From ultra-fine wire trading to catheter manufacturing, and Japan’s first PTCA guidewire (1992)

Finding the place to transfer the technology — the place with no competitor

Read this pivot as a success story about a trading house shedding its skin to become a manufacturer, and you miss the essential part. What Asahi Intecc chose was a field where it would not meet its existing customers head-on, and where its own ultra-fine wire technology — drawing, torque, coating — would carry over intact. A guidewire pushed through a blocked coronary artery lies on the same line as an industrial rope, and yet nobody in Japan had gone near it. The core of the judgement that made the country’s first such product possible in 1992 lay in fixing the destination of the transfer in medicine, where the competition was thin.

Even so, the pivot took a long time to bear fruit. Medical devices demand manufacturing approvals and an accumulation of clinical use, and in the year to June 2002, when consolidated results were first disclosed, sales still stood at only $41.5M (¥5bn). It would be another twenty years and more before medicine accounted for nine-tenths of revenue and the company counted as a dedicated maker of cardiovascular devices. A materials firm’s change of business is not settled by whether the technology can be moved. It is settled by whether the firm can endure the years of building approvals and trust once it has moved.