Taking D.A.Consortium Holdings to 100% by tender offer (2018)

Capital tightened over nine years

Seen across nine years, Hakuhodo DY Holdings never once hurried. It raised only the degree of control, step by step: voting rights from 49.3% to 53.7% in 2009, a joint holding company in 2016, 100% in 2018. It can be read as a method of tightening only the capital side while letting the digital operation itself run as a specialist. If you ask a sales organization carrying jobs worth tens of millions of yen to sell internet advertising priced in the hundreds of thousands, the individual’s rational preference for television wins. Holding an entire separate company appears to have been chosen as the way to avoid having to rewire that logic.

The time bought with capital, however, came with a price. The ¥3,700 per share was a 40% premium to the previous close, and of the ¥113.1 billion that flowed out in the year to March 2019, ¥104.5 billion was covered by long-term borrowings. That premium paid to minority shareholders is also money that would not have been needed had the whole company been taken in 2009. Reorganization continued after the buyout — a merger with Hakuhodo DY Digital, the creation of Hakuhodo DY ONE, then the absorption of DAC and Irep, three rounds in all. Sixteen years after the first investment, in April 2025, the name DAC stopped being used.