The ¥11.5bn Hunza acquisition — and the closure of Ticket Camp (2015)

A company in a hurry to diversify, before it learned how

Judged on the materials available at the time, the decision to buy is easy enough to understand. The problem — revenue concentrated in a single title — was clearly defined, the target business was genuinely growing, and the cash was there. What tripped the company up lay less in whether to buy than in what to watch once it had. Ticket resale is a business in which the convenience of users and the wishes of promoters and performers can collide head-on, and a buyer chasing revenue growth alone finds it hard to see that this collision is a condition of the business’s survival. A company hurrying to diversify failed to take the measure of the particular friction inside the business it diversified into.

Even so, the failure left more than a loss. Under Kimura an executive-officer system was introduced and subsidiary oversight was rebuilt. That structure was tested again when improper payments surfaced at Chariloto in 2024, leading to further measures — a screening department for supplier selection, mandatory records of meetings with counterparties. Buying a business and governing the business you bought are two different capabilities; as MIXI stacks up acquisitions in sports and overseas betting, the question left by that ¥11.5 billion in 2015 remains in the present tense.