Adding automotive parts to the charter — from spinner to parts maker (1972)

The time contained in one line of a charter

The resolution of December 1972 was neither a plant nor an acquisition, merely the procedural addition of one line to the company’s business purposes. And yet without that line a spinning company cannot make car parts. Where the 1966 move into bowling ended within a few years in a loss of some ¥600 million, this venture — equally a step outside spinning and weaving — lasted, and the reason can be seen in the product it had ready: seat fabric, a woven good on the direct extension of what the company already made. Whether the chosen field had continuity with the existing technology is what separated the two attempts at diversification.

What is easy to miss is how long the pivot took to bear fruit. For more than ten years after the charter was rewritten, reported sales marked time in the ¥30 billion range, and ordinary profit swung between losses and gains of a few hundred million yen. Only from the 1990s could one say in figures that the outline of the company had changed; parent-only sales of ¥877.6 billion in the year to March 2006 were roughly forty times those of the year to April 1973. The weaving company Toyoda Sakichi raised as a sales channel for his looms became, over thirty years, a company that supplies the whole interior of an automobile.