Concentrating on transdermal drugs after the loss (1981)

The year it decided not to become a general pharmaceutical company

What the 1981 narrowing discarded was not unsellable products but the path toward becoming a general pharmaceutical company. The ordinary response for a company that had posted a loss the year before is to clear out unprofitable lines or move into another field, and Nakatomi Hirotaka — president from May that year at forty-four — made neither his aim. Salonpas, launched in 1934, was left in place as the flagship, and only the two techniques inside it were extracted: suppressing skin irritation, and raising transdermal absorption. Combined and named the transdermal therapeutic system, they were installed as the company’s core technology.

Defining the company as the formulation technology originating in Salonpas can be seen to have set both its direction and its dead end at once. Precisely because it was defined as the technique of passing drugs through the skin, the company could move its point of sale from the pharmacy counter to the doctor’s prescription, and the prescription anti-inflammatory Mohrus of May 1988 became possible. As long as it holds the same definition, it cannot venture into tablets or injections. It took nearly twenty years to show in the figures: in the year to February 1999, analgesic anti-inflammatory patches were 90% of revenue of ¥49.1 billion. The expansion available to a company that has narrowed itself is not to choose a different market but to rewrite the measure of the market it chose.