Full container ships — and the world’s first pure car carrier (1970)

What it meant to split the bet across two ship types

The business the company declared it would throw everything into was the container ship; the pure car carrier came up quietly during the same few years. In a lecture in January 1969, executive vice-president Ueda Kazuo set out nothing but heavy conditions — ¥5bn for a single 700-box vessel, break-even far off, and failure for the company as a whole if it missed the turn. That the same financing plan listed reefer ships and car carriers alongside the containers suggests a calculation was at work: if liner freight rates collapsed under competition, there should still be cargo left to carry.

In the event, the side on which the company’s fate was staked piled up losses, and the side that looked like an afterthought is the one that survived. The reaction the Yomiuri Shimbun described in 1967 played out less as a surplus of conventional liners than as overcapacity and rate competition running on for half a century. Still, it would be going too far to call this foresight. The car-carrying ships worked as a business because a specific shipper stood behind them — the Toyota Motor of that era — and holding several ship types side by side is not the same as having seen which of them would pay.