Rebuilding from a record ¥382.5 billion loss: Hiroaki Kurokawa’s restructuring (2003)

Twenty years able to shrink, unable to envision

The significance of this rebuild weighs less as a tale of success than as a case that mirrors the difficulty of structural reform. The direction had been clear since 1993: shed the constitution that depended on mainframes and earn instead from software and services — a prescription that, each time it was raised, was dismissed as “pie in the sky.” Hiroaki Kurokawa’s rebuild, too, can be read as one driven first and foremost to stop the losses, never quite reaching an answer to the question of what to keep and win with. The more a company has reached the summit through technology, it appears, the harder it finds it to let go of the experience of success and recompose its business model.

Yet without stanching the bleeding there is no next step. Shrinking the $3.1B (¥383bn) loss and stacking up, one by one, the decisions to let go of the founding hardware businesses left room, twenty years on, to steer toward a concentration on services. It could discard, but drawing growth from the businesses it kept was long deferred — the structural reform that began in 2002 would not turn from shrinkage to growth until Takahito Tokita’s Uvance shift. That crisis response and growth strategy are different things is what these twenty years quietly show.