Licensing large-panel polarizer technology to Hangzhou Jinjiang — leaving the volume zone (2017)

Reading the moment to hand over the world’s best product

Second or third place promises no real profit — president Takasaki Hideo’s way of putting it shows a stance that measures a business by profit rather than share. Judged by that standard, the polarizer business begun in 1975 and grown to roughly 40% of the world market was, in large panels, no longer worth defending. It looks like a judgement in which two readings coincided: that not handing it over meant being ground down in a price war, and that it should be handed over while it still commanded a fee. That a president some generations earlier had said the technology should simply be sold, and that a later president came round to handing part of it over, likewise shows how the assessment of the same product changes with the time.

That said, transferring the technology did not immediately move the concentration of earnings. About 70% of fiscal 2017 operating profit still rested on the optronics business centred on LCD components, and medical sales were $407.9M (¥44bn) in fiscal 2016 — far from the ¥300bn targeted for fiscal 2025. What the company that passed ¥1 trillion in revenue in the year to March 2025 now stands on cannot be explained by this one act alone. A decision to let go of the mainstay has, by its nature, to race the speed at which the next mainstay grows.