Major Japanese computer, electronics, and telecommunications equipment manufacturer.
Nippon Electric Company, Ltd. (officially NEC Corp. in 1983), was founded in 1899 with funding from the Western Electric Co. Inc. of the U.S. NEC was the first Japanese joint venture with a foreign company. As Japan's preeminent telecommunications company, NEC contributed to developments in mobile telephony, fibre-optic networks, private-branch exchanges (PBXs), and microwave, digital, and satellite communications systems. Besides mainframe computers, NEC was an early manufacturer of personal computers (PCs). In 1997 NEC merged its North American PC operations with Zenith Data Systems and Packard Bell to form Packard Bell-NEC, Inc.