Absorbing Burroughs Japan and becoming Nihon Unisys (1988)

The gap between the scale of the merger and the change in freedom

What Nihon Univac obtained in this merger was two lines of customers and a nationwide maintenance network; what it did not obtain was the authority to decide the product. It issued, at a merger ratio of 33 to 1, new shares amounting to nearly a third of its total shares outstanding, and went as far as matching its corporate name to the American parent’s new one — yet the sole-agency contract that took effect in the same month still held the same three items as before: import sales, maintenance, and the right to use the trademark. The character of this decision shows in the gap between the scale of the integration and the change in management’s freedom.

That said, it is hard to imagine that Nihon Univac had another option at the time. Both the products and the trademark belonged to the American side, and once the supplier had become a single company there was no longer any reason for two sales companies to stand side by side in Japan. The name settled on in April 1988 lasted thirty-four years. The agency contract, for its part, was partly revised in March 1991 and again in October 2005, the later revision changing it into a form under which the company paid $225 million as a lump-sum licence fee for the trademark and related rights.