Handing the maintenance work away and switching to foreign semiconductor distribution (1990)

The idea of moving the vessel

The business of Tel Kanri Service, registered in March 1986, was the maintenance of buildings and their fixtures. In that same year the parent company saw sales fall to about half the previous year’s and went through its first operating loss since founding, together with the simultaneous resignation of three representative directors. Four and a half years later, that company began selling foreign-made semiconductors. In the choice to swap the contents of a vessel already inside the group, rather than to spin the business out into a new company, one can read a wariness about continuing to hold equipment and components inside a single legal entity. The sharp fall of 1986 was event enough to make the parent measure the weight of carrying two banners.

That said, no material has so far been found that tells who decided what, and how, in September 1990. Tokyo Electron Device was unlisted at the time, there was no reporting that took the company as its subject, and what survives amounts to a few lines in the corporate history section of the securities report. The motive for choosing the vessel can only be read backward from what Higashi Tetsuro said in 1997 — to use other companies’ strengths for everything outside the core technology. One could say the outline of this decision can be measured only by the volume of business moved across afterward over eight years: the Fujitsu products, the Motorola products, the entire electronic components division and three design and development centres.