Refusing Mori Trust's equity proposal and issuing ¥15 billion of convertible bonds to the Development Bank of Japan (2010)

What the means of defending independence brought on

What Parco turned away was not a hostile buyer but the shareholder who had helped it through the 2001 refinancing difficulty and become its largest holder in the process. Without explaining itself to that holder in advance, it issued ¥15 billion of convertible bonds to the DBJ the following month, creating potential dilution of 18.7% on full conversion. The very instrument chosen to preserve independence can be seen as having opened the path by which control was lost.

That said, Mori Trust's proposal was not wide of the mark. Its reading — that a shrinking population and the move to IFRS would leave nothing but rent on the top line, making consolidation unavoidable — was borne out by what followed. Parco went under J. Front Retailing in 2012, applied IFRS from the year to February 2018, and reported operating revenue in the ¥90 billion range. The judgement that going alone would be hard proved correct; what left Parco's hands was only the initiative over whom it would solve that problem with.