NEXT 2025: restructuring and about 2,000 job cuts amid the control-equipment slump (2024)

On rebuilding after losing alone

What this decision reflects is a structure in which going deep, in the good years, into major customers and into China turned into dead weight the moment demand reversed. A strategy of selling complex solutions to the largest firms at the leading edge of the industry produces high growth while those customers are expanding, but it is inseparable from a vulnerability to the full force of the cycle. That OMRON alone fell conspicuously further while peers such as Keyence and SMC were also posting lower profits can be read as the price of the concentration that lay behind the way it earned. In the decision to launch the first voluntary-retirement programme since 2002 while still profitable, one can see an attempt to rearrange the structure in advance, on the premise that the environment has changed.

Cutting roughly ¥30 billion of fixed costs does not, by itself, bring back lost competitiveness. Tsujinaga himself led the previous strategy, and reaching the medium-term targets he has set depends on how far the rethinking of the China concentration and the expansion into Western markets and non-manufacturing fields bear fruit. The job cuts are only one part of the restructuring; what remains is the harder-to-measure task of recovering a customer-first culture and a venture spirit. Operating profit has bottomed for now, but the gap to Keyence remains open, and how far the rebuilding of this old name will go is still not possible to judge.