Selling Rignite and leaving the US market (2015)

A price tag of ¥6,027,000

The wholly owned sales base placed in Silicon Valley in 2011 was let go by Nakamura Takanori for ¥6,027,000, eleven months before the company’s listing. A loss of ¥119.22 million on the sale of shares in an affiliate remained on the parent’s books; the money put in over nearly four years did not come back as equity. The president who had said the reason Japanese firms do poorly in America is that they keep behaving as Japanese firms rang down the curtain before carrying that American way through. The decision to bring Matsushima Yoshifumi, Rignite’s CEO, home as head of strategic planning shows the conclusion reached: no sales function abroad.

What was folded up, though, was the American company, not overseas itself. The Vietnamese development subsidiary opened eight months before the sale remained, and the securities report described the overseas subsidiary as a base developing part of the cloud services. The swap — giving up overseas as a place to sell, keeping overseas as a place to build — was completed in this period. Taking a 14.9% stake in an Indonesian company in December 2024 and only then placing a wholly owned subsidiary in Jakarta in April 2025 is the reverse of the 2011 order, when a wholly owned subsidiary went straight into Mountain View.