A CEO handover under activist pressure: Morishita to Sakai (2026)

Does splitting development from capital allocation resolve the conflict?

The division of labour — Morishita devoting himself to development while Sakai takes charge of capital allocation — can be read as an attempt to satisfy two demands at once: to preserve the influence of the man who created Puzzle & Dragons, while answering the improvement in capital efficiency that shareholders wanted. In fact the company’s moves — a raised dividend, share buybacks, the cancellation of treasury stock — went some way toward the underuse of cash that Strategic Capital had flagged. But the fact that Strategic Capital, whose proposals again failed to pass at the March 2026 meeting, went on buying still more shares shows that the reshuffle was not, in itself, the end point of the conflict.

What this configuration asks is whether dividing the management structure can answer the doubts over capital efficiency, or whether something more drastic — such as taking the company private — is what is being demanded. It is not unusual for activists to file proposal after proposal against a company that holds abundant equity yet lacks a pillar of growth; but in GungHo’s case, because the question reaches even to the founding family’s shareholding, the shape of any resolution is hard to foresee. How far the new structure — development chief and management chief pulled apart — can win back the market’s regard is, as of this writing, still not settled.