Six generations of family succession — from Nakamura Koichi to Nakamura Kimihiro (2016)

What the design of the handover produced

What distinguishes this succession is that the title of president and the final authority of the CEO were deliberately handed over separately, nine years apart. In 2016 Kimihiro was given the presidency and executive management first, with an interval in which Koichi stayed involved as chairman; only in 2025 was CEO authority itself transferred. This can be read not as a one-off generational change but as a design worked out over time — giving the successor a period to master the work while gradually thinning the founding family’s involvement.

What the 2025 change left Koichi was the post of chairman and chairman of the board without representative authority: withdrawn from executive management, yet still able to take part in running the board — a stance that does not entirely let go of the founding family’s presence. For a company where the family has held the presidency for roughly a century across six generations, the question is whether family succession continues from here or whether the pattern changes in Kimihiro’s generation — and how the next handover is designed will be worth watching.