Acquiring ICL: a three-pole mainframe structure across Europe, North America and Japan (1990)

The bet of holding a niche worldwide

What makes this acquisition interesting is that it internationalized a strength that came precisely from being a follower. Having abandoned a proprietary architecture and chosen IBM compatibility can look like the weakness of owning no technology of one’s own. But so long as IBM’s customers were everywhere in the world, the demand for compatible machines was everywhere too. Fujitsu went after that demand in one stroke, by buying ICL in Europe and Amdahl in North America. In the way it brought Western makers under its wing amid the rallying cries for nurturing home-grown industry, one can glimpse a distinctive cast of mind unbound by the domestic frame.

Yet the compatible line was also one bound to the fate of the very party it followed. As the mainframe itself shrank under the pressure of distributed processing and the cloud, the three-pole structure built worldwide on IBM compatibility lost its meaning as a pillar of growth. Even so, the European and North American footholds gained through the acquisitions outlasted the mainframe age and remained as a base for systems integration and services. The bet of holding a niche on a global scale, while heading toward its end as a mainframe business, can be said to have left behind for later generations the foundation on which Fujitsu operates around the world.