Absorbing nine operating subsidiaries into one KADOKAWA (2013)

What it means to become a single company

The explanation that this was a tidying-up of duplicated back offices does not account for the merger. What Tsuguhiko, chairman and CEO, dismantled was the very mechanism that had carried the group’s profits through the late 2000s: Kadokawa Shoten and ASCII Media Works competing for the same authors while only their sales operations were pooled. Whoever hesitates over the cloud gets left behind; however big a success has grown, you have to be willing to throw it away — the words he used in 2010, now applied to his own company’s winning formula.

That said, what actually became one was the legal entity and the sign above the door. Pay scales remained divided by the firm each employee had come from, several labour unions carried on side by side, and fifteen months after the merger 232 people left through voluntary redundancy. The eight brand companies were reshuffled within two years, and the Kadokawa Shoten name vanished from the organisation. Making a company one thing and making its people and systems one thing proceed at different speeds; the nine-company merger carried that gap straight into the next merger.