Hitachi sells 26%: the largest shareholder passes to the Itochu / JIP alliance (2022)

The script rewritten by the company being sold

It was not Hitachi Construction Machinery that drafted this change of ownership. Hitachi, Ltd., which had been reducing the twenty-two listed subsidiaries it held in 2009, kept construction machinery to the last as the one whose treatment it could not settle, and drew an awkward line at 26% — neither a full sale nor a buy-in. Even so, President Hirano Kotaro had first admitted for himself the weakness that the Americas accounted for only about 15% of group sales, and had decided to dissolve the Deere joint venture before the capital policy. The character of this judgement can be seen in the order: into a situation moving on the seller’s convenience, the company being bought brought its own problem.

It is too early, though, to say independence was the favourable trade. The shares fell 17% on the day of the announcement, and the press conference put squarely the suspicion that Itochu would take a spread. Hitachi’s holding fell to 18.4% by November 2025, and in April 2027 the Hitachi character will disappear from a company name it has carried for some seventy-five years. What remains, as the parent’s umbrella is removed in stages, is the single question of whether the company can open the Americas — its largest market — under its own power; the answer will come in the figures reported after the trading name changes.