Buying Warwick: local North American production via Sanyo Manufacturing (1976)

When a reactive decision becomes a first move

What makes this acquisition interesting is that it was not conceived as a strategy at all; it began from the passive circumstance of being unable to refuse the request of its largest customer. The pressure — refuse, and lose the sales channel — pushed Sanyo, as it turned out, into the earliest large-scale North American local production of any Japanese company. Building on the spot to avoid trade friction was a path Japanese manufacturing would later take widely, and Sanyo got there first not through an active strategy but within the dynamics of a customer relationship.

Yet the pattern of being pulled abroad by a customer seems to shadow the company Sanyo later became. Opening markets not with a strong brand or a decisive hit of its own, but by expanding to meet another party’s demand — this passivity, which won it the honour of a pioneer in overseas production, was the flip side of its faint outline as a full-line maker. The lead in local production it seized amid trade friction was a decision that mirrors, at once, this company’s strength and its weakness.