Concentrating ~¥12bn in trawlers while the fishing grounds halved (1983)

What contrarianism left behind

At the centre of this decision was the choice to gather capital into what the company was best at, at the very moment the premise of the business had collapsed. The 200-mile regime was a change that erased the company’s largest asset — distant-water fishing grounds — from outside, and no amount of new tonnage would bring back what was lost. That it nonetheless poured some ¥12bn into fishing was the flip side of a plain reality: most of the profit came from there. Shrink fishing and the immediate profit disappears, and with it the funds for turning to food — within that contradiction, that the needle swung toward sharpening the current earner had a certain logic to it.

The line between logic and overconfidence, though, is thin. With the fishing grounds structurally contracting, the investment in the Echizen Maru extended a relative advantage by a few years while also postponing the task that should have been urgent — the conversion into a food manufacturer. The first recurring loss and the fleet reduction in 1990 look like the invoice for that postponement. Forty years on, the company has renamed itself Nissui and is trying to graduate from being a fishing company at all. At the starting point of the long time it took an enterprise that perfected the efficiency of catching to move to the business of making, one finds this contrarian bet on the fleet.