Hulic - Company History

Nihonbashi Kogyo was established in March 1957 with ¥30m of capital in Yaesu, Tokyo, by Fuji Bank, to hold and manage the branch sites and buildings the bank owned rather than keep that work inside the bank. Its customer was, in practice, a single company. Revenue was rent on branch buildings and management fees, later supplemented by insurance agency work — from 1965 for all 149 of the bank’s branches — and the whole business moved in step with the bank’s branch network.

For more than forty years that was the entire company. It set up a facilities-management subsidiary in 1960, moved its head office next to the bank’s in 1965, and stayed there. Even through the bubble, when property values soared, it never stepped outside the perimeter of bank-owned real estate: it competed with no one, developed nothing, and won nothing. The arrangement produced dependably stable earnings and left the company with no capacity to find tenants, buy assets or fight for a site — none of which it had ever had to do.

The trigger came from above. When Dai-Ichi Kangyo, Fuji and the Industrial Bank of Japan combined to form Mizuho Financial Group in 2000, three parallel sets of property subsidiaries had to be rationalised, and Mizuho treated property as non-strategic and to be pushed outside the bank. In November 2000 Nihonbashi Kogyo absorbed Forward Building, adding fifteen former Fuji Bank buildings at a stroke. The decision was made for the company rather than by it — but it was also the first time in forty years it had taken on someone else’s buildings, tenants and all.

What arrived mattered as much as the fact of arrival. Land a bank had chosen for branches sits near central stations by definition, so a portfolio assembled without a single investment judgement of its own happened to be exactly the shape a location-concentrated strategy needs. In March 2006 Nishiura Saburo, a former deputy president of Fuji Bank, became president of what was still a mid-sized property company with a few tens of billions of yen in revenue, and concluded that the inherited assets plus genuine independence could make it something considerably larger.

He moved fast on both. In January 2007 the company was renamed Hulic — from human, life and create — deliberately severing the identity that the name Nihonbashi Kogyo had carried for fifty years, and in November 2008 it listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, weeks after the Lehman collapse. Selling shares at the bottom of a financial crisis raised less than it might have, but not postponing put the capital machinery in place two years earlier — which is what made the mergers of 2010 and 2012 possible. Hiring changed too: bank alumni in the executive ranks, but alongside mid-career recruits from the property industry and transfers from contractors such as Taisei, the route by which two future presidents entered the company.

Nishiura’s rule was concentration of location. Rather than spreading holdings, Hulic packed them into Ginza, Sukiyabashi and Kyobashi, and rather than fight Mitsui Fudosan, Mitsubishi Estate and Sumitomo Realty for multi-hundred-billion-yen redevelopments, it specialised in mid-sized offices — buildings with a wide pool of potential tenants, so that a departure is easy to replace. Spend first on renovation, raise the rent, and let the location hold occupancy. Between listing and 2018 the Ginza portfolio went from two buildings to thirty-seven, revenue reached ¥287.5bn and operating profit ¥75.6bn.

Around that core the company assembled a three-layer earnings machine: rent for stability, renovation for rent growth, and planned disposals for capital gains that smooth each year’s profit. Hulic Reit, established in November 2013, closed the loop — develop, hold, drop into the REIT, recycle the proceeds into the next asset — a mechanism that had not existed in the bank-subsidiary years. Property-segment operating profit rose from ¥44.1bn in 2015 to ¥81.0bn in 2018.

The 2010s also brought diversification of use rather than of business: hotel management from 2011, the luxury Fufu ryokan brand in 2018, Japan View Hotel in 2019, even an agriculture subsidiary in 2017. The pandemic then tested the structure. The hotel and ryokan segment posted operating losses of ¥7.5bn and then ¥8.0bn, while group operating profit still rose — ¥100.6bn and then ¥114.5bn — because property-segment profit of ¥115.4bn and ¥131.2bn absorbed everything. Fears that remote work would gut office demand did not materialise in mid-sized buildings. Yoshidome Manabu, a former FX dealer from the same bank, had succeeded Nishiura in 2016; in March 2022 the presidency passed to Maeda Takaya, who had joined from Taisei in 2007 — the first president from neither the founding bank nor its successor.

Maeda widened the portfolio beyond real estate outright. Serviced offices came in 2023; then in May 2024 Hulic acquired Riso Kyoiku, the tutoring group behind the TOMAS brand, roughly doubling group headcount from 1,357 to 2,828, and in November 2024 it took over Recerm, an independent asset manager structuring property products for wealthy and institutional investors, to sit alongside its own REIT business. A geological-survey and well-drilling company followed in August 2025 as a foothold in geothermal, and a catering business serving the elderly in November 2025.

The numbers kept compounding through it. Revenue reached ¥591.6bn with ¥163.3bn of operating profit in the year to December 2024, then ¥727.4bn with ¥186.8bn of operating profit and ¥172.9bn of recurring profit in 2025 — a seventeenth consecutive year of higher revenue, profit and dividend, with the payout ratio raised past 40%. The recurring-profit target of ¥180bn set for the 2025–2027 plan was effectively reached in its first year, which is why a new ten-year plan running to 2036 was prepared, aiming at ¥250bn and organised around four segments: property, tourism, education and asset management.

The declared new frontiers are urban data centres — where AI-driven demand meets the hard constraints of central-Tokyo power and where Hulic can pair redevelopment of its own buildings with the opportunity — and overseas assets in Singapore, the United States and Southeast Asia, on the view that the domestic market is maturing. For now the shape of the company is unchanged: property still supplies about 86% of revenue and roughly 97% of operating profit. Nishiura remains chairman and, at seventy years from the founding, effectively the final decision-maker on acquisitions — a company still run on the ten-year horizon it acquired along with its buildings.