Mizue Okuda joined the company in 1991.
It was after the collapse of the bubble economy, a period when various companies were successively going bankrupt.
Ito Akira Sangyo Co., Ltd.'s management was also becoming severe.

We thoroughly reviewed the business operations, eliminated waste, and restructured by downsizing factories through selection and concentration, enabling operations with a small number of staff.

As a result, the number of employees became 9, and the business scale became compact.
Amidst this, three young employees whom Akihiro had been nurturing reportedly resigned.

I felt that my father, who had overcome both the bubble collapse and the Lehman Shock, was very disheartened at that time. That's when I told him I wanted to succeed him as president.

The organizational reform was what Mizue, as the new president, undertook.

After the bubble economy collapse, a system was established to review operations and enable management with a small number of people.
Although sales had decreased, the company was in a state where it could generate proper profits.
To continue this and reverse it into growth, organizational development was necessary.

There is one more thing we are conscious of in organizational development.
That is not to give instructions to employees.

When I first joined the company, my father would give instructions on how to do things to other employees, but for some reason, he never gave me any instructions.

Akihiro's style was to show the goal but never teach the path to get there. At times, he would even tell Mizue, who had no sales experience, to go out and do sales. Mizue didn't know what to do, but she would visit companies three times more than others, just trying to move more than anyone else, and conduct sales.

I never asked my father for instructions on how to do things. But thanks to that, it's certain that I developed the ability to think about what to do to achieve the desired results.

This way of thinking is also applied in the current management of Ito Akira Sangyo Co., Ltd. A culture where employees think and act independently fosters their growth, which is necessary for the company to grow further.

Processing is also a value-added service for the steel materials sold by Ito Akira Sangyo Co., Ltd.
By introducing large processing machines, it became possible to apply various types of processing to steel materials.

And by creating videos of processing samples and publishing them on YouTube, they are promoting what kind of processing they can do.

Since customers have different preferences, such as wanting delivery in a nearly finished state or having processing done halfway and completing the finishing themselves, we add value to steel materials by processing them according to customer requests.

Ito Akira Sangyo Co., Ltd. is transforming from a 'company where you can get anything' that handles any type of steel material, to a 'company that can do anything' by also performing processing according to customer needs.