 2000 public companies in the world, published by: sales, profit, assets and market value. The list has been published annually since 2003. By country Forbes Global 2000 as of 2023: ...

Leading Companies and Industry Week 1000 Company.

History of Hoya-Pentax merger

Hoya discussed a merger with

Pentax was a Japanese camera and optical equipment manufacturer. Currently, it exists as the Pentax Life Care Business Division of Hoya's medical endoscope business, as well as the digital camera brand of Ricoh Imaging, a subsidiary of Ricoh. Penta ...

into Hoya Pentax HD Corporation during 2007. Hoya's primary goal was to strengthen its medical-related business by taking advantage of Pentax's technologies and expertise in the field of endoscopes, intraocular lenses, surgical loupes, biocompatible ceramics, etc. It was speculated that Pentax's camera business could be sold off after the merger. The merger was initially intended to be completed by October 1, 2007. However, Pentax management decided to not pursue the originally planned share swap, and other options for a merger were discussed. On May 25, the Pentax board of directors accepted Hoya's offer for a merger. On August 6, 2007, Hoya completed a friendly

takeover In business, a takeover is the purchase of one company (the ''target'') by another (the ''acquirer'' or ''bidder''). In the UK, the term refers to the acquisition of a public company whose shares are publicly listed, in contrast to the acquisi ...

bid for Pentax and acquired 90.59% of the company. On October 29, 2007, Hoya and Pentax announced that Pentax, as the company ceasing to exist, will merge with and into Hoya on March 31, 2008. The acquired Pentax surveying instrument business (later IT Asahi Co., Ltd.) and camera business (now Pentax Ricoh Imaging Co., Ltd.) were sold to Taiwan Instrument Co., Ltd. in 2009 and Ricoh Co., Ltd. in 2011, respectively.

ReadSpeaker

On July 13, 2017, it was announced that Hoya had acquired ReadSpeaker. ReadSpeaker was founded in 1999 and headquartered in Huis ter Heide, Utrecht in the Netherlands at the time of the acquisition. ReadSpeaker is a

text-to-speech Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or Computer hardware, hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system conv ...

technology that allows users to highlight words that are being spoken, and users can save the speech in an

MP3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany under the lead of Karlheinz Brandenburg. It was designed to greatly reduce the amount ...

format. It has been used to transform websites to speech. The

International Herald Tribune The ''International Herald Tribune'' (''IHT'') was a daily English-language newspaper published in Paris, France, for international English-speaking readers. It published under the name ''International Herald Tribune'' starting in 1967, but its ...

employed the tool to turn into

podcast A podcast is a Radio program, program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. Typically, a podcast is an Episode, episodic series of digital audio Computer file, files that users can download to a personal device or str ...

s the stories it publishes online. In a paper for the 2016 International Conference on Software Process Improvement, José Ortega and his coauthors said, ReadSpeaker "works 100% online, is a good reference but is commercial and costs."

Voice cloning

In 22 May 2025 it was claimed their voice product "Iona" was the result of recording work done by the actress Gayanne Potter in 2021 which at the time she understood would just be used for accessibility and e-learning software, but is now available generally and as the announcer on

ScotRail ScotRail Trains Limited, trading as ScotRail (), is a Scottish train operating company that is publicly owned by Scottish Rail Holdings on behalf of the Scottish Government. It has been operating the ScotRail franchise as an operator of las ...

trains

MiYOSMART

MiYOSMART is an optical lens made by Hoya to correct

myopia Myopia, also known as near-sightedness and short-sightedness, is an eye condition where light from distant objects focuses in front of, instead of on, the retina. As a result, distant objects appear blurry, while close objects appear normal. ...

. It was released in 2018. A three-year-study found that it reduces myopia by 60% in children aged eight to thirteen years.

References

External links