Concentrating on HDD spindle motors — and breaking free of the mainstay (1994)

Win the world’s top spot, then build a company that need not lean on it

The heart of this decision was not opening a new market but deliberately thinning, while it was still at its peak, the company’s dependence on the very mainstay it had fought to make number one in the world. HDD spindle motors were the strength that pushed Nidec to the global top, and that position existed precisely because it had concentrated there. From the loss of 1995 Nagamori read that this same strength was at once its greatest weakness; he deliberately lowered the mainstay’s share of sales and chose to widen the product line into automotive and home appliances. A decision to cut back, by one’s own hand, the share of a growing business cannot wait until a crisis has already deepened.

The HDD would in time recede as smartphones and semiconductor storage spread, but by then Nidec’s product mix had already broadened into automotive and home appliances. Taking the world’s top spot on a single leg and then remaking the body so that it need not rely on that leg — this two-stage design was a guard against sinking together with the mainstay’s rise and fall. Yet because most of the new pillars were obtained through acquisition, success or failure hinged on how deftly the company bought and how strongly it integrated. The courage to thin a world-leading mainstay and the capacity to buy up the next one supported one and the same transformation.