Rejecting “exit fibre” and staying put (1975)

What it means to resist the mood of “exiting fibre”

The heart of this decision was neither a financial turnaround nor a pivot into new businesses, but the fact that Fujiyoshi deliberately resisted the mood of an age in which leaving fibre was taken to be the right answer. Amid a rising yen and the chase of later-developing countries, commodity fibre was hard for an advanced economy to make money on — a reading Fujiyoshi shared. Even so, he located the source of competitiveness not in the field of business itself but in the depth of technology surrounding the material. The force with which he pushed back against the question urging him to “get out of fibre” was also the pride of a man who had resolved not to abandon it.

The choice to stay in fibre worked on Toray over a long span of time. The revival of the fibre business through HeatTech, and its rise to become the world’s largest carbon-fibre maker, were fruit obtainable only because it never let go of fibre and its neighbouring technologies. That road, however, was not straight. In the late 1970s there were periods of loss on a non-consolidated basis, and carbon fibre has repeatedly been shaken by sudden drops in aircraft demand. To keep betting on fibre carried a commensurate price. Whether Fujiyoshi’s judgement — choosing fibre in an age when exiting it looked like the rational course — was right cannot be measured over a short accounting period, but only on a yardstick of decades.