Selling the mail-delivery business and committing to 3PL (2003)

The logic of efficiency, and a decision the official record does not hold

The core of this decision was deciding first what to abandon. Mail delivery — handling correspondence and small parcels — looks to have been fated to sink into price competition in the face of the institutional change of postal privatisation, and the judgement not to cling to it built the foundation of the twenty years of successive M&A that followed. It can be read as a case in which the decision to discard is what made a business of expansion possible.

That said, the buyer, the price and the exact timing of the mail-delivery sale are not recorded in the company’s own 有価証券報告書 corporate-history section. That this decision survives only as President Kamata Masahiko’s own recollection, and that the story the company still tells — “the home for large firms’ non-core logistics subsidiaries” — was built on it, is where the weight of the turn can be seen.