The serial retreat from founding hardware: semiconductors, mobile phones and PCs (2010)

Quick to decide what to cut, slow to conceive what to keep

To read this serial retreat as no more than a record of defeat is one-sided. Had Fujitsu gone on carrying loss-making hardware, it would have eaten into the earnings of its systems-integration business as well. The decision to push semiconductors, mobile phones and PCs outside can be read as an unavoidable tidying-up, made in order to travel light and concentrate on the businesses that could earn. While Japan’s electronics makers struggled with an image of the all-round manufacturer they could no longer manage, Fujitsu handed down its decisions to discard relatively quickly.

The problem is that, against the speed of discarding, the conception of what to keep lagged behind. What to let go of was settled one after another, yet the question of what to sell from the businesses it kept, and how to grow them, hung in the air for nearly twenty years. Selection and concentration lead to growth only once there is a picture of what to concentrate on. Fujitsu’s twenty years of continuous discarding quietly show that cutting things loose, by itself, does not bring growth back.