Divesting non-core businesses to focus on tires and solutions (2021)

Not scale, but which business mix best plays to your strengths

The heart of this reform is that it was not a retreat driven by financial crisis but a deliberate letting-go — regardless of boom or bust — of businesses the company had held onto as monuments to past success. Since the 1988 Firestone acquisition, Bridgestone had kept its place among the world’s largest by buying businesses and expanding. Shuichi Ishibashi sold off part of that accumulation — cutting loose operations that were still earning if they sat far from the core — in order to narrow the company to two pillars, tires and solutions. It was a shift from managing by buying and widening to managing by selling and narrowing, a choice by which he drew a line, himself, under the expansionist bent the company had run on since its founding.

That said, narrowing the businesses runs back-to-back with thinning the sources of growth. The 2021 profit, swollen by gains on sales, is not necessarily a measure of underlying strength, and whether solutions can grow into a pillar to stand alongside the core tire business is still unclear. In January 2026, Ishibashi handed the Global CEO role to Yasuhiro Morita, leaving how to grow the pared-down portfolio to the next regime. Not chasing scale, but working out which combination of businesses best draws on the company’s strengths — the Ishibashi era’s wholesale divestment remains a reform that tried to give one answer to that question.