A run of European and Australian environmental-plant acquisitions, and the change of name to Kanadevia (2010)

What it bought was not a company but demand outside the public sector

The price of the shares was $296,229 (¥26m); the subscription to the capital increase, $51.2M (¥4bn). The figures of the 2010 Inova acquisition show that what was paid for was not the value of a company but a position from which work could be won in Europe. Waste-to-energy in Japan is a business whose results are tied to the ordering cycles of local governments, and in the year to March 2010, 84% of sales were to Japan. Having somewhere to sell the same technology to a different kind of buyer appears to be precisely what the company lacked after letting go of shipbuilding.

This road did not open through the parent’s decisions alone, however. The 2022 acquisition of Steinmüller was made not by Hitachi Zosen but by its subsidiary Inova, and produced $28.2M (¥4bn) of negative goodwill. In the pattern where the company you bought becomes the next buyer, the European business thickened over twelve years. That “Zosen” disappeared from the corporate name in 2024 was the result of that accumulation overtaking the parent’s own name — not, one might say, a transformation that consisted of changing the name.