The first postwar Japanese plant export, taken end to end (1954)

From contract labour to engineering — one order that changed what the company was

The heart of this decision was seeing that a skill honed on a single site — the rigging and installation of heavy machinery inside a steelworks — could be carried into an entirely different context: a plant exported overseas. Keep doing only domestic in-plant handling and it is hard to escape a structure in which the customer’s production plan determines your results. The Yugoslav order can be seen as the first move that opened a hole in that structure.

That said, at this point the Yugoslav job was still a one-off venture for Sankyu. Looking back over how it was institutionalized as kiko by the 1959 change of name, and how it led on to the Usiminas steelworks in Brazil and the network of overseas subsidiaries of the 1960s, the 1954 order was in the end the turning point at which the character of the company itself began to change — from a labour contractor into a general firm handling the export and installation of heavy plant. The experience of having port-yard skills valued across a national border already carried, at this early date, the prototype of the Sankyu that today runs engineering and logistics abroad as a matched pair.