SHIP VISION 2030: consolidating the group and exiting kitchen operations (2025)

What changes when you reduce the count

This reorganisation is different in character from a retreat forced by crisis. Through the year to March 2025 the company had gone on raising revenue, and operating profit was above the prior year. That sixty-five companies were folded into forty-nine anyway comes down to something simple: so long as the firms acquired are left standing side by side, each keeps its own accounting, its own HR and its own information systems. It is telling that the effect showed up fastest in the dispensing-pharmacy business, where five companies became one — a cut in recruitment-development spending, exactly the sort of line item that duplicates, lifted the operating margin by 1.4 points. The skill of buying and the skill of making what you bought into one thing are not the same skill, and this company spent thirty-three years honing the first before turning to the second.

Consolidated operating profit fell in the first year all the same. The individual causes — a gap between condominium-sale phases, delayed delivery of materials, M&A fees — outweighed the savings from folding companies together, and it will take time for the gains from integration to appear as a group-level margin. As for the “¥1 trillion group by FY2025” that chairman and CEO Furukawa Kunihisa announced in 2019, the year to March 2026 came in at ¥718.1bn, short of it. SHIP VISION 2030 sets no ¥1 trillion figure among its quantitative targets; in its place stand three — 5% average annual growth, a 4% operating margin, 12% ROE. The phrase survives in a single line of the human-resources policy: building the people and the organisation to support what lies beyond ¥1 trillion in revenue.