Creating Comsys Holdings by share transfer (2003)

Fifteen years of building the form first

Judged as of September 2003, this integration solved very little. All three companies worked mainly for the NTT group, so adding them together added no customers. The ¥248.9bn of consolidated sales in the first year was no leap beyond what the standalone company had done. And as Shimada Hirofumi said, there was no plan to cut the dependence — he had no intention of reducing NTT work. What the decision actually chose was not a business but a shape: the kind of structure to which companies could be added later.

That shape took a long time to work. The first outside subsidiary, Tsuken, came seven years later; the nationwide construction footprint took another eight, arriving in 2018. Had they merged instead, the path of taking regional companies whole, corporate personality included, and lining them up by share exchange would have been hard to follow. The fiscal 2024 result — NTT facilities down to 38.5% — is the figure of the twenty-first year after the first. Not making the companies into one company is what later allowed eight operating companies to stand side by side.