Company history

Wakebayashi Yasuhiro was born into a family of Noh performers, read his way through Ritsumeikan University, and joined Nippon Olivetti selling accounting computers. The job put him in front of tax and accounting practices in every prefecture of Japan, and when Olivetti tied up with TKC in the 1970s he began hearing, from the inside, the problems their small-business clients could not solve. In 1991 he turned that address book into a company, founding Nihon M&A Center in Shinjuku, Tokyo — with accounting firms from across the country as its shareholders.

The shareholding was the strategy. Succession deals for small companies are a business in which the information sits scattered among individual accountants and regional bankers, and professional confidentiality keeps anyone from pooling it; without a place where the deals collect, there is no brokerage. Every rival was a boutique working its own contacts. Nihon M&A Center was designed from its first day as the hub the contacts reported into — even though its founder had never done a deal.

The demand had to be summoned as well as served. In 1992 Wakebayashi bought the front page of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun to announce that he would find readers a successor company — 後継社, one character away from the familiar “successor,” and a deliberate signal that a business itself could change hands. Roughly 400 companies wrote in. In 1999 his book on the coming age of small-company M&A brought requests from regional banks to train their staff, and in 2000 he institutionalised those requests as the Nationwide Financial Institutions M&A Study Group. Alliance contracts can be poached; a decade of teaching a banker his trade cannot.

The company took the name Nihon M&A Center in 2002 and moved to Marunouchi in 2003, largely to hire better. Brokerage was then thought unfit for the public markets — a business whose stock in trade is other people’s secrets — and it was direct encouragement from H.I.S. founder Sawada Hideo that pushed Wakebayashi to go anyway. The listing on the Mothers market in 2006, followed by the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2007, bought something the boutiques could not buy: national recognition and the credit standing to recruit and expand. Nihon M&A Center opened the industry to the capital markets.

In 2008 it took an equity stake in Yano Research Institute, pulling market research into the group, and Wakebayashi handed the presidency to Miyake Suguru, a salesman’s salesman who drove the firm deeper into its partner banks. The instruments were institutional rather than contractual: an M&A Senior Expert certification in 2012 that formalised training for bank employees, and a Bank of the Year award in 2013 that set regional banks competing against each other on referrals. A Nagoya office the same year began filling in the map.

Education, certification, awards and branches together hardened the two-layer network of accountants and bankers into something closer to infrastructure. Deals flowed in from partner institutions; Nihon M&A Center took a success fee when they closed. With the share of small companies lacking an heir climbing year after year, a social problem and a revenue line had become the same curve — a rare and comfortable position, and one that made growth look automatic.

From the mid-2010s the firm built outward. A Singapore office in 2016 opened cross-border work between Japanese small companies and Southeast Asian buyers, and a valuation institute founded the same year brought pricing in house. Representative offices followed in Indonesia in 2019 and Malaysia in 2020, and at home the group absorbed Spear as a wholly owned subsidiary. In October 2021, on its thirtieth anniversary, Nihon M&A Center converted to a pure holding company — a structure meant, in part, to let management catch up with a group that had outgrown a single company.

It was two months too late. In December 2021 the firm disclosed improper accounting: revenue recognised before deals had actually closed, in 83 entries across prior years, with sales staff and their managers copying signatures onto contracts. The investigation laid the blame not on individuals but on a culture in which the sales target outranked everything, and on the evaluation system that enforced it.

The damage was structural rather than financial. Booking revenue early is a timing error; restated to the right period, the cumulative numbers barely move. But accountants and bankers refer their own clients to a broker only on the assumption that the broker’s work is sound — and that assumption, built over thirty years, was what the disclosure put in question.

Rebuilding meant slowing down. Tighter screening, rewritten rules for the sales floor and real supervision of individual mandates lengthened the road from engagement to signing — and in a business paid only on completion, a longer road shows up directly as revenue booked later. In March 2024 Takeuchi Naoki took the presidency and called the task a second founding: restore the quality of the work and open new ground at the same time, without letting the first goal eat the second.

The new ground has two fronts. In October 2024 the group set up Nihon Search Fund to back search-fund succession — instead of hunting for an heir inside the family or the company, placing an outside manager who buys in and takes over — a genuine departure for a firm whose core has always been brokering share transfers. Abroad, four bases in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam apply the domestic playbook, patiently cultivating local accountants and banks, to cross-border deals that carry far more legal and tax complexity than anything at home.

The trade-off surfaced in the numbers almost immediately. Deal counts softened while average fees rose as the group leaned toward larger mid-cap mandates, and the year to March 2025 produced the unusual combination of falling revenue and record ordinary profit — quantity and quality moving in opposite directions on the same statement. The year to March 2026 brought double-digit growth and a fresh profit record, which is the first real evidence that repairing the work before chasing the number was the right order.