Simul International Inc., a major simultaneous service firm, effectively went bust Friday as it filed for "wagi" composition procedures with creditors, according to private credit research agency Teikoku Data Bank.
After filing for the procedure with the Tokyo District Court, the firm immediately received a court order to protect its assets, the agency said. Capitalized at 30 million yen, the Tokyo-based company has 105 employees and liabilities of about 9 billion yen.
The firm was founded by Masumi Muramatsu, the current chairman, in 1965 to train simultaneous interpreters. Muramatsu, a former translator for the Allied Occupation forces in Japan, had established himself as a pioneer in the field of Japanese-English simultaneous interpretation. The company later expanded into various fields, including publishing, dispatch of translating staff, English conversation schools and planning and operation of international conferences.
The firm has been credited for its high-level service, particularly in simultaneous translations. For the year that ended last March, it posted sales of 5.37 billion yen, mainly through business with government ministries and major corporations. However, its aggressive strategy started to backfire in the early 1990s. While the company continued to set up translator schools in anticipation of rising demand for such services, the number of students did not increase as sharply as had been expected.