Acquiring Overhead Door and Novoferm: the Japan–US–Europe three-pole structure (2003)

Was there a way to avoid buying?

What stands out across these seven years is that Sanwa consistently chose, in facing overseas markets, to take the local leader whole rather than to export or form joint ventures. Openings hardware differs by place in dimensions, standards and installation practice, so a model of shipping product and selling it barely works. Putting under its wing companies whose main lines — American overhead doors, European industrial doors — were unfamiliar in Japan can be read as a policy of holding, as they were, businesses fitted to demand in each region, rather than spreading a Japanese product.

At the same time, a configuration of three regionally self-contained businesses standing side by side generated a new load of its own. Running them so that each acquired company keeps its brand and its distribution has the merit of preserving local competitiveness, but it leaves open the question of where decisions for the whole are to be made. That the shift to a holding company came in 2007, four years after the three-pole structure was completed, suggests that designing the operation after the acquisitions took longer than the acquisitions themselves. What to buy abroad, and how to arrange what you have bought, went on as separate decisions.