Retreating from the outdoors, back to the running shoe (2023)

Undoing a diversification to recover a core

Asics’s move into the outdoors, buying Sweden’s Haglöfs in 2010, was a bid for a second pillar beside athletic footwear — the classic answer for a maker worried about leaning on one line. It did not hold. Impairments on overseas subsidiaries drove a net loss of $183.9M (¥20bn) in 2018, the pandemic added another in 2020, and the diversified group had spread its resources thin across businesses that shared little. Yasuhito Hirota, arriving from a trading house to run the recovery, read the losses as a verdict on breadth and chose to reverse it: concentrate on running, and let the rest go.

Selling Haglöfs outright in December 2023 completed the retreat and freed capital for the core, and the numbers followed — operating margin climbing from 2.7% at the 2018 trough to 17.6% by 2025, with record profit each year. The lesson is the mirror of the founding one: Asics wins by fidelity to the performance shoe and loses when it strays, so its sharpest strategic act here was subtraction, not addition. That the turnaround came from undoing an acquisition rather than making one is what marks the decision out — growth, for this company, has repeatedly meant returning to what it already was.