Ending the holding structure and renaming the company SWCC (2022)

The room opened by striking out the name

What President Hasegawa Takayo folded up was a pure holding structure that had run for seventeen years, and the change of name was the outward notice of that reorganization. Once the operating companies had been consolidated into one, keeping a holding company above them merely inserted a layer between strategy and execution. What the new name — with “Showa” and “cable” dropped — took on was the substance of removing that layer and returning to being a company that runs its own business.

Changing a name does not, however, change a business. What carried the profit growth after SWCC became SWCC was product for power infrastructure; solutions such as AI-based prediction of workplace accidents are still at the demonstration stage. Striking the word for one’s field out of the company name was not a decision that created a new business but one that opened room to create it. Whether the line “not only infrastructure, not only cable” catches up with reality is, as of this writing, still ahead.