Announcing — and abandoning — the sale of the African business to AkzoNobel (2022)

A retreat settled outside the company’s own will

What is singular about this decision is that its resolution was handed to something outside the company. Writing off an African business that had run six straight years of losses amid currency weakness and slowing growth — and pressing ahead with the sale even after profitability had begun to recover — suggests a real anxiety about the structural difficulty of managing a distant operation from a Japanese head office. In the end, however, what overturned that judgement was not the company’s own management decision but the review of a third party: South Africa’s competition authority.

An attempt to let go of part of a map built up through overseas M&A was blocked by a different logic altogether — the competitive conditions of the acquired company’s own market. For a business operating globally, this episode shows that even a withdrawal cannot be completed on the seller’s intent alone. How Kansai Paint, left in Africa as a result, now engages with the region under President Mouri Satoshi’s banner of ONE KANSAI remains a question worth watching.