Staying a specialist while internalizing cleanroom technology (2017)

Choosing to hold the technology without leaving the specialty

These thirty-odd years at Takasago Thermal Engineering can be read as a run of management judgments that pursued two things at once: sticking strictly to the specialty, and possessing the technology. Becoming a full building-services contractor widens the opportunities for orders, but maintaining technical strength across every field including electrical and plumbing is not easy. Close yourself inside the specialty, conversely, and the range of your technology does not widen. Takasago narrowed its aim to air conditioning, heat sources and ventilation, and then chose to hold its own research institute and to take in, as subsidiaries, the overseas companies that had the technology it needed. That this choice — neither diversifying nor settling for pure contract execution, but internalizing technology while remaining a specialist — coincided with the tailwind of expanding semiconductor investment is what appears to have produced today’s high-margin structure.

That said, whether this technology-led course retains the same strength from here remains uncertain in places. Semiconductor investment is a strongly cyclical industry, and how thick the order book will be once the domestic wave led by Rapidus has run its course in the late 2020s is hard to see at present. Nearly ten years have also passed since ICT was consolidated, and the record of raising the stake through additional investment suggests a deepening reliance on a single base in India. How to reconcile the accumulation of technology as an air-conditioning specialist, the line held since 1984, with concentration on a particular market and particular customers is the question Takasago now faces.