Company history

Tanimura Itaru joined McKinsey & Company’s Tokyo office in 1987, covered pharmaceuticals and healthcare for a decade, and was made partner in December 1999. The usual next step was a fund or another firm; he left instead, at thirty-five, to run a business himself — later saying only that it looked like it would be interesting, and that he wished he had done it sooner. In September 2000, backed by Sony Communication Network (So-net), he set up So-net M3 in Shinagawa, Tokyo.

What he had watched from both sides of the consulting table was a single inefficiency. Doctors wanted efficacy and side-effect data quickly and had almost no time in which to find it; drug makers were reaching them by sending roughly 55,000 sales reps (MRs) around the country on foot — 85,000 people including wholesalers’ staff, three for every doctor, against seven to one in the United States. In October 2000 the company launched MR-kun: one platform through which many pharmaceutical companies could reach many doctors at once, which Tanimura said had no precedent anywhere. It began as a push channel from each rep, but switched to letting doctors pull information from the reps they chose — traffic rose, and “star MRs” accumulated more than 30,000 registered physicians. A business-method patent followed in January 2005.

The rest of the decade was consolidation and listing. In July 2003 the two medical sites the company had been running in parallel, MyMedipro and so-netm3.com, were folded into one portal, m3.com; a US subsidiary followed that October. In September 2004, four years after founding, M3 listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange’s Mothers market, and revenue went from ¥1.56bn in FY2001 to ¥3.85bn in FY2004. In December 2005 AskDoctors opened, letting some of m3.com’s registered physicians answer questions from the general public — the first proof that the doctor network was an asset that could be pointed at more than one business, which became the pattern for everything that followed.

In March 2007 the company moved up to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange; revenue for FY2006 was ¥5.7bn on operating profit of ¥2.6bn. In December 2009 it set up M3 Career for physician and pharmacist recruitment, and in January 2010 dropped the Sony prefix to become simply M3, Inc. Nothing about the ownership changed with the name — the parent still held 56.5% of the votes, and let go of control only three years later — but a company standing between doctors and drug makers, about to start buying physician communities abroad, could not easily explain itself under a telecoms brand.

The portal stopped being the whole company. In October 2012 M3 acquired CMS (now M3 Solutions), an electronic-medical-record developer; in February 2014, Medi-Science Planning, a clinical-trial support firm, by share exchange; in August 2014 it founded M3 Doctor Support (later CUC) to help run medical institutions. The segment disclosure records the same shift: Evidence Solutions appeared in FY2009 alongside the medical portal, Clinical Platform in FY2012, Sales Platform in FY2014. A one-product income statement became a portfolio sitting on one physician network.

The overseas model arrived in August 2011 with Doctors.net.uk, Britain’s physician portal. Of the $22.6M (¥2bn) purchase price, barely ¥200m came in as recognisable assets; the rest was goodwill. What M3 bought was a membership list and the reasons doctors returned to it daily — their own-domain email address, the one site that opened inside hospital network restrictions. Rather than recruiting foreign doctors itself, it would buy the platform that had already earned their trust. The template repeated with Kingyee in China (November 2013) and Vidal in France, Germany and Spain (November 2016), and the overseas segment went from ¥1.5bn of revenue and ¥55m of profit in FY2010 to ¥13.8bn and ¥1.6bn in FY2015.

The acquisitions moved up the stack. In November 2016 M3 took control of AXIO Medical Holdings, the holding company for Vidal Group, whose drug-information databases in France, Germany and Spain were a different layer of asset from m3.com. In February 2018 it bought Wake Research, a US clinical-trial site network, and in March 2019 DailyRounds in India, a medical-education platform for an emerging market. From physician portals to drug databases to trial networks, the company was assembling abroad not more of the same thing but a stack — and overseas revenue reached ¥22.4bn in FY2017.

Then COVID-19 did to the pharmaceutical sales model in two years what M3 had spent twenty arguing for. Face-to-face visits were restricted, digital promotion budgets moved to the platform, and the numbers went vertical: FY2020 revenue of ¥169.2bn and operating profit of ¥58.0bn, FY2021 revenue of ¥208.2bn and operating profit of ¥95.1bn — a 45.7% operating margin, a figure almost no operating company reaches. The pandemic did not change the business model; it briefly paid it what the model was worth when the alternative was unavailable.

The tailwind came off as quickly as it had arrived. As reps returned to hospital corridors, operating profit fell for three consecutive years — ¥72.0bn in FY2022, ¥64.4bn in FY2023, ¥63.0bn in FY2024 — more than 30% below the peak, even as revenue kept climbing to ¥284.9bn. Revenue growth without profit growth put one question at the centre of every investor conversation: what the underlying rate of growth had been, once the windfall was stripped out.

Two moves in 2023 answered it in the company’s usual idiom. In June, CUC — founded in-house nine years earlier as M3 Doctor Support — listed on the TSE Growth market, demonstrating that a business grown inside the group could be surfaced as market value rather than buried in consolidated accounts. In July, M3 bought two healthcare-research businesses from the Kantar Group, Kantar Profiles-Health and Kantar Media Healthcare Research, extending the Western data and analytics stack. Buying, in other words, had not slowed down.

What changed was where the money went. By May 2025, after impairments at M3 Wake Research in North America and at the Kingyee-linked physician-career business in China, the company that had spent a quarter-century recycling profit into acquisitions announced a dividend of ¥21 a share, totalling ¥14.3bn, together with a buyback of up to ¥20.0bn — 2.95% of shares outstanding — for $229.2M (¥34bn) returned in all. When the roster you buy has to keep earning its own keep, and some of it stops, the alternative use of cash starts to look better than the next purchase.