Buying foreign liquor brands while shochu was still strong (1986)

The awkwardness of moving at the peak

Planting the next thing while the core business is strong sounds, put into words, like plain good sense. In practice it requires the resolve to allocate money and people to an overseas business of unreadable outcome while the earner is doing well. That Takara Shuzo could carry it out was, it seems, because the memory of having damaged the core business with the beer withdrawal remained in management. This company knew from experience that the shochu boom would end someday. That it moved at the peak is precisely where the force of this judgment lies.

That said, most of the seeds sown at this point did not flower. Neither whisky nor bourbon became a pillar of the business, and this diversification was not what rescued the company from stagnation in the 1990s. Even so, the experience of buying and running things overseas stayed with the company. When, more than twenty years later, that experience bore fruit in the different form of Japanese-food distribution, the diversification of the 1980s can in hindsight be read as a long piece of foreshadowing. Whether an advance investment succeeds is often decided somewhere other than where the investor imagined.