The off-hours raid on Nippon Broadcasting — and the sale to Fuji (2005)

What it bought was not control but cash

Holding a majority of the voting rights and the backing of the Tokyo High Court at the same time, livedoor never exercised its rights as a controlling shareholder. The likeliest reading is that the cost of exercising them — fresh litigation and third-party intervention — was judged to exceed the returns available from running a broadcaster. What actually arrived in hand from acquiring the Nippon Broadcasting stake was not control of a television network but the ¥147bn in cash that Fuji Television held out. Perhaps the success of the takeover was being measured in cash from the very beginning.

What that cash left behind in the company is a separate question. The funds went into underwriting MSCBs and into further acquisitions, and the finance division earned ¥14.6bn of operating profit in the year to September 2005. The livedoor portal, in the same year, cleared ¥0.3bn. Measured against the original motive — extending audience reach to the scale of a television network — acquiring financial firepower worked not in the direction of growing that audience but in the direction of fattening the trades in the capital market.