Listing on the Tokyo and Nagoya exchanges in its sixty-first year (2008)

What a late flotation took on

Sixty-one years from founding is also the length of time this company did not need the capital market. With a single product — a machine that makes ice — and a web of sales companies that sold it and repaired it, Hoshizaki grew for decades under its own power. It chose to list only once it had started a different kind of investment: buying foreign companies whole. The weight of the decision lies not merely in acquiring a means of paying for acquisitions, but in placing itself in the position of having to keep explaining, on consolidated accounts, the companies it had bought.

Judged on pricing alone, going public in the depths of a financial crisis was an unfavourable trade. Yet when improper transactions at a subsidiary came to light a decade later, the company found itself obliged to handle the matter against an external yardstick — the exchange’s rules — and to show its deadlines and its procedures in public. A company whose decisions had been settled within the founding family became a company that explains itself to outsiders. What the choice of December 2008 delivered was, arguably, that change of standing rather than the money it raised.