Merging eight contractors under wartime decree, with the utility as shareholder (1944)

The shareholder it could not choose, and the work it could

Companies that begin without a founder are not rare, but companies whose customer sat on the share register from the first day are. Kanto Electric Works chose neither the firms it was merged with, nor the party that put up its capital, nor the territory it was to serve. The only thing left undecided was what, and how far, it would undertake within the territory it had been given. The Osaka office of 1959, the move into civil engineering and air-conditioning work in 1970, and the start of nuclear-plant work in 1979 were all decisions taken in that margin.

The relationship it was handed was protection and constraint at once. So long as the volume of work followed the client’s capital-investment plan, orders shrank whenever the plan did. When deregulation of the power business led Tokyo Electric Power to press down on construction costs in the late 1990s, Kandenko stood as the most dependent of the utility-affiliated contractors — the one being told to stand on its own. The 1984 rename, the stakes taken in peer contractors through the 2000s, and the 2012 entry into power generation are all answers to that single point. The first line of the shareholder register has not changed in eighty years; only the largest category of completed work has, from distribution lines to indoor wiring and building systems.