Becoming Nakanishi Inc. and merging the sales agent (1996)

Not the name — the wall between making and selling

Read the 1996 reorganization as a dental-instrument maker merely changing its name and you miss the core of it. What sat at the centre was that a structure in which the company that made things and the company that sold them had been separate since the founding was gathered inside a single firm. Once maker and seller are one organization, what customers ask for reaches development directly, without passing through an agent. That Nakanishi Eiichi went on to call the trinity of development, manufacturing and sales the company’s strength appears to rest on the wall between making and selling having come down in this year.

That said, integration did not immediately promise world leadership. Even in 2000 the company held about 15% of the world market for dental rotary instruments, second to Germany’s KaVo. For a structure with making and selling joined to bear fruit took the money raised by the OTC registration and more than twenty years of rebuilding a direct sales network across Europe and Asia. Less in the decision to change the name than in using it as the occasion to reconnect development and market inside one company lay the seed of the high margins of later years.