The hostile bid for Sankyo Seiki, and a conglomerate that became a target (1985)

Chase scale, or stick to the core business

At the heart of this decision lies a single question: stay with the bearings that were the company’s trade, or take scale and diversification through acquisition. Takahashi chose the second without hesitation, and pushed a specialist parts maker into the front rank of the industry worldwide. That expansionary drive showed most starkly in the 1985 attempt to take Sankyo Seiki by force. But this move, the forerunner of hostile M&A in Japan, ran into the wall of a corporate society in which banks, trading partners and the labour union closed ranks like a household to defend independence, and it was repulsed. A logic that placed scale above all else could not yet take root in the Japan of that era.

The irony is that a company trying to swallow another was itself nearly swallowed by foreign investors at the same moment. Of the businesses acquired, light-emitting diodes and small motors still contribute to earnings today; the semiconductor venture, into which a great deal of money went, is gone. Not every aggressive acquisition bore fruit. Even so, Takahashi’s conception — bind other companies together around a core competence in making parts cheaply and in volume — was inherited by the later Minebea Mitsumi as the route by which it recovered scale through M&A. Chase scale, or stick to the core business: the question Takahashi forced on his era has not aged, now that consolidation is running through the components industry again.