The turn to the BluStellar strategy: beyond selling hardware outright (2021)

A company that defended through crisis turning to offence

At the heart of this decision is the question of whether a company that, driven by crisis, gave itself over to defence can — at the end of that defence — turn once more to the offensive. Over ten years NEC let go of the areas around its founding businesses and, by shrinking into domestic IT, stopped the losses. The BluStellar strategy was an attempt to raise up again, from that shrunken body, a business model that sells problem-solving rather than one-off products. The success or failure of the strategy can be seen to hinge on whether the lightness born of defence could be reassembled into resources for offence.

That said, how far the framing of raising social and economic value at once is matched by substance remains hard to see. While the design that binds DX, generative AI and security together bore fruit as record profits, competition in generative AI is fast and global in scale, and the bundled strength will not necessarily last. After twenty years given over to defence, what kind of offence will NEC choose? — the BluStellar strategy and the CSG acquisition that followed connect to a present-day question of what a company that has survived a crisis bets on next. Its answer, still too early to declare, is likely to be reflected by the mid-term plans to come.