Company history

Kakaku.com began in December 1997, when a twenty-four-year-old, Mitsuaki Makino, founded a small company called Core Price and launched the kakaku.com price-comparison site. The idea was simple and, for its moment, new: let a shopper see side by side the different prices each electronics retailer charged for the same product. It arrived just as the internet was entering Japanese homes — Yahoo Japan had opened in 1996, Rakuten in 1997 — and it carried, from the first day, the shape of the business Kakaku.com still runs on. It held no inventory and no stores; it charged the merchants it listed. The attention of the side comparing prices was what drew the listings from the side being compared.

Makino had designed the venture to end. He said afterwards that he had decided at the outset to quit once he had earned $4.1M (¥500m), and he built the company toward an early exit. By 2000 he had reorganized it from Core Price into Kakaku.com, Inc., giving the near-personal project the frame of a proper corporation.

In 2001, at twenty-eight, Makino sold kakaku.com to the investment firm ICP for about $20.6M (¥3bn) — more than five times the target he had set — and retired. Yoshiteru Akita, who ran ICP, stepped in as the second president, a founder’s departure flowing straight into the buyer becoming the operator. The following year Digital Garage, an internet-investment firm co-founded by Joichi Ito, took a large capital stake and made Kakaku.com a subsidiary, positioning it for the public market.

Kakaku.com went public fast: it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market in October 2003, six years after its founding, and moved up to the First Section in 2005 — a pace that was striking even for an internet company. But the more consequential move of these years was not the listing. In 2005 Atsuhiro Murakami, who had joined the year before, launched Tabelog, a site of user-written restaurant reviews. He deliberately stood it up as a separate brand rather than an extension of kakaku.com, reasoning that the colour of competing on cheapness would bury the reviews that matter most in choosing a restaurant — and it grew into the company’s second pillar.

The pattern was the same one Makino had proven, moved to a new market: the people doing the reviewing supply the content for free, and the businesses being reviewed pay to be listed. Applied first to electronics prices and now to dining, that two-sided design produced margins few operators could match. Under Minoru Tanaka, who became the third president in 2006 and led for a decade, Kakaku.com posted ten unbroken years of rising revenue and profit, adding compare-and-review services in travel, film and autos by acquisition alongside its own sites.

The capital side, meanwhile, churned while the business did not. Digital Garage’s controlling stake was diluted through the IPO and later transfers; the lead shareholder passed to Culture Convenience Club and then, in 2012, to the advertising group Dentsu. Each buyer joined as a minority holder, and the management ran on undisturbed — a separation of ownership from operation that would define the company for the next decade.

The fourth president, Shonosuke Hata, who took over in 2016, carried the growth on: revenue rose roughly forty-eight percent over the four years to the year ended March 2019, and the Kyujin Box job-search aggregator, launched in 2015, matured into a third pillar that eased the concentration of profit in Tabelog. But the platform model also showed its underside. The pandemic cut restaurant advertising and knocked revenue down about sixteen percent in the year ended March 2021, and a run of lawsuits over Tabelog’s rating algorithm — including a 2022 Tokyo District Court ruling that an algorithm change had violated antitrust law — put the neutrality on which the whole business rests on trial.

In April 2024 the presidency passed for the first time to the person who had built the largest profit source: Atsuhiro Murakami, the creator of Tabelog. Where every previous head had entered from outside — the buyer Akita, the banker Tanaka, the JT alumnus Hata — the company was now led by an insider who had made its biggest earner. Results reached records under and around the handover: revenue of about $523.9M (¥78bn) in the year ended March 2025 at an operating margin above thirty-seven percent, spread across three pillars in Tabelog, kakaku.com and Kyujin Box.

The very qualities that made Kakaku.com valuable then made it a target. Having diluted away any controlling shareholder, it entered 2026 as an independent company that others could bid to own. A buyout battle broke out over taking it private: the private-equity firm EQT, backed by the roughly thirty-eight percent held by Digital Garage and KDDI, against a higher counter-offer from LINE Yahoo. Once the higher bid appeared, the board could no longer keep recommending the original offer and shifted to neutrality — leaving open the question of who decides the fate of a listed platform with no controlling owner.