Open Up Group - Company History

The legal entity that is now Open Up Group was created in August 1997 in Sagamihara, Kanagawa, by the trading house Sanei Shoji, as a special-purpose subsidiary under Japan’s disabled-persons employment law — a vehicle for meeting a statutory hiring quota, not a business with intentions of its own. Precisely because it held nothing, it could be filled with anything. In November 2004 the investment fund Amuse Capital bought all of its shares, looking for an operating business to load onto a listable shell; in June 2005 it acquired Trust Tech, an engineer-dispatch firm, and the shell became a technical staffing company. In 2008 Trust Tech was absorbed and its name taken as the parent’s own. The entity was continuous; the business was not.

The other lineage began in 1976 as Sato Architectural Design Office, incorporated in 1990 as Yumeshin. Its business was dispatching construction site-management engineers to general contractors — demand that grew through the late 1990s as contractors held down permanent hiring. Yumeshin listed on the Osaka exchange’s Hercules market in 2003, moved to a pure holding structure in 2005, and from then on expanded by acquiring subsidiaries and then merging, splitting and renaming them in a near-continuous cycle.

By 2005 the two lineages that would later become one company had converged on the same method without knowing it: keep the corporate shell, change what is inside it, and reorganize subsidiaries as freely as departments. That shared instinct is what made the 2021 combination possible, and it explains most of what the group has done since.

Trust Tech listed on JASDAQ in June 2007 — two years after becoming an engineer-dispatch company — and climbed the market tiers to the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section by December 2013. Revenue moved from ¥15.5bn in FY11 to ¥30.1bn in FY15, then accelerated as acquisitions came in sequence: staffing and engineering firms at home, MTrec in Britain in 2016, an Indonesian arm, the IT-dispatch firm Fusion Eye in 2017. FY16 revenue reached ¥43.0bn, 1.4 times the prior year.

In December 2017 the company bought a British staffing group, followed by Quattro in 2018 and a Vietnamese business in 2019 — but the overseas segment grew in size without growing in profit: ¥22.0bn of revenue and an operating loss in FY17, ¥31.2bn and ¥0.2bn of operating profit in FY18. Meanwhile the domestic technical segment produced ¥40.4bn and ¥5.0bn in FY18 and carried the group. The gap between areas where scale converted into earnings and areas where it did not was already visible.

In January 2020 Trust Tech renamed itself BeNEXT Group and moved to a holding structure, unifying subsidiary names under one brand. It had entered construction dispatch in November 2019 by acquisition — and in FY20 that segment produced ¥8.7bn of revenue, a ¥28.3bn operating loss and a ¥29.4bn impairment, turning a group that had earned ¥4.7bn the year before into a ¥25.2bn operating loss. The goodwill had been priced on demand and margins that the business did not deliver. Buying one business area after another had outrun the group’s ability to verify what it was buying.

In April 2021 BeNEXT Group absorbed Yumeshin Holdings, paying entirely in stock, and renamed itself Yumeshin BeNEXT Group. The combination created a roughly ¥200bn technical staffing group, third or fourth in its industry, with four segments: machinery/electrical and IT, overseas, manufacturing, and construction. The logic was direct — BeNEXT had entered construction on its own and written off ¥29.4bn for the attempt, and Yumeshin brought the real demand base and scale that would fix it.

It largely worked. FY21 revenue reached ¥156.6bn, 1.6 times the prior year; construction went from ¥8.7bn of revenue and a ¥28.3bn loss to ¥36.9bn and ¥5.3bn of profit. The technical segment held its place as the earnings pillar at ¥70.7bn and ¥7.1bn. Overseas remained the exception, with a small operating loss and another impairment.

Leadership split between the two sides: Nishida Yutaka, who had come from Recruit Staffing to run BeNEXT in 2018, as chairman and CEO; Sato Hiroteru, a relative of Yumeshin’s founder, as president and COO. The company moved to the Prime Market in April 2022 in the exchange’s reclassification.

In January 2023, less than two years after the merger, the company dropped both predecessor names and became Open Up Group. What followed was an unusually concentrated round of internal reorganization — splits, absorptions and renamings that ended with one operating company per business area: construction dispatch, machinery and electrical dispatch, IT dispatch, IT contracting, and disability employment. In April 2024 the swapping extended to whole segments: a subsidiary was sold to UT Group while two of UT Group’s companies were bought, both parties being listed staffing firms.

In March 2025 the group sold its entire European holding, exiting seven years after entering. Overseas revenue had grown but never earned properly — ¥27.7bn of revenue for ¥0.9bn of operating profit in FY24 — and the segment’s headcount fell 99% with the sale. What remained was domestic: FY24 revenue of ¥188.0bn, operating profit ¥16.2bn and net profit ¥12.6bn, a record, with machinery/electrical and IT at ¥101.5bn — 54% of revenue and 68% of operating profit — and construction at ¥56.9bn, lifted by the site-manager shortage created by the 2024 overtime rules.

In July 2025 Sato Hiroteru stepped back to a board seat and Nishida took chairman, president and CEO together, completing the shift away from founding-family involvement. The medium-term plan for the year to June 2026 keeps the two domestic pillars and narrows overseas to Southeast Asia and foreign engineers placed in Japan. Twenty-eight years after a quota-compliance subsidiary was registered in Sagamihara, the group has arrived at its current shape by repeatedly buying and selling the businesses inside it — and there is no sign the method is finished.