After the morning walk, I took a breakfast at a hotel in the center of Metropolis. The resort like atmosphere has been disappeared and the restaurant had a few empty tables. A waiter said that it was crowded through 19th Thursday and that guests began to go back to their homes from Friday. Most of these people might be preparing themselves for the hard works starting again on 23rd Monday.
On August 20th, Friday, three presidents of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank, Fuji Bank and Industrial Bank of Japan attended a press meeting together and announced plans formally to merger their operations by 2002, creating the world's largest banking group with assets of 141 trillion yen ($1.3 trillion.) Some of industry leaders and financial analysts appreciated the merger highly, while the others kept a sharp lookout for it. Both of them seemed to be well-grounded. But the reactions of former people might come from their wishful thinkings.
The key points of their success or failure would be whether they could develop a single and perfect banking system managing all three banks fast enough for competing with other powerful financial groups in the world. Many successful big mergers in the past were lead by companies which had succeeded in developing competitive managing systems. They meregered the others with this powerful arms. For example, an airline company which succeeded in developing an excellent managing system covering reservation of seats, sales of tickets, transportation and delivery of checked-in baggage, etc. meregered the others. In other words, to develop the best management system first is the necessity for successful mergers. Then the effective operation of a huge mergered company is resulted in. In this case there is merger first and then they have to develop newly the management systems. I am afraid that this case seems to be in the opposite direction. Each of Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank and Industrial Bank of Japan have had special friendly relations with Fujitsu, the most powerful soft system developer in Japan. It might be one of the observatory points how they work together for developing new management systems.
If this merger fails, Japanese economy will be collapsed. So I hope they will succeed by all means. I might be one who has an wishful thinking.