Buying Trust Tech into a disability-employment shell (2005)

How the name that was bought became the name of the company

The June 2005 acquisition is hard to picture if read as an ordinary corporate purchase. Seller and buyer were under the control of the same investment fund, and the target company had been established only eight months before the deal. The substance of the transaction was closer to a choice of arrangement — which business to load onto an entity aiming at a listing. Onto a company created for disability employment, put manufacturing contracting; then put engineer dispatch on top of that; then take off the businesses that do not fit. That sequence is packed into less than a year, from November 2004 to September 2005.

What resulted was a company in which the continuity of the legal entity and the continuity of the business do not match. The registered incorporation is Sagamihara, August 1997; the substantive original business is Trust Tech, established in September 2004; the corporate name moved in 2008 from the buyer to the bought, then to BeNEXT in 2020 and to Open Up in 2023. An entity placed in 1997 to satisfy a statutory employment quota now operates as a TSE Prime-listed company posting ¥187.9bn of revenue in the year to June 2025.