Leaving shipbuilding for marine engines and port cranes (2021)

A withdrawal decided by looking at what was left

Describing this as a piecemeal sell-off forced by enormous losses captures only half of the withdrawal. What Mitsui E&S let go was shipbuilding; what it kept were marine engines and port cranes, both of which — as president Takahashi Takeyuki put it — had developed out of shipbuilding. The line was drawn not only by the demands of cash flow but by which technologies could earn. A crane business with roughly 80 per cent of the domestic market, and the standing of a senior licensee of MAN Energy Solutions, were assets that could be held without continuing to build hulls.

To read the reorganisation purely as managerial acuity, however, is to depart from what the principals said. President Oka Ryoichi described the cause of the losses as putting revenue first and closing his eyes to risk. A company that chose to reform alone after its integration with Kawasaki Heavy Industries collapsed in 2013 only actually carried that reform out after losing ¥150 billion on the Indonesian project. Over the forty years in which employment in Japanese shipbuilding fell to a quarter of its former size, every company had the same opportunity to defer the decision to withdraw. The conditions that make a company finally act are, in most cases, supplied from outside.