Spinning off batteries and magnetic tape as Maxell — and selling it to Hitachi (1961)

On handing a business you raised to your former parent

The dry cells and recording tape begun in 1950 were still growing products when they were let go. No record survives of the participants explaining the separation, but set the fact that the Suita coatings plant and the Maxell division’s Senrioka plant were built one after another within about a year against the fact that tapes made up 68% of sales in fiscal 1967, and it looks like a choice about where to put limited money and people. It reads as a decision to put down the burden of building a consumer sales channel from scratch, in exchange for going deeper into industrial materials.

That said, the interest in consumer goods did not die. Eleven years after the separation, in 1972, the company was still talking about tape-based ornaments and household goods, and the following year about a Ginza sales floor and a target of ¥1bn a month. Even so the sales mix did not come back: 28% to the electrical-machinery industry, more than 70% to general industrial materials. The division it let go grew into Hitachi Maxell, a brand known in every home, while the side that stayed went on stacking volume in materials on which only the customer’s name ever appears. It can be read as the fork at which two roads diverged from the same adhesive technology.