Diversifying into electronics with shadow masks and photomasks (1958)

Printing technology off paper — a bet on growing the next pillar

The heart of this decision can be read not as a defensive move forced by financial crisis but as an offensive one — stepping deliberately into electronic components, an unrelated field, at a time when the core business was still growing. Kitajima Orie applied his conviction that “one or two pillars is dangerous” not only to paper containers and packaging but to colour television and semiconductors, the most advanced markets of the day. The company’s technical bent shows in its willingness to stake a laboratory and capital on the judgment that the fine plate-making skills honed in printing would also work on metal and glass.

Granted, yields were low in the early days of mass production, and the toil that comes with being a pioneer was no small thing. Even so, this pillar set outside paper grew into one of the great trunks supporting the company in an age when print media would shrink. That a printing house is today also a major supplier of electronic components and battery materials lies on a line running straight from that sequence of choices — joining MITI’s trial production more than half a century ago and building a dust-free plant at Kamifukuoka. How to grow the next pillar alongside the core business — for having faced that question so early, this is an instructive decision.