Absorbing Sanwa Door Kogyo: from shutter specialist to general building-materials maker (1974)

The decision to take down the specialist’s sign

The heart of this decision is that Sanwa did not diversify because results had turned bad; it reworked its product mix while its main line was growing fastest. In the year to August 1973 heavy shutters were up 55% on the prior year, in the thick of the building boom. Even so, president Takayama Manji judged that light shutters would eventually fall to a third of the mix, and built the shape of a company that carried house shutters and doors alongside them before he needed it. Six years earlier he had said he wanted the firm to grow as a shutter specialist; this can be read as taking that policy back while demand was still strong.

The other thing that acquires meaning in hindsight is that the relationship with the American company began as an exchange of technology. Overhead Door Corporation handed over manufacturing know-how, and Sanwa handed over shutter technology. Tied as an equal, mutual arrangement, that relationship would turn twenty-two years later into an acquisition. That the overseas expansion began not from the logic of capital but from a practical need to build a product is hard to overlook when reading the three-pole structure that followed.