Halting sales and unwinding contracts after the FY2026 tax outline (2025)

The arithmetic of selling a premise

In the same month that his message to shareholders spoke of aiming at another record profit, president Tanimura Hisanaga stopped selling the product that made up seven-tenths of consolidated revenue. The tax reform outline appeared the following month; at the point of the decision, only press reports were certain. Rather than keep selling and leave investors carrying a valuation that changed after the fact, FPG chose to unwind even contracts already subscribed and refund them. Siding with the investor the moment the premise moves was, for a company that converts an interpretation of the tax code into a product, the only way to protect its credibility.

That said, shareholders paid for it. The annual dividend was cut from a planned ¥125.40 to ¥92.70, below the ¥130.40 actually paid the year before. The company expects some inheritance-tax compression to survive beyond 2027 and the products to remain useful for estate planning, but the details of the reform have still not been published. The stated goal of returning to the ¥100bn revenue level remains a forecast. The deeper problem is that the leasing fund business also stands on a single point of the tax code — the deferral of corporate tax — and nothing guarantees the same thing will not happen again. In a business where the rules decide what a product is worth, the quality of management shows less in what it sells than in how it folds up when the premise moves.