Leaning into overseas plant orders, and the rename to JGC (1976)

A new sign over the door, and the risk underneath

The axis of this decision was not only bringing the company’s name into line with what it actually did. What Chairman Suzuki Yoshio called building a record and a reputation was a way of treating the relationship with the client itself as an object of risk management — the territory that contract forms and country diversification cannot cover. Accumulating that asset, which barely shows up in the figures, can be seen as the other core of the decision, standing beside the change of name.

Yet as Suzuki himself candidly admitted about the concentration in Algeria, the principle of diversification kept giving way before the reality of the order book. Changing the sign and adding to the reputation did not dissolve the pattern by which risk, at the far end of a series of individual negotiations, drifted back into concentration. From the 1989 reform that raised overseas procurement, to the large-contract losses booked almost half a century later, JGC would face the same question again and again in changing forms.