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Shimano is famously a company that people in about four seemingly random/unrelated fields/hobbies think of as a specialist brand in that hobby (e.g. fishing).

(They are or at least were originally a bearings company, specialising in things that need to spin with very low friction, and all their seemingly unrelated businesses started from that)

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I don't know about the other industries, but within old cycling circles they're also just seen as the group that was first to make good counterfeit goods that were actually high enough quality to use, and their entrance to the market was aided by the fact that existing players, campagnolo and schwinn mostly, were producing junk from junk proprietary alloys in order to compete with 'overseas' components at truly exorbitant costs.

that was 40-50 years ago, so who cares, but Shimano is truly interesting for cultivating so many different opinions.

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