Merging with Nippon Milk Community to create Megmilk Snow Brand (2009)

A price of 0.2 shares

Look at the terms of the merger: Snow Brand shareholders received 0.2 shares of the holding company for each share held, Nippon Milk Community shareholders 0.48. The two share counts were constructed differently, so no simple ranking can be read off the numbers; what remains is that a company which had brought its own rebuilding within sight and a company only just out of negative net worth formed a single holding company on terms close to equal. The party Snow Brand had turned to for help when it let the milk business go was, seven years later, negotiating a ratio and stepping under the same umbrella.

The merger widened the entrance for raw-milk procurement to nine producer bodies and gave the company’s development capability a route onto the milk shelf. Even so, the losses in milk remained, and the reduction target in the 2022 medium-term plan went unmet. In its centenary year of 2025 Megmilk Snow Brand set out, under Next Design 2030, a restructuring of 20–30% of its domestic production sites, and by May 2026 it had decided to end production at three plants — Kobe, Okoppe and Kawagoe. The work of unwinding the overlap in production assets — divided in 2002, brought back together in 2009 — is still going on, one plant at a time.