The 6:4 plan — diversifying beyond insulators (1964)

How far the company’s own territory extends

President Nobuchi Sanji had introduced a divisional structure on taking office in 1959, creating a chemical-equipment division and a new-products division, and in 1962 had licensed underdrain technology from Leopold of the United States. What the 6:4 plan of 1964 fixed was not merely the quantity of diversification. Its character lies in the fact that it first drew the boundary reachable by the firing technology of insulators and the sales channels of acid-resistant equipment, and treated only what lay inside it as a candidate for growth.

The five-year deadline for reaching 6:4 was not met. According to an account given in 1984 by finance director Yogo Akira, power-related products still made up 94% of sales a decade later, in the year to March 1974; the ratio only began to move after catalytic substrates for automotive exhaust were commercialised in 1976. President Shibata Masaharu likewise said it took twenty years to get there. A plan that missed as a numerical target survived instead as a line drawn on a map — a statement of how far, technology by technology, the company considered its own territory to extend.