From flow-type ISP connection to the enterprise stock model (2012)

Choosing to change the way of earning, not the capital spend

The heart of this decision lay less in which businesses to enter than in reworking how revenue was accumulated. The Crosswave collapse had confronted IIJ with what happens when a large investment whose recovery cannot be read outruns a company’s own strength. Rather than retreat or shrink, IIJ chose to absorb that lesson by redesigning the very way it earned — toward a stock model in which monthly contracts pile up. The distinctive thing about this turn is that it was a redesign of the way of earning, not a one-off round of capital spending.

That said, MVNO, cloud and data centres are all businesses heavy with up-front investment and price competition; recasting them as stock does not by itself buy safety. Even so, a revenue base built on continuous enterprise billing underpinned the structural profit growth of the 2020s and the recovery, after twenty years, of capital independence. From a flow-type connection specialist to a company that stacks up contracts to support the recovery of its plant — how to judge this turn depends on whether the next stage of growth, flying the flags of government demand and data distribution, can be carried on the same shape of revenue.