Abandoning the display business and concentrating on semiconductor inspection (2009)

Not a spread, but the one point you can win

The core of this decision is that although it was forced by crisis, it was not a defensive contraction but an offensive concentration. Two pillars are meant to hold the company up when one of them sinks. But when capital spending in both fields moves with the same economic wave, spreading the bet removes no risk at all. What Okabayashi Osamu chose was not to prop up two sinking pillars evenly, but to throw away the one he could not win with and move the resources to the one he could. When diversification stops being a defence, concentration becomes the weapon of the niche mid-sized firm — a paradox this decision brings into view.

Concentration, of course, pays hugely when it lands and narrows your escape routes when it does not. What let Lasertec make that wager work was the lightness of owning no factory, a company culture that grew more confident the harder the technology became, and the nerve to move first on EUV while the market was still invisible. Beyond the monopoly it won lies a new problem — dependence on the semiconductor cycle. The choice of 2009, to give up half of revenue, stands as a case in which preferring the sharpness of focus over the comfort of a spread turned a small company into a very large one.