From regional listing to the first section in four years (1972)

Four years spent expanding without borrowing

A listing is not, in itself, a decision that changes a business. What the company actually did between 1968 and 1972 was enter water treatment, buy a metropolitan contractor as a subsidiary and start a housing business; the listing was the work of shifting where the money for all that came from — out of debt and into equity. It had the steady earnings of utility work and the credit standing that came with them, and the choice of this period is visible precisely in its refusal to fund expansion on borrowing against that credit alone.

The speed catches the eye too. Four years from appearing on the Osaka and Fukuoka markets to the first section in Tokyo; ten months from the Tokyo second section. Revenue in construction is governed by the order backlog and does not suddenly double. Even so, capital went from ¥500 million to ¥1.1 billion, and unconsolidated sales from ¥26.9 billion in the year to April 1971 to ¥105.1 billion in the year to April 1981. In April 2022 those same shares moved to the Prime Market in the exchange’s reclassification. The words “first section”, won in 1972, changed their name after fifty years.