Absorbed into Sankyo Sangyo, and renamed SANKYO (1991)

The year it put its own form in order

Within six months the legal entity was swapped, the corporate name was refreshed to SANKYO, and the shares were registered for over-the-counter trading — one continuous run of procedures that could perfectly well have been spread across separate years, bundled together instead. A company that had come from last in the industry to counting three-quarters of the country’s halls among its customers spent its twenty-fifth year working not on a new machine or a new plant, but on its own form as a corporation.

Going public did not, however, change the character of the company. Even after the shares began trading, the top of the register was held by two limited companies and individual shareholders named Busujima; at the end of March 2006 the top five held more than 44% of the shares outstanding. That holding had thinned to under 10% by the end of March 2024, but the structure in which Busujima Hideyuki, as owner-chairman, decided to keep investing in gaming machines and nothing else survived. What 1991 built was an entrance through which capital could come in — not a mechanism for letting the company go.