This was a favorite saying of Mr. Honda to his engineers, but there was one big problem he couldn’t solve no matter how hard he thought about it–machine tools. To improve the specification of components, you need high-precision machine tools. Even though the company was performing marvelously, the Dream E-Type was a big hit and sales of the Cub F-Type were positively explosive, Mr. Honda was still totally dissatisfied with the level of precision of his components. Although he wanted to be number one in the world, he realized more than anyone else that he would never be able to make a breakthrough using his existing machine tools. In June 1952, Honda carried out its second capital increase bringing the company’s capitalization to ¥6 million and Fujisawa became senior managing director. In October of the same year, the company decided on a program to invest as much as ¥450 million in the latest imported machine tools.
