Merging with Harima to found Ishikawajima-Harima Heavy Industries (1960)

Designing the portfolio, not chasing scale

The heart of this merger was not enlarging scale in a single leap, but the fact that a land-heavy Ishikawajima and a sea-heavy Harima formed a pair that filled each other’s gaps. President Doko read early the era’s drift toward oil and ever-larger tankers, found in Harima the facilities that matched that reading, and meshed the two companies together; Shinto’s production innovations then turned that meshing into the power to win orders on low prices and short build times. In the very midst of a shipbuilding boom, the decision to reassemble — facilities and people alike — into the large-ship market that neither could reach alone reveals a will that prizes the design of the portfolio over sheer scale.

Yet Ishikawajima-Harima did not hold for long the “sea” it gained in the merger. From the 1970s oil shocks tanker demand thinned structurally; the company was forced into layoffs in 1979 and 1987, and with a rising yen and the ascent of Korean and Chinese rivals its shipbuilding lost international competitiveness. In 2002 it spun off the shipbuilding business, and in 2007 it changed its name to “IHI,” dropping the two words “Ishikawajima” and “shipbuilding” from its banner. The merger that combined land and sea to reach the summit became, half a century on, also the entrance to a road that would keep aero-engines and land machinery as the mainstream while letting go of the founding business at sea.