A second US plant: AURORA PACKING (2015)

What a ¥263m price tag was pointing at

The $2.2M (¥263m) paid in this acquisition is less than 1% of consolidated sales in the same year. The cash taken on exceeded the purchase price, so the net movement was ¥65m coming in. In money terms it was a small transaction, but what it bought was neither profit nor a customer list: it was plant that keeps slaughtering cattle in American cattle country, the skills of the people working there, and a site carrying the certifications that exports require. If the motive for entering Nebraska as a joint venture in 1989 was to hold the entrance of the raw material, the choice made in 2015 doubled that entrance and put the company on the selling side of high-grade American beef under its own name.

Ten years on, the plant at North Aurora, Illinois, has reached the point of being rebuilt. The mid-term plan states that a new facility completed in 2026 will raise processing capacity 2.5 times, and sets targets of ¥600bn in sales and ¥17bn in operating profit for the year to February 2029. A company that wrote off ¥66m of goodwill in one go as immaterial, on an acquisition price of ¥263m, has placed that acquisition at the centre of the plan. The purchase with the small price tag drew in, a decade later, the heaviest capital investment in the group.