The Siemens alliance and the founding of Fuji Denki (1923)

It did not build the business — it built a company

The road of starting heavy electrical machinery as a division of its own was not taken. What Furukawa Electric did instead was erect a separate company with ¥10m of capital, holding 70,000 of its 200,000 shares itself, giving 60,000 to Siemens and leaving the rest to public subscription. Technology and patents were brought in wholesale from outside, and management was entrusted to Natori Wasaku, a man from beyond the company. The post-war recession of the early 1920s, which left neither Furukawa Gomei nor Furukawa Electric able to put up the money alone, appears to have produced, as a result, a company open to outside capital and outside people.

Yet this way of building left little of the fruit with Furukawa Electric itself. In 1935 Fuji Denki let go of its telecommunications division as Fuji Tsushinki Seizo, which became Fujitsu. Nippon Light Metal in 1939 and Nippon Zeon in 1950 were born by the same procedure, and each grew up as a company separate from the parent. Of Furukawa Electric’s ¥6.89bn of sales in the year to March 1955, 62.3% was still wire and cable. The habit of putting new businesses outside left the core, one could say, a wire company.