Listing on TSE Mothers at the peak of the dot-com bubble — and the crash (2000)

The bubble’s cash bought a long horizon for investment

What this listing left behind sorts into two things. One was a painful education as a manager facing the capital market: the fall from a $3.6B (¥390bn) market value to one-eighth of the share price brought home to the young Susumu Fujita his responsibility to shareholders, and the way a public company’s management is caught between the market’s expectations and reality. The other, paradoxically, was the $192.1M (¥21bn) it could raise precisely because it was the peak of the bubble. This vast cushion, raised by a loss-making company, weighed on it at once as write-downs on the investment-incubation business, yet depending on how it was used it could also become a long-term source of investment capital.

In fact this cushion set the character of the company that followed. The 2001 fight, in which the Murakami Fund closed in by exploiting the distortion of a company holding so much cash, is the symbol of it. On the other side, the 2000 turn of policy from agency toward owned media bore fruit in Ameba in 2004, and the bubble-era money became the foundation for long-term investment that raised media while tolerating losses. The listing’s frenzy and crash looked in the short run like a painful failure, yet they left the company both financial capacity and the idea of “owning our own media.” One can read this experience of tasting heaven and hell at once as the origin of its later investment judgement and financial management.