Listing in Tokyo while remaining a wholly owned subsidiary (1999)

An unusual model for a foreign-owned subsidiary

The heart of this decision is that the head of the Japanese arm rewrote the parent’s capital policy. Listing locally while remaining a wholly owned subsidiary was rare among foreign-owned companies at the time. What the parent wanted was simply to raise money; Sano tied that to a different purpose — winning trust in the Japanese market — and pushed until the parent was persuaded. It is a case in which one executive’s sheer force of will moved the skeleton of the company, its ownership structure.

That said, most of the fruit of the listing flowed to the US parent, which went on holding a majority. The multi-hundred-billion-yen cash raised in the offering that accompanied the move to the TSE First Section is the emblem of it: the Japanese arm gained its own valuation in the capital market, yet the structure of control did not change at all, and that is where the character of the model shows. Legitimacy through disclosure, coexisting with a concentration of wealth at the parent, would define Oracle Japan’s capital policy for a long time afterwards.