Downsizing: cutting about 2,600 jobs (1978)

The weight of a decision to “go back to the old headcount”

The core of this decision lies in pulling the workforce — swollen on the assumption of endless expansion — back in one stroke to a size matched to the company’s earning power. President Oya’s words — “now that the mainstay fibre business no longer earns, we return the headcount to what it once was” — amounted to disowning the very success he had lived through in the high-growth years. That roughly one in four employees left within half a year reflected both the depth of the crisis and a management that had cut off its own line of retreat. Because the trigger was an external one — the synthetic-fibre recession — a contraction in scale was unavoidable; even so, the way it was carried out left no small wound on the shop floor.

That said, it cannot be said that this slimming put Teijin back on a path to recovery. Headcount could be compressed, but the future businesses that Oya’s one-man rule had pushed — oil development and the like — bore no fruit, and the gap with Toray and Asahi Kasei only widened. Where the downsizing was a symptomatic treatment that merely stanched the immediate losses, the essential question — how to rebuild the pillars of growth — was carried over to the new regime under President Tokusue, formed after Oya’s sudden death. Not how many people to cut, but how to earn with the businesses left standing: the drastic surgery of 1978 was a turning point that forced that question on Teijin.