A tender offer for Sanei Architecture Planning (2023)

Choosing to buy a weakened competitor

This acquisition was different in character from Hawk One in 2018. That was a healthy, growing company bought through negotiation at a market price; this was a company with strains in its funding and its trading relationships, taken over and carried all the way to a delisting. A price set 26.48% above the previous close is hard to describe as beating down a weakened counterpart. It is rather that the circumstance — the seller needing to part with its shares as a condition of its own rebuilding — governed both the price and the procedure.

For the buyer, taking in a company with that much supply capacity at that moment was no small thing. But credit with trading partners and with banks is not an asset you can buy; it can only be rebuilt afterwards. In the year to September 2024 revenue grew to $8.6B (¥1.3tn) while operating profit fell below the prior year, and closing that gap between scale and profitability remains unfinished business. Whether a company that has repeatedly used the instrument of buying up its own competitors can bring what it buys around to its own way of selling — under a management that has now taken over from the founder, that answer is still to come.