Merging with Shoei, the other listed Fuji Bank property company (2011)

The rescuer survives under the name of the rescued

What is interesting about this merger is that the direction of the rescue and the direction of the legal form point opposite ways. It was Shoei that had touched its financial covenants and found its prospects for continuing hard to establish, and the approach came from Shoei’s side. Even so, the entity that remained after the merger was Shoei, and the one that disappeared was Hulic. Accounting resolved the twist as a reverse acquisition, and the figures were recorded as a continuation of Hulic. The method of keeping the name of the company with the longer listing history while replacing the contents was a form available precisely because the two companies had coexisted for so long within the same group.

Counting from the Forward Building merger of 2000, the consolidation of former Fuji Bank property reached a resting point after twelve years. But the 2011 combination is less the completion of that consolidation than a confirmation that the company had become one able to buy another’s assets with its own shares. From then on Hulic went on absorbing companies outside the group, one after another — hotels, education, asset management. This merger can be placed as the turning point at which a company that started from property gathered for a bank’s convenience moved to the side that buys companies by its own judgement. That the year 1931 remains in the corporate register can be read as an annotation recalling where it came from.