Taking four city-gas subsidiaries wholly in-house by share exchange, unifying group decision-making (2014)

The first step toward folding up the companies it had collected

The 2014 share exchange was in itself an unglamorous piece of procedure: buying out minority holdings. Yet without it, much of what happened over the following decade would not have moved. Entering city-gas retail, the joint venture with Tokyo Electric Power, the consolidation of retail functions into the parent — with a structure in which each of the four companies had its own board and its own minority shareholders to satisfy, every one of those would have taken time to decide. With the timetable of liberalisation already fixed from outside, the order of business was to repair the way decisions were made before anything else.

Seen another way, it was also the first step in dismantling, by its own hand, the collection of companies assembled over nearly half a century from 1966. Placing a company in each service area, each with its president, its accounts and its share price, was the logic of an age when service areas were defended. In 2024 the retail businesses of three of them moved to the parent, and the signboards bearing the names of supply territories have gone from the map of Kanto. The holdings bought back in the share exchange were, in the end, the price of folding those companies up.