Selling the founding family’s 23.17% to House Foods Group and becoming its subsidiary (2015)

Whose share sale was it?

Read as a founding family cashing out at a good price, the point of this transfer is missed. What set it moving was neither the seller nor the buyer but the man who had inherited the management. The reason Hamashima Toshiya gave when he called on House Foods in July 2015 was what would happen when the founder died. If inheritance scattered the 23.17%, the founder’s own discipline — of taking no part whatever in management — would collapse along with it. The core of this decision lies in getting ahead of that at a moment of record profits.

Stability of capital did not, however, guarantee stability of management. Barely a month after the subsidiary deal the resale of discarded cutlets came to light, and being under House Foods served as no shield at all. Even the acceleration abroad that had justified the deal took more than a year merely to bring the roughly sixty stores in China and Taiwan back under direct management. Ordering the share register can do no more than put management in a state where it is able to think on a long time axis; what comes after that is left to a different kind of effort.