Spinning off the chemicals arm to specialize in repair (1975)

Choosing purity of trade over size

The heart of this decision was not a response to some immediate financial crisis but the raising of the company’s purity as a contractor by putting manufacturing and construction into separate firms. Shobond had been born an adhesive maker, and making its own materials was a genuine strength; it left that strength with Shobond Chemical and concentrated the parent on executing and managing repair work. Given the choice between the convenience of holding materials and construction together and the clarity of separating their roles, it took clarity.

With public investment being cut and credit tightening, Ueda Akira chose not to widen the range of what the company did but to narrow its trade to the single field of repair. The choice bore fruit in the mid-1980s, when the deterioration of Japan’s social infrastructure brought the “age of repair” he had bet on, and it led on to the stock-market listing of 1987. What distinguishes this spin-off is that it settled the question of which trade would carry the company’s strengths before it worried about growing.