From OEM supply to selling under the Takeuchi name (1978)

Technology without a sales arm — under whose name does it reach the world?

The heart of this decision, one might say, lay in whether a company that had got ahead on technology would go on borrowing its selling power from others. As long as the product it was first in the world to build went out under someone else’s name, it could earn volume, but the standing in the market accumulated for another company — and the moment a customer began manufacturing for itself, the volume vanished too. The reply Takeuchi met, “never heard of Takeuchi,” showed the people involved in the most painful possible form that being first to develop and being recognised in the market are two different things.

The road it chose, however, was not a frontal assault. Instead of building a brand at home, it removed the market where its name did not carry and shifted its centre of gravity to Europe, with its abundance of work on cramped sites. It was a decision to go looking for the way its product came alive and to re-select the market accordingly — and it appears to have prepared, at the same time, both the high export ratio of later years and its mirror image, a sensitivity to overseas economic swings. Where does a small technology-holding company decide under whose name it reaches the world? Takeuchi’s choice leaves one answer to that question.