Taking ¥165 billion from Apollo and leaving the market (2026)

Borrow, buy, fail to repay, borrow again

To call this package merely the tidying-up of an acquisition is to miss what the decision contains. As an executive officer’s words indicate, what has been missing over these twenty years was not the will to reform but the financial strength to carry reform out. Headcount reductions and site consolidations cost money before they save it. A company with $3.8B (¥570bn) of interest-bearing debt, $1.2B (¥177bn) of it maturing within a year, has no room to pay those costs up front. The core of this choice lies in the judgement that rolling the maturities over would simply preserve the same condition.

Yet in exchange for injecting capital and erasing $1.5B (¥231bn) of debt, the company gives up 72% of the votes and the listing that served as its place to raise money. Seventy-six years of history as a listed company, from 1950, ends here. The ¥500 a share paid to minority holders is the final settlement figure for the judgement that committed $5.6B (¥616bn) in 2006. Borrow to buy, fail to repay in full, and turn again to outside capital — this episode shows what happens when a company that bought scale with debt cannot wind that debt down under its own power.