Absorbing ¥250 billion of losses and cutting into the aircraft “sanctuary” (2004)

How far can a company pushed by its bank choose its own businesses?

At the centre of this decision is the predicament of a trading house merged at its bank’s convenience and then hurried through the clean-up. The natural order would have been to decide which businesses to keep and which to release, and only then to fix the losses. Sojitz was given the reverse: chased by its rating and its funding, it was forced to announce a plan carrying a headline total while the choice of businesses was still deferred. Nishimura Hidetoshi’s description of the loss figure as an “estimate” captures that inversion.

Cutting into the sanctuary was no simpler. Aircraft was the business that carried the old Nissho Iwai’s sense of itself as a first-rank house; the company split over whether to give up the sales rights, and the detail of the withdrawal missed its promised deadline. Efficiency alone could not bind two organisations of different descent into one rebuilding. Yet it was by passing through that painful entrance that Sojitz repaired its finances over the following decade and began looking for a colour of its own. How far a company founded at a bank’s urging can choose its own businesses is the question it has been answering ever since.