Absorbing Toyo Computer Service: making contract processing the core (1975)

The month a company sheltered by its keiretsu went outside

Measured by size, the merger of October 1975 is a small event. Set it beside the fact that the company opened a Tokyo branch in the same month, though, and what the decision chose becomes easier to see. Rather than stay in the safe position of a joint computing centre for sixty affiliated companies, it would take on clerical processing — the daily grind of a client’s operations — and go out selling beyond the keiretsu. This can be read as the month a four-and-a-half-year-old company decided where to put the foundation of its earnings.

That choice carried a long way. The skill of holding a customer’s operations and keeping them running without a stop became the strength in credit-card and consumer-credit systems in the 1990s — and, at the same time, became the exposure of carrying a huge project alone. Deciding what you will take on is also deciding which failures you will take on. The record of the merger is a single line, but the direction that line pointed to would be confirmed again and again in the company’s later history.