Booking a loss on purpose: winding up Mexico, writing down the U.S. holding company (1998)

What a decision to drop the pretense left behind

Tsujimoto’s remark that he “dropped the pretense” and chose loss-making books can be read as, for a Japanese manager of that era, a rather unusual call. For a founder who leased rather than owned his head-office building and preached mi-no-take management, deciding to clear unrealised losses in a single stroke rather than carry them forward sat squarely along the line of his philosophy. The anecdote that he recognised losses beyond even what the auditors had flagged reflects a consistent pattern of judgment — choosing what helps the future numbers over dressing up the present ones.

Tsujimoto’s reading at the time — that “software development is entering an age strongly governed by a company’s financial health” — reads almost as a premonition of the later RE Engine era, when development budgets of tens of billions of yen became ordinary. Had he not chosen in 1998 to clean the wound before it could damage the balance sheet, the financial base that underpins the run of consecutive profit growth from the 2010s might have taken a different shape.