Integrating Aisin Seiki and Aisin AW under the single name Aisin (2019)

Undoing, under the parent’s name, a subsidiary that outgrew it

The heart of this integration is that the twin pillars produced by the two decisions of 1965 and 1969 were returned to one for the age of the EV. Folding the company that carried the half-century mainstay of automatic transmissions into a parent no smaller in scale, and unifying even the corporate name, can be read as an effort to harden — inside the company and out — the intent to re-engineer an AT-dependent earnings structure toward electric drive. The character of the reorganization shows in how it dissolved, under the parent’s name, the reversal by which the subsidiary had grown larger than the parent.

That said, making the name and the vessel one does not by itself guarantee competitiveness in electrification. How much of the technology and manufacturing accumulated in automatic transmissions can be carried across to electric drive units, and how the gap with front-runners such as Denso can be closed, are the questions left to management after the integration. Can the AT business — obtained half a century ago by buying into a patent through a joint venture — this time be re-bridged, by Aisin’s own hand, to the next mainstay? Whether the decision proves right cannot be fully judged until that path comes into view.