Registering over-the-counter, and building a third Malaysian plant with the proceeds (1995)

What it gave up was not its shares

Reading this listing only as a way to raise money for an overseas plant is not enough. As Kanbe Makoto himself put it, “profits were perfectly good, and I agonised for a long time over whether we should go public at all” — this was not a company going to market because it was short of cash. At the centre of it, alongside his remark that there is no point in listing if you are going to be swayed by personal feeling, was a decision to rebuild a company run at the family's discretion into one that could explain itself to outside shareholders.

That said, it did not thin the founding family's control. Two and a half years after the listing, at the end of March 1998, the largest shareholder was still Maruwa Gōmei with 31.6%, individual shareholders named Kanbe filled the rest of the top of the register, and Kanbe Makoto was still president. What changed hands was not ownership but the obligation to explain, to outsiders, what the money was for. When a family company enters the capital markets, the first thing it gives up may not be its shares but the freedom not to explain itself.