Both pillars down at once: the 1,143-job restructuring (2016)

Stopping the bleeding is not the same as designing growth

The heart of this decision was to identify the fronts it was unlikely to win, book the losses first, and get the body back into profit. To conclude that the scale gap with ASML in lithography “could not be recovered” must have been a heavy call, seen from inside a company that took pride in its founding technology. That Vice-President Oka — an outsider from finance who stood on the numbers — led the restructuring from the front, while President Ushida held the organisation together under the banner of carrying the founding craft forward, divided the roles of aggressive retreat and defensive continuity, and in that division the character of this restructuring shows itself.

Shrinking to balance, though, breeds no next pillar. Trimming the two pillars back to profitability succeeded in stopping the blood loss, but it did not answer what to grow from there. For the price of that pain — 1,143 voluntary redundancies and special losses on the order of $487M (¥53bn) — Nikon is still searching for commensurate growth. To narrow scale and firm up the defence in a downturn is a different job from building a new source of revenue beyond it, and companies that can carry through the former often stumble at the latter. The 2016 restructuring left the later Nikon with the question of how the speed of stopping the bleeding differs from the design of growth.