Buying growth outside curry — and the retreat that followed (2015)

Spending a fortress balance sheet on markets it could not command

The point of this decision was to escape a structural trap: a near-monopoly in a shrinking category, carried on a balance sheet so conservative — an equity ratio near 77% — that capital efficiency was chronically low. The 2015 purchase of a 51% stake in Ichibanya, operator of CoCo Ichibanya, for $248.7M (¥30bn) was meant to answer both problems at once, putting idle cash to work in a high-return restaurant business adjacent to curry. It was of a piece with the Keystone plant-based acquisition in the US and a run of mid-term plans betting the group’s future on overseas and restaurant growth rather than on the home-curry core.

The outward strategy did not command its new markets the way House commanded curry at home. Overseas targets went unmet, and goodwill on both Ichibanya and Keystone was written down; the acquired restaurant and overseas segments earned only a fraction of what the old spice-and-seasoning core still produced. By May 2026 the group had turned the strategy around into “structural reform” — selling businesses, unwinding cross-shareholdings, buying back stock and concentrating on the spice value chain. The episode reads as the company’s defining pattern in one arc: House multiplies where it can define and hold a kitchen staple, and struggles wherever it must instead win a market someone else already owns.