Turning shareholders into fans: the 100,000-individuals plan (2001)

What it means to receive shareholders as customers

Kagome's plan for 100,000 individual shareholders was a technique of capital policy and, at the same time, one answer to the question of whom a company is run for. Rather than secure stable shareholders through the mutual dependence of cross-holdings, it entrusted its shares to a large number of individuals who used its products — a choice supported by the idea of overlaying shareholder and consumer, and of treating the capital market and the brand as a single thing. The plan was inseparable from the movement by which a company whose founding family had held both the shares and the management opened itself to the market under a president from outside that family.

The notion of treating individual shareholders as stable shareholders has another side to it, however. Shareholders who hold for the long term without selling support the management, but they are also stable shareholders who slacken the tension upon it. Whether this structure — readable as replacing the role cross-holdings had played with individuals instead — works toward discipline or toward stability is left to what management is doing at any given time. That a capital policy of receiving shareholders as fans still, a quarter of a century on, marks out the individuality of this food maker is the reach of the decision.