Turning the ALC building material Hebel into a housing brand (1972)

Commercialising a material and entering an industry were two separate decisions

The key to this judgment is that “commercialising a material” and “entering the housing industry” are two separate decisions stacked on top of each other. The thoroughgoing diversification begun in 1961 produced the material Hebel, but whether to fashion it into a detached-house brand was another question altogether. Had Asahi Kasei stopped at selling the material to others it would have ended as one division of a building-materials maker; by stepping into housing and taking on construction and sales as well, it acquired a source of earnings whose cyclical rhythm differs from that of fibres and petrochemicals.

At the same time, Miyazaki himself acknowledged that this business was an outlying enclave, off the line of Asahi Kasei’s usual account of diversification as technologies connected by a single thread. What made the enclave hold was the way the market was cut — concentration on the Tokyo metropolitan area and on two-generation houses, both reasoned backward from the properties of the material — and it was that hold which kept housing from being sold in the age of selection and concentration. Including the way the falsification of pile-driving data in 2015 shook the record of a business built on trust, half a century since entry shows that the success or failure of a diversification hangs on what is built after the entry.