Taking New Japan Radio into the group by tender offer (2005)

From buying to defend, to buying to reshuffle

The 2005 tender offer was both a transaction that gained a semiconductor business and a moment in which the company re-chose its own standing. Unrealised gains of ¥54 billion combined with a price below book value confronted Nisshinbo with an uncomfortable proposition: the more assets you hold, the more you are hunted. Stay on the hunted side and, sooner or later, someone else decides what your assets are for. Spending the cash on hand to take control of a business that earns can be read as an attempt to pull that sequence back to your own side of the table.

That said, absorbing semiconductors did not produce earnings straight away. Micro devices still carries an operating loss twenty years on, and the earner turned out to be wireless and communications, which joined later. A business you buy does not necessarily grow as intended, and the business that grows is not necessarily the one you intended. Even so, in shifting the axis from managing to protect unrealised gains toward managing by swapping businesses, this fight set the premise for every decision that followed. The more you acquire, the heavier the next question becomes — what do you let go of? The entrance to that cycle was 2005.