Carving power cable into Viscas with Furukawa — and dividing the domestic business fifteen years later (2001)

Owning it jointly, as a way of buying time

A fifty-fifty venture was an answer in between withdrawal and continuation. Domestic power cable ranges overlapped from maker to maker, and no company could hold selling prices on its own. Yet folding a business whose grid-maintenance demand still remained would have meant losing the trade with the electric utilities altogether. Setting up a company with Furukawa Electric in 2001 and moving manufacturing, sales and research into it by 2005 looks like a choice to share the economics until it became clear where demand was going. What the freed resources went to — an optical communications base in North America and a wire-harness subsidiary in Europe — shows what was given priority in those years.

But across fifteen years of joint ownership domestic demand did not return. Investment in transmission infrastructure did not grow after the Great East Japan Earthquake, and in 2016 the domestic business was divided by product line: underground and submarine cable to Furukawa, distribution and overhead transmission to Fujikura. The copper wire taken back moved out again in April 2024, conductor business and all, to Fujikura Dia Cable; it did not remain in the parent. A joint venture is a means of buying time, not of creating demand. Where to put part of the founding trade is a question that, twenty years on, is still unsettled.