In a quiet side room at Pigeon Corp.'s spacious R&D facility north of Tokyo, researchers are on a high-tech quest to perfect a baby's bottle nipple that replicates that of a breast-feeding mother.
Pigeon, founded almost 60 years ago, sells about 100 million bottle teats a year and holds more than 80 percent of the Japanese market. As the country's birthrate declines, the company has moved overseas and sales outside Japan this year will for the first time account for more than half its total revenue.
Its main target market is China, where parents aspire to quality Japanese bottles to feed their babies. Pigeon, which has a workforce of close to 3,500, hopes to have a 50 percent share of the baby bottle nipple market in all major international markets by around 2020, according to a note by Shared Research.