Dropping the name “Nippon Suisan” — graduating from fisheries into food and aquaculture (2022)

What a company carries after taking down its own name

At the centre of this decision is that a company which had entrusted its earnings to fishing for half a century tried to put down that dependence together with its own name. The name Nippon Suisan was at once the symbol of a history built on distant-water fishing and the signboard of a constitution whose results were tossed about by market conditions. Replacing it with Nissui, and rearranging the company so that food leads revenue and aquaculture becomes the next pillar of profit, can be read as an attempt to answer head-on, at last, the task of becoming a food manufacturer that had smouldered since the 200-mile regime. That the step was taken not out of the ease of good times but midway through recovering strength after cleaning up overseas acquisitions shows how pressing the shift was.

Yet whether aquaculture, set as one of the two wings, brings a stability different from the fishing era is still being determined. Farming continues to carry risks of the same type as those that once tormented fishing — market prices, feed costs, mortality — and the large investment in South American salmon has also weighed on the finances. Taking down the fisheries signboard and becoming free of fisheries-derived volatility are not necessarily the same thing. Whether the change of name can be borne out in results — the rightness of the choice to abandon “Nippon Suisan” appears to hang on how thick the new pillar of aquaculture becomes.