From importer to instrument maker: the Omori works (1933)

When a trading house acquires a factory

The Yamatake Shokai of 1932 was a company that scraped together its ¥300,000 of capital by valuing receivables and inventory at ¥180,000 and goodwill at ¥120,000, its debts shelved and its affairs under the supervision of Yasuda Bank. Even to start assembling instruments it needed the bank’s consent under the terms of that arrangement; its first workshop was an office room on the third floor of the Yaesu Building, and its first delivery came to ¥6,133 in all. One can read the decision as a trading house with no capacity to build going out to close, by itself, the price gap on the goods it had been selling.

That said, what became its own at this point was only the assembly step. The main components were still imported from Brown, with some subcontracting and domestic materials filling the rest; the design and the engineering remained borrowed. The rectifiers, hardness testers, marine speed logs and carburizing agents it took up in the same period never became pillars — what remained was Brown instruments alone, where demand and reputation had come first. Less a matter of choosing well than of betting on what was left. The question of how to make borrowed technology its own was carried over to the postwar negotiations with the company that had absorbed Brown.