The family motion that turned a machine maker into an investor (2008)

Protect the machine, or keep the company

A company that had taken more than half the world with the performance of its main product stood at the point where the market for that product itself disappeared. Two paths were available. One was to keep fighting on the machine side — put out digital-ready minilabs, and fill the decline in photo shops with unit prices and servicing. The other was to abandon the definition of the company as a company that makes machines. What Nishimoto Hirotsugu demanded by motion in 2008 was the latter, and in that sense the object of the renewal appears to have been less the management than the company’s own self-definition.

Whether the judgment was right is measured by where the cash it had earned was put. The ¥25bn the minilabs had accumulated flowed into agriculture and into medicine, and much of it was let go within a few years. Some of it remained. The Japan Medical Data Center, taken over from Olympus in 2013, became JMDC, and grew into an asset whose 33% stake was transferred to Omron in 2022 for about ¥111.8bn. That money gathered as payment for machines placed in photo shops changed form, by way of a medical data company, into sale proceeds in the hundred-billion-yen range is the most concrete outcome of this conversion.