The Blue Yonder acquisition and the shift to a holding company: re-forming into an “operating-company system” (2021)

The MCA lesson, a quarter-century on

The Blue Yonder acquisition stands in fine contrast to MCA in 1990. Once, Matsushita bought, at great expense, a film company far from its core business, could not master the Hollywood logic in which talent decides value, and withdrew in five years. What it chose this time was not film but supply-chain software directly connected to the manufacturing floor. More than what you buy, whether you can handle what you bought with your own logic — this can be seen as a decision that, a quarter-century on, tried to give a different answer to the question MCA had left behind at a high price.

The re-forming of the vessel was also a dialogue with the past. The holding-company — operating-company system can be said to re-place, in modern form, the autonomous-management philosophy of the division system that Konosuke devised from his own weakness in 1933, now onto a giant group ninety years on. The organizational pendulum that had swung between centralization and decentralization swung back here toward decentralization once more. Whether that swing links to a recovery in earning power remains, as the revenue stalled at ¥8 trillion and the margin around 5% show, a question still without an answer.