Buying Lucent’s optical fibre business — and the world’s number-two share (2001)

Buy on collateral that has risen; pay after it has fallen

The unrealized gain on the JDS Uniphase shares, spoken of as some ¥2 trillion, had fallen to ¥500bn, and then to around ¥150bn, before the contract was even signed. A purchase decided on the strength of a stock that had risen was paid for after it had fallen. Furukawa Junnosuke said he had “decided on the acquisition reading three to five years ahead,” and had American optical fibre demand indeed returned within three to five years as he read it, the arithmetic would have worked. It took more than ten years to return, and that gap showed up as net losses exceeding ¥250bn over two years.

Even so, one cannot flatly say the asset itself was the error. Lucent’s roughly 900 patents and the licence to Corning’s patents were not lost, and the business carried at a loss for more than twenty years was reorganized into Lightera in 2025, now supporting data-centre products that account for over 30% of information and communications solutions revenue. Had it been let go, that harvest would have belonged to someone else. The outline of this decision lies in the way a judgement recorded as a failed acquisition came to be assessed differently through the years of simply not selling.