From consulting and photographic film to in-hospital logistics (1997)

Choosing the terms on which you hold another’s shelves

The point of this shift was not that a new product had been found, but that the hospital’s inventory was taken onto Ship’s own books. Under off-site SPD the goods sitting on the shelves inside the hospital become the company’s stock, and the working capital required is larger than under conventional delivery. The securities filings recorded that as a risk — and recorded, in the same breath, that because the contract puts every clinical material under one supplier, losing it to a competitor means losing the entire account. Hard to take, easy to lose. In exchange, once you are in, you live inside the hospital’s logistics. It looks like a bet on a set of terms quite different from the discount war among medical-equipment distributors.

What the bet cost was the founding franchise. The medical-imaging division handed to Fuji Film Medical West Japan in October 1999 was precisely the Fuji Photo Film business begun three months after the company was founded. How much conviction lay behind letting go of the earner to pour resources into an undeveloped outsourcing trade is not recorded. The result, though, is: the in-hospital logistics work started in February 1997 was a business selling $3.2B (¥510bn) in the year to March 2026.