Serial acquisitions in ramen and hotpot, and a curry-bread format (2023)

What it means to expand by buying

Read as diversification to escape a mature curry market, the interest of this change of course is lost. Ichibanya was a company poor at developing formats. The FS CocoIchi curry stand of 1995 was withdrawn at about fifty stores, and Pasta de Coco stopped a little over thirty. Having admitted that building from scratch was the losing road, it switched to buying businesses that already had customers — Menya Takei, Maedaya — and growing them on its own store network. That is where the judgement of 2020s Ichibanya can be found.

Whether the method has raised the quality of the company cannot yet be judged. Revenue set records three years running, while operating profit has not cleared the ¥5.2bn of before the pandemic. Buying stores adds revenue in proportion to their number, but there is no guarantee that the earnings shape which held an average spend of ¥895 on curry alone can be reproduced in other formats. How long the caution that made Hamashima Toshiya wait seven years between first mentioning M&A and actually moving will hold is an open question. The answer has been deferred to the ¥10bn operating profit set for the year to February 2030.