Converting to the pure holding company Fuji Oil Holdings (2015)

What changing the structure moved, and what it did not

What Fuji Oil gave up in this transition can be seen as the premise that headquarters holds the individual business judgements. By handing authority to regional headquarters and creating a structure in which each area buys and builds for itself, the pace of acquisitions — Brazil, Malaysia, Australia, the United States in succession — did indeed rise. Sales grew nearly two and a half times in ten years. That it moved in the order of changing the shape of the organization first and then passing deals through it is consistent with the ten-year roadmap president Shimizu had set out.

But to the extent that matters were entrusted to the regions, the ability to look across the businesses themselves weakened. Until the deterioration in earnings in North American industrial chocolate began to drag down group profit, the thinness of management along the business axis appears to have been hard to see. The 2025 decision to revert to an operating holding company shows the difficulty of reconciling, within a single organization, moving fast by area and managing deeply by business. The shape of an organization changes the speed of management, but does not determine the content of the business — a structural change that went out and came back over ten years gives material for re-examining where that line falls.