From the founding family to a career insider — and the CEO/COO split (2008)

A career insider as president, and where the power stayed

Read this succession only as the founding family stepping off the front line and you miss what was actually designed. What Sankyo built was a two-tier structure: Sawai, the career insider, was placed as president and COO, while Busujima Hideyuki became chairman and CEO, holding strategic decision-making and the chair of the board. Daily execution to the insider, final judgement and oversight of the business as a whole to the family — the April 2008 change of president, made together with the new executive-officer system, can be read as a single rearrangement that cut authority in two. A company the founder had built himself was opened up on the execution side alone, while the family kept the capital and the strategy.

That said, one cannot claim the career-insider presidency took hold. Sawai lasted about four years in the job; revenue, which stood at ¥280.5bn in the year he took over, fell to ¥187.9bn the following year amid the financial crisis and tighter regulation. The presidency moved on to Tsutsui and others, and no single insider came to lead the company for long. What did persist, until Busujima Hideyuki stepped back in 2022, was the structure of a chairman-CEO at the apex with the president as the instrument of execution. The essential point about a change at the top of a family firm may show up less in who becomes president than in where the real power is left.