Buying Lancer of the US and Gram of Denmark — beverage equipment in North America, refrigeration in Europe (2006)

What comes after choosing to buy time

The core of these two deals was not what to sell overseas but how to obtain an overseas business — a choice of means. A company that had spent twenty-five years from 1981 stacking up local subsidiaries and plants bought, whole, the second-largest American maker of beverage dispensers and a long-established European refrigerator manufacturer. Raising products of its own and building the channels for them would have taken a decade apiece; paying a price shortened it. That the head of the founding family committed to investment on this scale within a year of returning to the company says something, too, about the speed of the decision.

Making a purchased business run as part of one’s own, though, does not end at signing. Three months after the Gram acquisition came a stock market listing in the middle of a financial crisis, at the moment restaurant capital spending was freezing. Whether the range assembled by acquisition really meshed region by region was the sort of thing that would be tested over the following decade and more. How far today’s Hoshizaki — still stacking up acquisitions that fill product gaps region by region — is bound together as a single company is a question the choices of 2006 and 2008 posed and have not finished asking.