The September 2016 Mothers listing, designed as a private-equity exit (2016)

An exit listing, and a founder who did not exit

The character of this listing is summed up in a single number: a public offering of 50,000 shares. This was not a listing to raise growth capital from the market but one that opened the market for a fund that wanted its investment back two years after the buyout. That in itself is the standard exit for a private-equity take-private and hardly a thing to condemn. What draws the eye is what happened on the other side of that exit. The founder, who might reasonably have been among the sellers, had put $23.6M (¥3bn) back in at the buyout, bought more after the listing, and returned to being the largest shareholder.

The management passed from the outsider Hagihira to Abe, and Eguchi never stood in the foreground again. In capital terms, however, the founder remained throughout the largest individual shareholder. Separate management from ownership; let go of the management but never of the ownership — that this choice delivered the fruit of the growth that followed to the founder is what the share price shows. When is a founder’s exit actually complete? Baycurrent’s listing reads as a case in which the succession of management and the succession of capital proceeded on separate clocks.