Buying the other half of TH FOODS (2025)

Thirty-six years of giving technology away on half the rights

One sentence names the core of this decision: that the return on providing technology was limited. From 1989, for thirty-six years, Kameda handed its usuyaki manufacturing technology to its American joint venture. Holding 50%, it got back only half the profit the technology it gave away produced. So it kept its hands off any technology other than usuyaki — a restraint entirely rational while the joint venture continued, which turned into lost opportunity as the American gluten-free market widened. What ¥63.1 billion untied was a capital relationship, and at the same time a constraint the company had been imposing on itself.

The weight of the sum remains, however. Amortisation of ¥13.8 billion of goodwill and ¥26.7 billion of intangibles will eat into profit over twenty to thirty-seven years, and capital efficiency was raised as an issue at the shareholders’ meeting; the company explains its own expected margin dip in the early 2030s by the amortisation burden of growth investment. Recovery is a contest measured in decades. In the same year it released one North American business for ¥2.9 billion and put ¥63.1 billion into the other — whether concentrating resources that had been split in two was right depends on whether the products it now lifts and shifts into that operation actually sell on American shelves.