Becoming a “2.5-tier-industry company” in the shipbuilding slump (1987)

Choosing the mix of businesses over the volume built

The heart of this decision lay less in the painful shrinkage of layoffs than in redirecting the resources they freed outside shipbuilding, deliberately shifting the weight of the businesses. The triumph of standing atop the world in shipbuilding was, seen from the other side, a constitution that absorbed the full swing of the shipbuilding market’s cycles. That President Kosaku Inaba carried out the second round of cuts as one piece with a reshuffling toward land machinery and industrial machinery, and raised it as a transformation into a “2.5-tier-industry company,” can be read as an attempt to remake that constitution itself.

Still, the switch from a management that chases the volume built to one that chooses the composition of businesses was not something a single decision could complete. Shipbuilding kept shrinking thereafter, and only through spin-off and a change of name did it finally leave the parent. The structural shift of the 1980s stands at the entrance of that long reshuffling; in placing the question of which businesses to hold, and how much, at the centre of management, it carried a reach that runs on to the later concentration on aero-engines and the letting-go of the founding trade.