FPG - Company History

FPG began in November 2001, in the stagnation that followed the collapse of Japan’s IT bubble, as a limited company in Setagaya, Tokyo, with a single line of business: advisory work on leasing silent-partnership contracts. The structure was already known to a handful of specialists — pool investors into a 匿名組合 that buys shipping containers, ships or aircraft and leases them out, book the accelerated depreciation early, and the investing company defers its corporate tax. Tanimura Hisanaga, who founded the firm and has been its only president since, put the choice plainly: rather than go where competition is fierce, he wanted to do what others were not. Against the banks and brokerages crowding the rest of finance, a small venture had better odds in a gap no one held.

The corporate form was tidied up first — renamed twice in 2002, incorporated as FPG Co., Ltd. in February 2004 — and in August 2004 the company began selling silent-partnership interests in marine container operating leases. That product line is the origin of everything that followed and still sits at the centre of consolidated revenue more than twenty years later. The head office moved to Marunouchi in central Tokyo in January 2005, and in May 2008 FPG completed registration as a Type II financial instruments business operator, putting the whole operation on a licensed footing.

What followed was a build-out aimed squarely at where the customers were: sales offices in Osaka (2008), Fukuoka and Nagoya (2009), reaching the owners of mid-sized companies and wealthy individuals city by city. Ships were added to the leased-asset menu in July 2009. In September 2010 the shares listed on the JASDAQ market of the Osaka Securities Exchange — nine years after founding — and the following month FPG opened an M&A advisory business, the first line of work that was not a leasing product.

In April 2011 FPG added aircraft to its leasing products, completing the three-asset set — containers, ships, aircraft — that still defines the core business. Six months later the shares moved to the Second Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and in October 2012 to the First Section; the JASDAQ listing was withdrawn in January 2012. Eleven years after being founded in a Setagaya office, FPG was a First Section company.

The strategic problem underneath the growth was that a single tax-driven product is only as durable as the rule it rests on. The answer was to collect licences, one at a time, until FPG could design, sell, manage and broker its own products — and until the same customer could be sold more than one thing. A Dutch subsidiary in 2012 and a Singapore one in November 2012 gave it overseas footing; acquiring FPG Securities in March 2013 brought a Type I licence; a real-estate brokerage licence followed in April 2013 and FPG Real Estate in June, permitted under the Real Estate Specified Joint Enterprise Act; and in October 2014 the acquisition of Bernina Trust — now FPG Trust — added trust capability, which in April 2016 became the engine for fractional real-estate products.

The same period pulled FPG deeper into aircraft. It took a 25% stake in Dublin-based AMENTUM CAPITAL in November 2013, worked live deals with it, then bought control in May 2015 and renamed it FPG Amentum, entering aircraft investment management. Private equity followed in October 2019 after an investment management registration, and in November 2019 FPG bought a regional airline, Kitanihon Kokuu — moving from leasing aircraft to flying them. Consolidated revenue rose from ¥15.3bn in the year to September 2015 to ¥26.6bn in FY2019, with operating profit holding between ¥10.1bn and ¥14.4bn — the economics of a small firm selling a scarce structure.

The pandemic did to FPG what no tax change had yet done. As global air travel collapsed in 2020, the airlines on the other side of its aircraft leases — Japanese carriers, Southeast Asian and European ones — grounded their fleets, and lease payments went late, were renegotiated, or were restructured worldwide. Consolidated revenue fell from ¥26.6bn in FY2019 to ¥12.7bn in FY2020, a 52% drop; operating profit fell 87%, from ¥14.4bn to ¥1.9bn; and net profit attributable to owners fell 89%, from ¥10.0bn to ¥1.1bn. It was the worst year in the company’s history.

The diversification of the previous decade did not prevent the fall, but it did cushion it: trust, real estate, container and ship products kept earning while aircraft did not. FY2021 recovered part of the ground — ¥14.9bn of revenue, ¥5.2bn of operating profit, ¥2.9bn of net profit — without returning to FY2019 levels, because the aircraft leasing market itself needed years to normalise. What did not waver through the crisis was the underlying demand: mid-sized company owners still wanted to defer tax, and the container and ship products were arranged and sold throughout.

In April 2022 FPG moved to the Prime Market in the TSE’s restructuring — its fourth change of listing venue since 2010. In June it began offering overseas real-estate investment products, and in December it changed its English name from Financial Products Group to Financial Partners Group. The company has not publicly explained the wording, though the shift from selling a product to standing alongside a client is legible in it.

Then the numbers went vertical. Consolidated revenue climbed from ¥14.9bn in FY2021 to ¥59.2bn (FY2022), ¥71.1bn (FY2023), ¥107.8bn (FY2024) and ¥129.8bn (FY2025) — roughly 8.7 times in four years — with net profit reaching ¥20.5bn in FY2024 and ¥18.2bn in FY2025, the best results in the company’s history. Two things arrived at once: aircraft leasing normalised after the pandemic, and the trust, real-estate, private-equity, container and ship lines had all matured enough to contribute. Revenue no longer came from one place.

FPG kept widening. It bought AND ART — now AND OWNERS — in November 2023 to run a co-ownership platform for art and other real assets, registered as a financial instruments intermediary the following month, and started a private-jet business in April 2024. In May 2025 FPG Securities launched F.bit, a fractional product built on beneficiary-certificate-issuing trusts that cut the minimum ticket from $66,823 (¥10m) or more to $6,682 (¥1m) — the first deliberate move past the wealthy-owner customer base into individual investors. The timing was not coincidental: in December 2025 the FY2026 tax reform outline signalled that fractional real-estate products would be valued for inheritance tax at market prices rather than the assessed values that made them attractive, and FPG stopped selling them. Twenty-four years on, the group spans leasing, trusts, securities, private equity, real estate, aviation and lending — and its core earnings still rest, as they did in 2001, on a reading of the tax code.