Buying AMENTUM CAPITAL — entering aircraft investment management (2015)

Work together first, buy afterwards

FPG took 25% for several hundred million yen in November 2013, arranged two aircraft with the firm in a second deal in March 2015, and two months later raised its holding to 75%. The character of the transaction is in that sequence: the decision to acquire was not settled on paper but after two and a half years of actually running deals together. The counterparty was the world’s second-largest lease-management company by aircraft under management — too heavy for a Japanese distributor to swallow whole. Pairing up first, letting each side see how the other worked, and only then taking control looks like a way of closing a gap in financial strength with time.

That said, the capability it absorbed did not earn on its own. Revenue from the aircraft investment management service was $2M (¥245m) in its first year and, even in the year to September 2019 when it became a reporting segment, $10M (¥1bn) — while posting a loss of $816,439 (¥89m). When air travel vanished in 2020, consolidated revenue halved; owning the company that manages the aircraft could not prevent the market from disappearing. Even so, it closed a US deal in the interim period of the year to September 2026 and propped up a period in which real-estate sales had stopped. The worth of an acquired capability is measured not in the profit and loss statement right after the purchase, but in the period when the main business tilts.