Listing System Pro on Nasdaq Japan (2002)

What the money forced the company to answer

Read as the rite of passage a growing company reaches at a milestone, this listing loses its meaning. What Henmi Yoshichika had chosen earlier was a management style that stayed light by refusing seven of every ten orders. Listing sat on the opposite side of that choice: in exchange for explaining results to outside shareholders indefinitely, it bought the standing ability to draw funds from the market to hire. That the second offering in 2004 was ten times the size of the IPO shows that, for this company, listing was not a single financing but the tap itself.

Yet obtaining money and being able to decide where to put it are not the same thing. After listing, sales concentrated in contract development of mobile-handset software, and every period saw customers each exceeding 10% of total sales. The question of which market to aim the newly hired engineers at was not solved by listing; if anything, having ample funds sharpened it. The answer to that question came eight years later, in the Catena merger.