Restructuring for the death of the core business: VISION75 and the second founding (2004)

What to keep and what to let go

The heart of this decision lies in the fact that it was aimed not at a financial crisis but at the disappearance of the core business that had been the very source of profit — and that the people who had lived that success took the knife to it themselves. For Fuji Photo Film, which had built the world’s number-two position in photographic film, admitting that its founding business was shrinking and cutting on the order of five thousand jobs was also a choice to repudiate its own past success. Komori recast the technology of a vanishing photographic film not as an asset to be discarded but as one that could be redeployed, and parcelled it out to liquid-crystal materials and healthcare. The character of this restructuring shows in that sorting of what to protect from what to abandon.

That Kodak, facing the disappearance of the same market, went bankrupt while Fuji Photo Film survived shows that what divided their fates was not the presence or absence of a crisis but how each faced it. Even so, VISION75 did not solve everything. The digital camera itself would in time be displaced by the smartphone, and the company went on shifting the weight of its business toward cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and the contract manufacturing of biopharmaceuticals. Its later ¥1-trillion healthcare vision lies on the extension of this 2004 choice. Whether a company that has achieved success can let it go and remake itself when its core business disappears — Fuji Photo Film’s ‘second founding’ left one answer to that question.