Betting {{money:27400000000:2014}} in one year on smartphone touch sensors (2013)

The strength of betting on a growing market, and the weakness of leaning on it

At the centre of this decision lies the very pattern the company has repeated: take the technology inherited from the founding trade and stake it on a large market. Applying photoengraving to decoration, and decoration to touch sensors, and then concentrating resources on demand of a wholly different order of magnitude in smartphones, shows a consistency recognisably Nihon Shashin Insatsu’s own. But where earlier diversification had distributed one technology across several uses, the 2013 investment was different in kind: it bound market, customer and technical format into one. The strength of betting on a growing market and the weakness of leaning on it were the two faces of the same decision.

When that weakness surfaced as impairments and voluntary redundancies, NISSHA turned the same instinct toward contract manufacturing for medical devices and pharmaceuticals. Choosing a market less exposed to the business cycle, and putting the precision converting learned in printing to work in it, is a shift built on what the touch-sensor experience taught. Yet medical, grown by successive acquisitions, carries a different weight of its own — the risk of goodwill impairment. The cost of concentrated investment prompts the next move, and that move brings new problems of its own; whether the company can keep turning change into evolution remains an open question.