Turning away from “expansion”: selling the food and liquor businesses (1993)

From “healthy losses” to capital-efficiency management — how to read the turn

The core of this decision is that the successors set out to replace the very structure of decision-making — concentrated for thirty-one years in one man, Miyazaki Teru — with the objective yardstick of capital efficiency. “Healthy losses” had been the force that pushed diversification forward through a period of steady growth, but once growth stopped, the same idea risked turning into a device that concealed the inefficiency of individual businesses. Without the accidental trigger of Miyazaki’s sudden death, there is no telling how much later this turn would have come.

That said, the ten years it took from the introduction of divisional balance sheets to the completion of the food and liquor disposals is also the consequence of Asahi Kasei choosing a route that rearranged its businesses while protecting employment. This staged method of transfer carried forward into the later three-segment structure of Material, Homes and Health Care, and then into the growth strategy of overseas M&A from the 2010s. From thirty-one years of “expansion” to thirty of “selection and concentration” — this turning point can be seen as having set the frame of the Asahi Kasei that followed.