In 2009, Olympus Corp. sold a profitable diagnostic unit in hopes to conceal decades of losses in order to shore up balance sheets. The Japanese camera company has spent over $1.3 billion in deals that had to do very little with their business, such as face cream, plastic cookware and recycling companies. Doing this wrote off 76% of their value within only one year.
President of Olympus, Shuichi Takayama, at a press conference
On November 8th, the company revealed that these purchases were made in order to hide losses that date back to the 1990s.
As discussed in class 3, on ethics and decision making, the three men involved with the scandal had “inherited” these values from previous managers of hiding losses. This shows, that if unethical methods are practiced in companies, then employees learn from these methods and use them later on in the future.
Companies in the future can learn from this scandal, and weigh out the benefits of making unethical decisions. Olympus shares fell 29% on November the 8th, the day that the scandal was announced and have continued to fall. Were their choices really worth it?