Taking control of Tully’s Coffee Japan by acquiring Food X Globe (2006)

Did it buy the stores, or the time?

Read as a tea company straying into food service, this acquisition is misread. Even in green-tea drinks, ITO EN made the product first and then built the distribution and production machinery — vending machines, partner factories — with its own hands. Coffee alone skipped that sequence: it acquired a finished operating company outright. The calculation appears to have been that carrying a brand already established in stores over to the drinks shelf was faster than fighting the majors head-on in canned coffee.

Nor should the seller’s side be overlooked — a listed company whose founder no longer held control. Matsuda Kota chose ITO EN not on price alone but on whether the buyer would keep growing the business. Measuring an acquisition only by price or ratio cannot capture that kind of judgement. That ITO EN carried the fixed costs of a footfall-dependent business through the pandemic and did not let go, returning it to a record profit, is one answer to the question of how far the buyer lived up to the seller’s reading.