Integrating with Fuji Electronics by joint share transfer (2014)

What an integration of equals left unfinished

That Macnica set up a joint share transfer with a partner more than five times smaller in revenue is where the character of this integration shows. Buying Fuji Electronics outright would have been the quicker route, but the acquired sales organization would have become one department inside the buyer, and the standing of the people who had carried the relationships with mid-sized and small customers would have changed with it. What this integration wanted was neither plants nor technology: it was the customer list the other side had built over decades, and the people who held it. Once those people move, the value one went to acquire is gone. A holding company — the form that set the two side by side — can be read as a way of buying time against that loss.

Left side by side, though, the effect of the integration stops at purchasing leverage. Merging the operating companies into one was carried over to October 2020, and the Fuji Electronics name did not leave the holding company’s title until August 2022. Counting from the agreement, it took eight years for the two companies to become one name. Whether the integration was right can only be measured across the whole of that eight-year sequence, not by the first year’s results.

Macnica’s revenue, $2.4B (¥256bn) in the year to March 2014, reached $7.3B (¥1.03tn) on a consolidated basis in the year to March 2023. It is the only semiconductor distributor in Japan to have passed ¥1 trillion.